Module 2: "The Myth of Pygmalion"

“He’s earning enough to keep a wife...or he would be if he charged properly. That’s another reason he needs one. My Althea is a very shrewd girl. She’d see he got the right prices for his work...”

Weave your amorous spell, plaiting it into the tresses of one of our maidens, making it a snare for his wild loneliness.

Weave your amorous spell, plaiting it into the tresses of one of our maidens, making it a snare for his wild loneliness.

Bid your son, the Archer of Love, plant one of his arrows in that indifferent young man so that he becomes infected with a sweet sickness for which there is only one cure.

“You, Aphrodite, queen of beauty, lady of delight. How can you think that I who in my daily work will accept nothing less than the forms of ideal beauty, how can you think that I could pin my highest aspiration on any but the most perfect face and form? Yours, Aphrodite. Yours, yours. I love you, and you alone. And until I can find a mortal maid of the same perfection, I will not love.”

“You, Aphrodite, queen of beauty, lady of delight. How can you think that I who in my daily work will accept nothing less than the forms of ideal beauty, how can you think that I could pin my highest aspiration on any but the most perfect face and form? Yours, Aphrodite. Yours, yours. I love you, and you alone. And until I can find a mortal maid of the same perfection, I will not love.”

In fact, her divinity was precisely in this, womanliness raised to its highest power.

She was much pleased by this ardent praise.

The he took mallet and chisel, and began to work—it was as if the cold tools became living parts of himself.

The he took mallet and chisel, and began to work—it was as if the cold tools became living parts of himself.

Every line of her drawn taut by his own strength stretched to the breaking point, the curvings of her richly rounded with all the love he had never given a human being.

Her marble foot spurned the pediment.

“There is not life without love. I know how you can do it. Look...I stand here, I place my arm about her; my face against hers. Now, use your power, turn me to marble too. We shall be frozen together in this moment of time, embracing each other though eternity. This will suffice. For I tell you that without her my brain is ash, my hands are meat; I do not wish to breathe, to see, to be.”

She looked at Pygmalion—tousled, unshaven, with bloodshot eyes and stained tunic— and said, “Now, dear husband, it’s my turn to work on you.”