Here’s a talk I gave at Delaware REP before the premiere performance of Cheri Magid’s play, A Poem and a Mistake. The play is an adaptation of/commentary on Ovid’s Metamorphoses and its many depictions of sexual violence. I was asked to say a few words as prologue to the performance. (The beginning of the video is cut off. You can read a full transcript of my talk below the video.)
It means so much to be here tonight for this performance of Cheri Magid’s play, which is so vitally resonant.
I’ve had some time to read and sit with the play, and I’ve been working through Stephanie McCarter’s new translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. This translation reads the sexual violence in Ovid for what it is, not euphemizing or romanticizing it as in previous translations. And I’ve had a lot of thoughts and feelings. Representation of sexual violence, particularly in theatre, is the main focus of my work—so I think about this stuff a lot. But I always feel the emotional impact of narratives of rape and assault. So—with Metamorphoses, which depicts over 50 instances of sexual violence, it takes some processing, every time I read these stories. Where do I even begin to talk about this?
I think I’ll begin where I personally began with Ovid, before I knew who Ovid was—and that is with Pretty Woman. Is anyone here familiar with the film Pretty Woman? I didn’t realize, as a young teenager, when I first saw the movie that Pretty Woman is actually a reworking of the Pygmalion story from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Did anyone know that?
Well I didn’t, when I first saw Pretty Woman. But I loved Julia Roberts as Vivian, a sex worker whose gorgeous looks and disarming personality win the heart of a curmudgeonly young businessman named Edward—played by a restrained but still dashing Richard Gere. Edward hires Vivian to be his companion for a week while he’s in LA on business. But he decides she needs a makeover – so he decks her out in designer clothes and very expensive jewelry. And he takes her to the opera and a polo match. And they have sex on top of a piano. And then at the end of the movie, Edward decides he wants to be with Vivian for real—not just as a professional arrangement. And he goes to her little apartment in a white limousine and climbs up her fire escape and gives her rose bouquet. And she smiles her 10,000 watt Julia Roberts smile and omg they’re in love. Anyway.
Like I said, I was maybe…13 when I first saw Pretty Woman, and to me—well, to lots of us—it was a Cinderella fairy tale. Which—to me, was already kind of…fraught. See, even as a kid, my mom taught me that I should be a bit critical of fairy tales. That there’s more to aspire to than getting a prince—or a wealthy businessman—to fall in love with you. And so I knew that Pretty Woman had some issues. But—it was so fun to watch! It’s a great piece of cinema! So I thought I would just kind of… compartmentalize, and enjoy the movie without thinking too deeply about it. We didn’t have this term back in the 90’s, but the movie was (and is) one of my “problematic faves.” That’s when you know something clashes with your values, but you enjoy it anyway, even though you feel a bit conflicted. And at the time, as a teenager, this sort of engagement with Pretty Woman, like with Cinderella… seemed…ok to me.
Then I started to connect some dots…between Pretty Woman and My Fair Lady…and George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion…and then, finally, in undergrad…Ovid’s “Pygmalion.” Oh.
If you’re not familiar with “Pygmalion,” or if it’s been awhile since you read Ovid…this is the story of a man –Pygmalion– who hates all living women, so he carves an ivory statue to be his girlfriend. He dresses the statue up in very expensive jewelry (sound familiar)?, and even gets physical with the statue (no sex on a piano, but he does take the statue to bed). And then he makes an offering to the goddess Venus to give him an actual girlfriend who is “like” his statue. Weirdly, he doesn’t ask Venus to make his statue come to life, per se. He just wants a girlfriend who is like an ivory statue—physically ideal (according to HIS fantasy of course), completely silent…and unable to resist him in any way. Hmmm.
So Venus hears Pygmalion, and she actually *does* make the statue come to life. And then…Happily ever after? Well, it’s unclear, because that’s where the story ends. And this is where most fairy tales end, actually, if we think about it. What happens after Cinderella marries Prince Charming? What happens after Julia Roberts rides off with Richard Gere in his white limousine? I’m getting ahead of myself a little bit here. We’ll come back to that.
