Pygmalion Advises His Student

A marble statue

This essay includes poetry formatting and is intended to be viewed on desktop.

Be aware this poem and essay discuss themes of misogynoir and body image. The poems cited in the analysis may also contain graphic/sexual imagery or themes of abuse.

[This is the original draft.]

Pygmalion and Galatea

Enter: the abrasive. Hammer and point. The chisel. The [quintuple puckered tsk].

Breathing - wedging apart a chest cavity. Pneumatic. The ivory is made from

[scratch]. The prominence of the elbows, not the femurs. The surface

featured and unfeatured at sculptor’s choice. Second choice. Might

have preferred softer material. More pliable. Perhaps a laurel.

Back to the task. No longer unworthy clay, rough prototype.

Now refined. A flat curve. Of course, smoother ivory.

The perfection of an even temper. Mild. Mannered.

Straight toothed. Only the dull sense of marrow.

Connection only by removal. How else to

make a lover eroded?

Analysis:

This poem combines the allusion elements from the Xenomorph Blood craft draft and the narrative elements from the small bird craft draft.

The whole poem is a retelling of an ancient Roman myth. Pygmalion is a marble sculptor who falls in love with his sculpture of a woman and then prays to the gods for the sculpture to come to life as a woman, Galatea.

Because the subject matter comes from ancient Roman mythology, there are plenty of allusions to the myth in art including:a play, paintings, metal sculptures, and (more pertinently) more than one marble sculpture.

There is also a psychological “Pygmalion effect” that students perform better if teachers have high expectations of them, but there’s controversy about how exactly that happens and how often it happens that are outside the scope of this craft draft.

It’s difficult to look back at this myth without also considering the 1972 novel The Stepford Wives, in which the eponymous wives have their personalities replaced to make them housewives who obey their husbands unquestioningly. The primary difference here is that Pygmalion gets to make those types of choices by creating a partner instead of changing a person’s a priori personality.

A lot of the imagery in this poem has a double meaning - both about the art of sculpture, and about emotional manipulation.

“Abrasive” can refer to both a material that scratches and sands away a rough texture – and a personality that is rude or unwelcome.

“Hammer and point” are tools. And they reflect an emphasis: “hammering in a point” and the action of pointing – which is emphatic and sometimes considered rude.

“Pneumatic” is an action related to literal breathing but also reflects the myth of giving life, breathing life into the statue. Also, a pneumatic chisel is a type of power-tool chisel used in more present-day [disambiguation] sculpting. This is also a clue that if the sculptor is using power tools, the poem has something to say about the present day instead of just retelling a myth.

“The prominence of the elbows, not the femurs” and “featured and unfeatured”: If I remember right, these were also sculpture-related puns, but I don’t remember what sculpture concepts they were referring to.

“Straight toothed” refers both to straight human teeth as a cultural symbol of beauty - and a straight tooth chisel.

“[quintuple puckered tsk]” is an onomatopoeia. There are two onomatopoeias in the poem (the other one is “[scratch]”, an audio pun), enough to be noticeable but not enough to feel intentional. In a revision,, I would either have one onamatopoeia for its novelty, lean into other aesthetic imagery with other senses, or use more sound words throughout.

The main gimmick of this poem is that the line length decreases with each subsequent line. This is a word painting that reflects chiseling marble. The lines get shorter, like material is being chipped away from them. If a reader misses this throughout the poem, the last line is significantly shorter than its previous lines to really call attention to the technique.

“Second choice.” A brutal consideration that despite Pygmalion choosing and crafting every element of Galatea to his personal taste, he still sees imperfections in her.

“Might have preferred softer material.” Softer, as in even easier to manipulate - both to change as making an artwork and socially influence as a person.

There are two references to other myths from antiquity with similar themes.

“More pliable. Perhaps a laurel.” This refers to the myth of Apollo and Daphne. Daphne is a nymph who receives the unwanted affections of the god Apollo. To escape, Daphne is turned into a laurel tree.

“No longer unworthy clay, rough prototype. / Now refined.” This refers to the myth of Prometheus creating humans from clay sculptures and giving them fire.

“A flat curve.” A loaded description. An obsession with body image also brings along expectations of thinness - but only in ways that are attractive.

“Smoother ivory” is certainly also a loaded description that brings expectations that marble as a sculpture medium represents whiteness as race.

“Perfection of an even temper” again refers to both the marble’s texture and an expectation about the woman’s personality.

“Only the dull sense of marrow.” The surface of a sculpture sometimes looks soft or like clothing fabric, despite the sculpture being hard stone. This is considered attractive and a sign of high skill on the artist’s part. It’s also a bias towards realism that appears in other art media. The same way, this Pygmalion imagines Galatea as a pretty woman that looks like a perfect sculpture without annoying features like a personality or opinions of her own. Like chest cavities, bones and teeth are on the inside, not the surface, so the sculptor and audience have to pretend that they are there. This Pygmalion only has to pretend Galatea has a personality when it’s convenient to him.

