Ovid’s Pygmalion Myth in the work of Marston, Morris and Burne-Jones
A companion piece to my article: "The Conundrum of William Hazlitt's Liber Amoris, or, the New Pygmalion”.
The Roman poet Ovid (43 B.C. - 18 A.D.) was the first author to give a written account of the Pygmalion myth.[1] He narrates the myth in the tenth book of Metamorphoses, an epic poem written between A.D. 2 and A.D. 8.
In Ovid’s Metamorphoses Pygmalion is a king as well as a sculptor and so wields power in the two realms of action and imagination. He must, however, face the compulsive power of the second when he conceives and then creates a marble statue, Galatea, whose beauty is such that he falls in love with his own creation. Venus, out of regard for him, transforms the cold marble into living flesh and presents the grateful king with a real woman to worship. Here is a parable of the relationship between action and imagination, the world and creation, in the work of art. (Corbett 36)
Pygmalion’s repugnance for the Propoetides, daughters of Propoetus, who denied the divinity of Venus and turned to prostitution, leads him to create his ideal version of woman in marble.
Pygmalion, loathing their lascivious life,
Abhorr'd all womankind, but most a wife:
So single chose to live, and shunn'd to wed,
Well pleas'd to want a consort of his bed.
Yet fearing idleness, the nurse of ill,
In sculpture exercis'd his happy skill;
And carv'd in iv'ry such a maid, so fair,
As Nature could not with his art compare,
Were she to work; but in her own defence
Must take her pattern here, and copy hence. (Ovid 356-65)
But Pygmalion developed a sexual obsession for the statue he had created.
Art hid with art, so well perform'd the cheat,
It caught the carver with his own deceit:
He knows 'tis madness, yet he must adore,
And still the more he knows it, loves the more:
The flesh, or what so seems, he touches oft,
Which feels so smooth, that he believes it soft.
Fir'd with this thought, at once he strain'd the breast,
And on the lips a burning kiss impress'd. (372-79)
Pygmalion, the attentive lover, adorns the statue with shells, pearls, precious stones and fine raiment (392-405). In the Ovidian myth, Pygmalion carries his obsession into the physical realm, although stopping short of the sexual intercourse practiced by Pygmalion on the statue in pre-Ovidian Greek mythology, “an uncomfortable experience one may suppose” (Griffin 65).
Then, from the floor, he rais'd a royal bed,
With cov'rings of Sidonian purple spread:
The solemn rites perform'd, he calls her bride,
With blandishments invites her to his side:
And as she were with vital sense possest,
Her head did on a plumy pillow rest. (406-11)
Pygmalion makes his offerings to Venus, praying her to send him a wife resembling the ivory statue. Venus accedes and when Pygmalion rushes home and feverishly kisses the statue the transformation has occurred.
He kisses her white lips, renews the bliss,
And looks, and thinks they redden at the kiss;
He thought them warm before: nor longer stays,
But next his hand on her hard bosom lays:
Hard as it was, beginning to relent,
It seem'd, the breast beneath his fingers bent;
He felt again, his fingers made a print;
'Twas flesh, but flesh so firm, it rose against the dint:
The pleasing task he fails not to renew;
Soft, and more soft at ev'ry touch it grew;
Like pliant wax, when chasing hands reduce
The former mass to form, and frame for use. (430-41)
John Marston (1576-1634), the English dramatist, satirist, and poet published in 1598 his verse version of the Pygmalion myth in The Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image and Certaine Satyres. Like many contemporaries, Marston was a master at scurrilous satire and took a less sympathetic approach to the Pygmalion myth.
Marston’s account of the myth preserves to a great extent both the Greek and Ovidian attitudes, though shaped according to Elizabethan parameters. He borrows the most critical elements from these two traditions and transforms them into a harsh satire against the poetic uses of his time or about several other subjects of controversy. (Santano 261)
Marston dedicated the poem to his mistress, beseeching her to play the role of Venus and breathe life into his muse by granting him her sexual favours.
Thy favours, like Promethean sacred fire,
In dead and dull conceit can life inspire;
Or, like that rare and rich elixir stone,
Can turn to gold, leaden invention. (Marston 202)
Marston’s description of Pygmalion’s obsession for the statue is sexually charged, far from the chasteness of the Victorian versions, making the perversity of his desire explicit.