But first. Fun fact: the story of Pygmalion sits in Book 10 of Metamorphoses, just before the story of Myrrha. Myrrha, is the namesake of the central character in Magid’s play—the one we are about to see tonight. While the play doesn’t specifically engage with “Pygmalion,” you can’t turn to the story of Myrrha in Ovid without coming across Pygmalion—even if just in passing. This seems like an invitation, almost. So here we are, about to meet Myrrha onstage, but first—we encounter “Pygmalion.”
What I’d like to do is take a closer look at “Pygmalion”—and we’ll come back to Pretty Woman. But I’d like to dig into the darkness of the original source material a bit with you here, do a little close reading if you don’t mind…and examine how the story of Pygmalion represents misogyny and gender violence in a more insidious way—so that it’s been framed as romance and repackaged as the stuff of fairytales and happy Hollywood endings. The violence in “Pygmalion” is not an explicit assault event in the same way as Jove’s attack on Callisto or Apollo’s pursuit and attempted rape of Daphne.
Rather–it is a situation, a circumstance. It’s an unettled question? What we do know is *unsettling.* Pygmalion’s statue—is brought into the world, and into life, with no agency, no purpose, and no choice but belonging to Pygmalion.
What’s so disturbing about this story is how that relationship fits so neatly into traditional heterosexual ideals of romance and marriage—ideals which do persist in the 21st century, in spite of significant advances in feminism and developing understandings of gender and relationships. So we’ll come back to Pretty Woman in a minute, but let’s first take a closer look at Pygmalion and his ivory statue.
Ovid tells us right off the bat that Pygmalion is a man who hates women. This hatred has been translated in various ways over the years. But to give you just a taste from the last century: Frank Justus Miller in 1916 reads Pygmalion as “disgusted with the faults” of “the female mind.” Per the 2004 Anthony Kline translation, Pygmalion is “offended by the failings that nature gave the female heart.” In the 2005 Charles Martin, “Pygmalion observed how these women lived lives of sordid indecency” and is “dismayed by the numerous defects of character Nature had given the feminine spirit.” Per Stephanie McCarter’s new translation Pygmalion is “outraged”—notably, a more aggressive feeling, one with potential for violence—let’s remember that. But however it’s translated, we get the picture: Pygmalion is disgusted, outraged because he thinks women are defective, failed in mind, spirit, heart. Wow—how is this guy single, am I right?
It turns out that Pygmalion is a bachelor, apparently by choice, since he hates women so much. But he reminds me a lot of certain 21st century men who call themselves “involuntarily celibate”—or “incels” for short. Do we know about incels?
So—briefly– incels feel that—as men, sex with women is their rightful entitlement. But because women don’t want to have sex with them, their “right” is being unjustly denied. So, they have deep outrage and hatred for women, for denying them their “entitled right.” And they also generally subscribe to the misogynist belief that women are inferior to men in basically all capacities. That women’s only purpose is for sex with men.
For incels, an acceptable woman—for the designated purpose of sex—is not a real woman at all—she’s more like the ivory statue that Pygmalion creates for himself. No real woman will do for Pygmalion—only a fantasy of his own making, an object that cannot speak, cannot think, cannot resist. But here’s the rub—she also can’t reciprocate his physical advances. Per McCarter’s translation, Pygmalion “won’t admit she still is ivory. He kisses her and thinks she kisses back.” Wow. A trademark incel behavior is to imagine or fantasize mutual desire and consent from lust objects where none exists.
If this sounds kind of sad and pathetic, it kind of is. Incels—and Pygmalion—are kind of pathetic, but their attitudes are violent—and their behavior can be, too. You may remember two high-profile cases in 2014 and 2018 where self-proclaimed incels committed mass-murders because they were outraged at being rejected by women. These are extreme cases—which is why they got a lot of public attention—but outrage leading to gender-based violence is horrifyingly common.
And the thing is– Incels themselves aren’t the root of the issue, and they’re certainly not the only perpetrators of sexual violence. See Incels are more of a recent symptom of a deep-seated problem in mainstream patriarchal culture where in order to be a “real man,” you need to have dominance over women. And a common attitude is that heterosexual sex is a way for men to assert this dominance. So yeah, women ARE viewed as objects of male desire and pleasure, but they’re ALSO used to assert male power. And so we have this really terrifying situation where there are men who view women as inherently inferior and unworthy of respect…AND are also constantly trying to have sex with women, in order to affirm their own status as men. This is a perfect storm for sexual violence.
