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Madeline Miller’s Galatea (2022) is the feminist retelling of the famous myth of Pygmalion. Set within a speculative framework, this short story, which challenges the traditional depiction of women in literature, presents Galatea’s journey as she is transformed from a worshipped sculpture and an objectified woman to her eventual rebellion against her creator and husband. Drawing on feminist theories by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Fiona Joy Green, Adrianne Rich, Andrea O’Reilly, Naomi Wolf and Gina Wong-Wylie, this analysis describes how Galatea’s motherhood becomes a source of empowerment rather than subjugation. Furthermore, it is also observed how Galatea criticizes societal ideals created around beauty and perfection by contrasting them with the realities of embodied female life. Thus, Galatea emerges as a text aligned with new tendencies in feminist literature that seek to endow women with agency and a voice to tell their story as a means of questioning the enduring patriarchal metanarrative of (hi)story.

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Re-sculpting the Mother-Daughter Bond and the Idea(l) of the Female Body: A Reading of Madeline Miller’s Galatea

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  • 发表日期：

    2026年

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  • Madalina Armie

摘要

Madeline Miller’s Galatea (2022) is the feminist retelling of the famous myth of Pygmalion. Set within a speculative framework, this short story, which challenges the traditional depiction of women in literature, presents Galatea’s journey as she is transformed from a worshipped sculpture and an objectified woman to her eventual rebellion against her creator and husband. Drawing on feminist theories by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Fiona Joy Green, Adrianne Rich, Andrea O’Reilly, Naomi Wolf and Gina Wong-Wylie, this analysis describes how Galatea’s motherhood becomes a source of empowerment rather than subjugation. Furthermore, it is also observed how Galatea criticizes societal ideals created around beauty and perfection by contrasting them with the realities of embodied female life. Thus, Galatea emerges as a text aligned with new tendencies in feminist literature that seek to endow women with agency and a voice to tell their story as a means of questioning the enduring patriarchal metanarrative of (hi)story.