“I sold flowers. I didn't sell myself. Now you've made a lady of me I'm not fit to sell anything else!”: Re-Animating Galatea in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion

Abstract

In the myth of Pygmalion, according to Ovid, a sculptor falls in love with a statue he has carved, which the goddess Aphrodite transforms into a living woman named Galatea. This myth has inspired numerous adaptations over the years. Among these adaptations and retellings, George Bernard Shaw's 1914 play Pygmalion and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein offer reinterpretations that expose deep-seated perspectives on gender and objectification. Shaw’s play, set in early 20th-century England, focuses on a linguistics expert named Henry Higgins, who attempts to turn the flower girl Eliza Doolittle into a refined Victorian lady. Similarly, Shelley's Gothic novel features a monster who demands a female companion from his creator in order to put an end to his loneliness. This paper examines the treatment of Eliza and the monster's "bride" through the feminist lenses of Luce Irigaray's “Women on the Market” and Gayle Rubin's “Traffic in Women”. These analyses reveal that both Shaw's play and Shelley's novel opaquely criticize capitalist and patriarchal commodification of women, reducing them to mere objects in male-centric transactions. By tracing these modern narratives back to the myth of Galatea, this study reveals the apparent shift from a focus on artistic and romantic transformation to a critical examination of women's roles as commodified objects in patriarchal and capitalist societies.

Keywords: pygmalion, galatea, george bernard shaw, mary shelley, Frankenstein

DOI: 10.7176/JLLL/103-06

Publication date: October 30th 2024