Now you may be thinking… wait a minute here. Is Pygmalion actually a perpetrator of sexual violence? He gets kind of freaky with his statue, but it’s a statue, not an actual woman. She can’t consent, but she’s also an inanimate object…so… what do we make of this?
So—with the intervention from Venus, the statue does become a real woman. And what I find particularly unnerving is that this is basically where the text ends. In the last line of the story, Ovid tells us that nine months later, Pygmalion and his new real live wife have a daughter, Paphos. But there is no description of how the relationship is, or how the statue is doing in her new life and marriage. Are we to believe that the hateful misogynist Pygmalion and the first actual woman he has ever been with just live happily ever after for the rest of their lives?
More to the point: Do we really think Pygmalion will change his perspective of women, now that his fantasy girl is “real”?
Textual evidence suggests not; per McCarter’s translation, this newly-alive woman’s body is “like wax softened by the sun—a thumb can bend and mold it into many shapes as it grows more usable with use.” Use. Usable. She is still, for Pygmalion, an object to be used for his pleasure, to submit to his desires.
Ovid’s story ends just as the statue comes to life, blinking into consciousness. The various translations of Ovid agree that Pygmalion awakens his new girlfriend to life with a kiss. She is blushing in all translations I’ve read, “timidly” so per the translations by Miller and Martin. Martin’s version reads: “she opened her eyes to the sunlight, and at the same time, first looked on her lover and heaven!” (exclamation point). How romantic, right? In Martin’s parsing, it’s as though Pygmalion and heaven are, in the woman’s eyes, all one.
McCarter’s new 2022 translation, though, offers a revelation. It reads: “Feeling his kiss, the virgin blushed. Raising scared eyes to heaven, she saw her lover and the sky at once” (period). That word: scared. She’s scared. He kisses her, and her response is fear. She opens her eyes and sees: Pygmalion. Whom we know hates women, who views women as intrinsically defective and inferior. Who only “loves” the statue because he himself created her for his own pleasure. What is Pygmalion going to do when he realizes that his creation actually has independent, self-possessed thoughts and feelings? We already know that she does—because “scared” is a feeling, one that Pygmalion didn’t prescribe.
And scared is how I feel FOR this poor woman, whom we also know is pretty immediately impregnated by Pygmalion. Is it rape? Is it consensual? How can this woman consent to sex when she is, for all intents and purposes, a newborn? And what choice or agency would she have, to deny Pygmalion?
So many questions. So much that Ovid doesn’t tell us explicitly, but that we can imagine. It’s chilling. Happily ever after? I’m not so sure.
But wait a minute…that’s not Pretty Woman! Pretty Woman actually does have a happy ending, because Vivian hasagency and makes her own decision to be with Edward at the end. And it’s romantic! They fall in love! Totally different from Ovid. Really?
Though Pretty Woman is updated in the aesthetic trappings of late-20th-century romantic comedy, it’s pretty faithful to Pygmalion in terms of its heterosexual scripts. It’s softened a bit—Edward doesn’t hate women per se, he’s just got too much work and too much emotional baggage to invest in a relationship. And the actual sex acts between Vivian and Edward are mutually consensual —great. But the power dynamics—not just in terms of gender, but also in terms of age and socioeconomic status, and influenced by Vivian’s vulnerable position as a sex worker—certainly complicate the relationship. The film does acknowledge these complexities in some ways, but the *romance* is used to gloss them over, to obscure them.
Neither Pretty Woman nor Pygmalion shows a “love story” between equal partners. In both stories, the woman’s legitimacy as a romantic partner—and essentially, her “realness” as an entity—is a function of the man’s agency, desire, and status. Both of the men in these stories mold and style these women to fit an image of their own fantasy. Edward and Pygmalion grow to “love” their respective objects of desire because these objects are really reflections and affirmations of the men themselves. Pygmalion’s statue is an exhibition of his own vision and artistry, and Edward “makes over” Vivian so that she is a reflection of his wealth and taste.