“Make” is a more generic word that I swap out for a more specific “erode”. This also has connotations for working with a stone, like sculpting marble. Leaving this change in word choice itself in the poem is also a last bit of word painting to really emphasize Pygmalion and his student are not building someone up but taking someone down, using an art process to justify gross behavior.

Things I really like about this draft:

• References to sculpture-craft! Skilled artists don’t just use art as a method of expressing thoughts and emotions - they use art as a method of thinking and feeling. Pygmalion is thinking of Galatea through how he is making her.

• I think the word painting gimmick with the line length is fun.

  
  

Things I wish I did differently in this draft, and that I change in the revision:

• Some of the techniques are inconsistent. Again, see the onomatopoeias. See also that there are whole sentences and sentence fragments. The next draft could easily make them all fragments, like small chisel hits at a time.

• The reference to Prometheus feels really appropriate because it also describes an art-making process. The reference to Daphne feels more like a stretch. If I want this to be more of a survey of misogyny or women being treated disproportionately in classical mythology, I would consider other examples that are maybe more relevant to artmaking: Athena and Arachne, Medusa (connecting stonework to turning people to stone), Orpheus and Eurydice. Or even write another poem and make this a series of retellings. Great thematic resonance! But it feels unfocused in its current form.

• The references to sculpture-craft were elements I liked about the draft. If I were to revise this draft, I would probably consider other sculpture/art terms I might want to include: armature, contrapposto (relaxed pose), maquette (small prototype wax/clay model), among others.

  •  I find it useful to express my inclination towards this. I think it is itself a distraction from the poem’s – not just the draft’s – focus, the paring down I want to do.

• The title is bland. Names and titles are important, especially for allusions. Knowing that a whole work is alluding to another work or canon of work like classical mythology helps the audience be more on the lookout for formal elements like symbolism. Changing the title to something like “Pygmalion advises his student” introduces characters but also shows who has agency by doing actions (Pygmalion) and who doesn’t (a student expected to listen to a more experienced artist, and Galatea). Also, Pygmalion, as a famous artist, would probably be a mentor to younger artists - which also brings the toxic masculinity subtext into clearer focus. “See, this is how you pick up women…”

• The first few lines are long, which makes their enjambment run against the page margins. For a poem so focused on using line length and enjambment as a narrative tool, this feels a little sloppy.

• I wish there were some breaks throughout to separate descriptions that could have deniability in being about art from descriptions about a person. “Mild mannered” feels like a good turn, separating it into “mild” (supposedly about the texture or hue of the marble) and “mannered” (obviously about a behavior).

• The most obvious for last: neither draft is from Galatea’s perspective, which other poems certainly try to remedy. I read poems that retell the myth: Claribel AlegrÍa’s “Galatea Before The Mirror” (1995), Megan Gower’s “Pygmalion” (2021), Vanessa Stauffer’s “Pygmalion” (2021), and especially Jennifer Perrine’s “Pica” (2007), among others for revising this draft. My draft has some similarity to Katha Pollitt’s “Pygmalion” (1979) - they both express an artistic sentiment of active revision. The process of revision is more fulfilling sometimes than having the completed draft - but treating people the way you treat working on a piece of art is rude at best. Madeline Miller’s 2022 short story “Galatea” also brings some Yellow Wallpaper vibes to the myth and hits many similar beats as my draft, except in prose.

  
  

I deliberately focus on Pygmalion’s creepy behavior because he is thinking like this before Galatea is alive. If I had the choice for Galatea to stay away from Pygmalion or for Pygmalion to be more considerate and less creepy, I would choose the latter. Galatea should not be around him, but if Pygmalion doesn’t learn to be better, what stops him from being just as bad or worse to his next “sculpture”? There are a lot of feminist retellings and criticism of this particular myth that are outside the scope of this essay. Also: not the first time in history a person has been weird about unrequited love from something that usually only looks human.

There is, of course, more than one metatextual lesson for artists and writers in this. When Galatea is a statue, Pygmalion can endlessly fuss and tinker and make adjustments to her. But when Galatea is a person, Pygmalion can’t do that anymore. A finished work, even imperfect, even half-finished-but-done, is worth more than a dozen almosts-dids.

This is the revised draft:

Pygmalion advises his student

Use the abrasive. Hammer and point. Pneumatic chisel

wedges apart a chest cavity. Slow marble stretches,

bends in the skin. No longer unworthy clay, rough

prototype now refined. Smooth. Flat here, but

curvy there. To taste. Ivory. Even temper. Mild.

Mannered. Straight toothed, but no tongue.

Relaxed. Her eyes never quite reach yours,

but they’re happy to see you. Ears curl in

the same direction. Only a dull sense of

marrow. All the waste carved away to

erode a blank hollow face.