Re-writing Myths of Creativity: Pygmalionism, Galatea Figures, and the Revenge of the Muse in Late Victorian Literature by Women

Abstract

Recent criticism suggests that the second half of the Victorian era marked the golden age of the myth of Pygmalion in Britain. To name but a few, adaptations of Ovid’s tale across the arts in late nineteenth-century British poetry and drama include Robert Buchanan’s ‘Pygmalion the Sculptor’ (Undertones, 1863), William Morris’ ‘Pygmalion and the Image’ (The Earthly Paradise, 1868), W.S. Gilbert’s Pygmalion and Galatea, an Original Mythological Comedy (1871), Robert Browning’s ‘Beatrice Signorini’ (Asolando, 1889), and Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Well-Beloved’ (Poems of the Past and Present, 1901). In the well-known marmoreal painted female figures of D.G. Rossetti, Albert Moore, Frederic Leighton, or Lawrence Alma-Tadema, one also recognizes the Cypriot sculptor’s fascination for his statue. Similarly, late Victorian criticism and fiction are replete with reprisals of the myth. As J. Hillis Miller has pointed out, many late Victorian literary protagonists ‘do […] something like falling in love with a statue’.