Untill his eye descended so farre downe
That it descried Loves pavillion,
Where Cupid doth enjoy his onely crowne,
And Venus hath her chiefest mantion:
There would he winke, and winking looke againe,
Both eyes and thoughts would gladly there remaine. (Marston 205)
Pygmalion’s physical interaction with the mute and lifeless form he has created is tinged with the inevitable frustration of his desire.
And when he goes to bed with the senseless woman, her passivity is taken for granted as the meaningful silence of the Petrarchan mistress – whose existence, not active presence – is all the poet requires to carry out the representation of his poetic abilities. Marston ironically uses the plural pronoun to denounce the unbalanced relationship: “Now they dally, kiss, embrace together” (161). It is not them, but he, who performs all these amorous actions. (Santano 266)
When Marston reaches the climax of his poem, he refrains out of mock decorum from a physical description of Pygmalion’s love-making with the humanised statue.
And now me thinkes some wanton itching eare,
With lustfull thoughts and ill attention,
Lists to my muse, expecting for to heare
The amorous description of that action
Which Venus seekes, and ever doth require,
When fitness graunts a place to please desire. (209)
Marston is conflicted.
He envies Pygmalion’s freedom to enjoy his lady’s beauties: “O that my mistress were an image too,/ That I might blameless her perfections view!” (65-66). He acknowledges the advantages of the Petrarchan free manipulation of the lady’s body. However, he explicitly laughs at those lovers who assume the Platonic conception of love, that is, love without sex:
I oft have smiled to see the foolery
Of some sweet youths, who seriously protest
That love respects not actual luxury,
But only joys to dally, sport and jest. (Santano 266-67)
William Morris’s (1834-1896) response to the Pygmalion myth was through his epic poem The Earthly Paradise, published in three volumes between 1868 and 1870. Amelia Yates outlines the structure of the poem:
The tales comprising the overall narrative are told by a group of “Wanderers” who have fled Norway to escape The Black Death. The poems are arranged in pairs, one classical and one medieval, each pair assigned to a particular month of the year. “Pygmalion and the Image” is the classical tale told in August, the introductory poem for this month echoing many of the themes of the Pygmalion poem. August is introduced as a burning, fiery month, with the pleasures of summer still lingering. The Wanderers tell of human nature’s tendency to desire more, however, perhaps with direct reference to the story of Pygmalion:
‘Ah, love! such happy days as these,
Must we still waste them, craving for the best,
Like lovers o’er the painted images. (15-17) (Yates, Poetic Narrative 112-13)
Morris’s version of the Pygmalion myth is high-minded, almost mawkishly romantic in its sensibility, compared to the raunchiness of Marston’s poem.
His early Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems (1858) and the unfinished Scenes From the Fall of Troy are seen as vivid, engaged with life, full of naturalistic observation, somewhat rough at the edges in formal terms but, crucially, alive to conflict. These are contrasted with the verse of The Earthly Paradise (1868-70) that Thompson sees as mannered, smooth and facile in form and averse to conflict. ‘Mechanical oscillation of mood’ is said to replace true conflict. The underlying seriousness of the verse, the dark tone, which is most certainly there, is seen in terms of personal and political despair; no hope can be fixed upon to hold back the drift towards death. The felicities of the ornamental are seen as a palliative or compensation. (Arscott, William Morris 95)
Arscott analyses Morris’s poem in the context of Edward Burne-Jones’s subsequent series of paintings entitled Pygmalion and the Image:
In Morris’s poem the sculptor Pygmalion is given a wide range of emotional states, while, for the bulk of the story, the statue is fixed in a grave state of painless half-knowledge of love – seeming to have an inkling of love, but at one remove, as if in a dream.
Naked it was, its unbound locks were laid
Over the lovely shoulders; with one hand
Reached out, as to a lover, did it stand,
The other held a fair rose over-blown;
No smile was on the parted lips, the eyes
Seemed as if even now great love had shown
Unto them something of its sweet surprise,
Yet saddened them with half-seen mysteries
And still midst passion maiden-like she seemed
As though of love unchanged for aye, she dreamed.