In one of the most iconic scenes from Pretty Woman, Edward takes Vivian on a shopping spree. He says, “Stores are never nice to people; they’re nice to credit cards”—which Vivian doesn’t have, but Edward sure does! Then there’s this glorious montage of Vivian trying on clothes, and being fussed over by the salespeople, while Edward looks on approvingly. But the store manager caters to Edward first and foremost, paying him compliments, since he has the wealth—another indicator of masculine power. It’s clear that the adornment of Vivian is really about Edward, and Edward is in control. Vivian is having a good time, but it’s at Edward’s behest.
In Pretty Woman, and also in “Pygmalion,” the woman is both an object of male desire and a symbol of masculine status and power. Yes, Venus does transform the statue into a real woman, but this is because Pygmalion has the wealth and means to make offerings to the goddess. Yes, Vivian does decide to go with Edward at the end of Pretty Woman, but this relationship never would never have happened without Edward first using his wealth and influence to mold her into his ideal partner and then deeming her worthy and acceptable.
Pretty Woman seems to update the Pygmalion story by making it a romantic comedy instead of just a creepy story about a gross misogynist and his literal sex doll. But ultimately it reinforces the messaging that 1) Women’s legitimacy and value are determined by men and 2) heterosexual romance and “falling in love” are the cure-all, the solution, the resolution. The ultimate goal.
“Pygmalion” and Pretty Woman both end when the woman becomes “real” or “legitimate”—when the statue comes to life, when Edward recognizes Vivian as a worthy romantic partner. What happens next? In both stories– We don’t know.
Because what happens when we fall “in love”? Does this automatically mean that we will be safe, that we will be treated with dignity and respect by our partner, that sex will always be consensual? Too often, the expectation in romantic relationships is still that one partner will be dependent on the other…will submit to the other, will sacrifice their desires, their needs, and their freedom for the other—and too often, this doesn’t happen on equal terms.
Now don’t get me wrong—I am NOT anti- romantic love. Romantic love can be great, as long as the people involved are mutually fulfilled on the terms that work for them and their situation. But often, the dynamics of power and consent in intimate relationships are not navigated on an individual basis between partners…but rather fall into traditional patterns ingrained over generations of patriarchy and compulsory heterosexuality. Patterns retraced through perennial “problematic faves” like Pretty Woman. Culturally, we still hold onto the idea that embracing these rigid traditional heterosexual roles and relationships will legitimize us, will make us worthy, will make us real.
How do we disrupt this?
How do we dismantle these expectations and ideologies that insidiously inform our desires and our relationships?
And speaking of pop culture and art, how do we deal with our “problematic faves” that reinforce the very same ideologies we are trying to escape from?
One thing we *can* do is to create *new* art that interrogates these norms and expectations… and that represents other narratives and other truths.
The notion that violence can be painted over and repackaged as romance is what Magid’s play pulls apart. The play interrogates how the violence in Ovid’s Metamorphoses is often reframed and euphemized as expression of romantic love. As we’ll see in the play, this is consistent with popular messaging surrounding love, sex, and relationships. The play explores how violence is bound up with sex– and with love—and not just in literature and art.
A really powerful thing about theatre is that it is a living art form, and we can use it to make old things new—or to create new things from old texts. Theatre is a fantastic space to confront and critique the challenging aspects of an old text within the immediate context of the cultural present.
Theatre is an embodied art form, and it is also an ephemeral one. The embodied aspect makes the text feel real, present, urgent. The ephemeral nature of the live performance adds to that sense of urgency—you just have to be there. You have to be present. It demands your attention. You don’t want to miss this because it is happening right here, right now, in this theatre space, with each other—and it is also happening in the larger here and now, at our present moment, in this cultural climate.
And so this—here—now —with “A Poem and a Mistake” is a perfect opportunity to revisit one of our “problematic faves,” Ovid’s Metamorphoses, through a distinctly current perspective. The play invites much more conversation, and I am so ready to keep unpacking and keep processing with everyone else who is here and now. I’ll see you after the show.
Thank you.
