The
story of Pygmalion, as it has been related to us by Ovid in the tenth book of
his Metamorphoses, is characterised
by an astonishing ambivalence towards women and the idea of sexual love.
Pygmalion is not just a sculptor who one day creates a statue that he then
happens to fall in love with (which is how most people will remember the
story), but rather somebody who deliberately sets out to create a being that is
worthy of being loved by him. Ovid
introduces him as a man who is disgusted by the whole female sex after seeing
the daughters of Propoetus prostituting themselves in public (which is not
entirely voluntary, but rather a punishment inflicted on them by the goddess
Venus for having offended her). They are being described as having “lost all
sense of shame” and “the power to blush, as the blood hardened in their cheeks”
This
loss of shame is clearly understood as a decisive step in a process of
dehumanisation: a little more hardening, we are told, and they would be
indistinguishable from flint. (Compare this to Lord Ewald’s claim in Villiers
de l’Isle Adam’s The Future Eve that
Alicia has no “soul” because she is too earthly.) Appalled by so much female depravity,
Pygmalion decides (just as many centuries later Celia’s disillusioned lover in
Swift’s “Lady’s Dressing Room”) that he no longer wants to have anything to do
with women and is determined to stay a bachelor. Yet entirely happy with his
wifeless (read: sexless) existence he is not, because soon enough he carves a
statue that looks exactly like a woman and is so exceedingly lifelike that one has
the impression that she might move any second now and that it is only modesty
that keeps her from doing so. And Pygmalion falls in love with his own
creation. Here is, finally, the woman that he has been waiting for, that all
men (if we take Pygmalion to represent the male sex) have been waiting for: a
woman who knows how to behave properly and who is pure and free of all unseemly
desires and inclinations, and this purity and freedom makes her much superior
to all real women. In Pygmalion’s mind, the statue is actually more human than any real woman could ever be.
All real women are ultimately like the Propoetides: natural born sluts, and as
such less than human (less than what humans, or at least human females, should
be), more like stones, almost like living statues. The actual statue, on the
other hand, is as a woman should be. The statue, in its immaculate
ivory-whiteness is the true woman.
Curiously,
however, Pygmalion has a very sexual relationship with this statue. He clearly
desires her: “Often he runs his hand over the work, tempted as to whether it is
flesh or ivory, not admitting it to be ivory. He kisses it and thinks his
kisses are returned; and speaks to it, and holds it, and imagines that his
fingers press into the limbs”. He dresses his new love, gives her presents, gets
her jewellery, and most importantly, takes her to bed and sleeps with her. For
a while that seems to work, but for obvious reasons (a statue is unlikely to
make a good sex doll) it is not very satisfactory in the long run. So Pygmalion
approaches the goddess Venus and begs her to bring his ivory maiden to life.
She obliges, and ivory becomes human flesh. He kisses her, and she “felt warm:
he pressed his lips to her again, and also touched her breast with his hand”.
Gradually her body yields to his touch, loses its hardness and becomes
malleable under his caressing hands. “The lover is stupefied, and joyful, but
uncertain, and afraid he is wrong, reaffirms the fulfilment of his wishes, with
his hand, again, and again. It was flesh!” Soon enough, the no-longer ivory
maiden becomes aware of what Pygmalion is doing with her, and in the same
moment that she becomes fully awake to the world, in the very moment of her
birth, acknowledges him as her rightful lover: “The girl felt the kisses he
gave, blushed, and raising her bashful eyes to the light, saw both her lover
and the sky.” She cannot help loving him back, and since we are told that nine
months later she gives birth to a son, she is obviously not reluctant to have
sex with Pygmalion, nor he with her.
So
why is Pygmalion not disgusted by her? What is it about her that makes her so
different from all other women that he can accept her and even have sexual
intercourse with her without being repelled by her? It must have something to
do with the fact that she is not an ordinary woman, but a statue come alive,
and that she carries the modesty, the bashfulness of the inanimate thing, over
to her new existence. She doesn’t move on her own. She doesn’t follow her own
will. She has no own will. She is a perfect mirror of her lover’s desires, without
having any desires of her own that might threaten her purity. She lives only
for her lover, who is her one and only. He is, quite literally, her world. She
is a supposedly living woman, but without the flaws, a living paradox. She is perfect
and pure, but also perfectly usable, obedient and ready to serve her one and
only master. She does what she is told. She is the ideal woman, the Eve of the
Future, a precursor of today’s or tomorrow’s sexbots, a tailor-made,
always-willing, never-tiring sexual companion, a Stepford wife.
Isn’t
it odd how little our desires have changed over the last two thousand years?
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