The anaesthetised timelessness of the statue is set off against dynamic states of engagement on Pygmalion’s part. He feels the bitterness and disgust of world-weariness, the frenzy of thwarted desire, the agitation of nameless hope, the agony of presumed loss, the momentary chill and calm of abandoned hope and then the renewed pain of rekindled desire. It is only in the closing section of the poem that the statue participates in this kind of vivid experience. Speaking to Pygmalion she cries out at the pangs of love she feels for the first time. The inverse relationship between pleasure or numbed timelessness and the intensity of love and loss is a major theme of the poem as a whole. The enjoyment of magical trance-like states repeatedly gives way, in a switchback, to mortality, memory and the inevitable regret of lost illusion. In Burne-Jones’s (1879) Pygmalion and the Image there is no such contrast. If anything, Pygmalion, the statue and Venus all seem to inhabit the timeless zone occupied by Morris’s statue. But this is not the beatific region explored in Morris’s romance. It is a world where loss is not allowed to figure, where pleasure comes packaged with pain. (Yates, “Venus as Dominatrix” 116-17)
Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898), a close friend of Morris from Exeter College, Oxford, first pictorial engagement with the Pygmalion myth was as part of a collaboration with Morris to illustrate The Earthly Paradise.
Subsequently they planned and started work on a richly illustrated edition of Morris’s verse work The Earthly Paradise with up to 500 wood-engraved illustrations designed by Burne-Jones. There was a remarkable investment of imaginative energy on Burne-Jones’s part to produce figure compositions in numbers for the stories told by the two parties (Norse and Greek, Burne-Jones’s preference being for the Greek) in the Earthly Paradise, starting with the first portion completed by Morris (in 1865), ‘The Story of Cupid and Psyche’. The illustrated edition was never completed, and the poem came out with just two woodcuts in 1868-70, but Burne-Jones made dozens of compositional sketches, and work on the illustrations gave rise to a number of Burne-Jones’s elaborate projects in watercolour or oil, preoccupying him for decades, notably the Cupid and Psyche series and the Pygmalion series. (Arscott, William Morris 17)
The years in which Burne-Jones executed the two series of oil paintings Pygmalion and the Image, the first in 1868-70 and the second in 1875-1878, straddled the most passionate period of his affair with the young and beautiful Greek artist Maria Zambaco (1843-1914) and its scandalous denouement (Yeates 110). Separated from her husband, Maria left Paris for London in 1866 where she was introduced to Burne-Jones by her mother for a commissioned portrait. She became his student and model at his studio in his house, the Grange, in Fulham. Burne-Jones, whose marriage to Georgiana Macdonald by then in sexual limbo, engaged in a passionate affair with Maria which ended in a dramatic confrontation in 1869 when he refused Maria’s entreaties to abandon his family to live with her on the Greek island of Syros (MacCarthy 202-11).
Burne-Jones’s blending of pleasure and pain in his imagery may be traced to his relationship with Maria as model for the Galatea and Venus figures in the Pygmalion series of paintings, The unsettlingly passive, non-sexual representation of Maria as Galatea and the androgynous representation of Pygmalion, contrast with his earlier sexually charged portrayals of Maria in works such as Phyllis and Demophoön, which Burne-Jones withdrew from exhibition at the Old Water-Colour Society in 1870 in protest at the Society’s President’s request to cover over Demophoön’s genitals (Corbett 29-31), and his sequence of paintings Seasons where Maria is represented as Summer (1869) and his wife Georgie as Winter (1869).
Burne-Jones’s determinedly passive-aggressive Phyllis and the fearful and unhappy Demophoön seemed to contemporary commentators to be too degenerate in their relationship to support the idea of a healthy or celebratory depiction of their nudity. Nothing could be less heroic or manly in the Victorian sense than Demophoön’s simultaneous cringing and longing. (Corbett 30-31)
Burne-Jones’s series of paintings illustrating the Pygmalion myth have been criticised for their embodiment of male narcissism at the expense of female sexuality.
Despite the title of the first painting, “The Heart Desires,” Burne-Jones’s depiction of the Pygmalion myth, when compared to Rossetti’s paintings, is strikingly asexual. The most frequent pose for Pygmalion in Pygmalion and the Image is an averted, introspective gaze. The bodies in the paintings are uninvolved with each other and stand parallel to rather than interacting with one another. Even in the final image when Pygmalion finally achieves his desire, he seems to be looking at Galatea’s abdomen while she looks over his head at something else. The mirror on the wall above Pygmalion’s head in this painting underscores the idea that his creation of Galatea is a self-referential act. … The displaced eroticism of Rossetti’s women has been aestheticized in Burne-Jones’s paintings to such a degree that it self-consciously eschews any reference to contemporary sexuality. The figure of Galatea in Pygmalion and the Image, even after she has supposedly been “fired” by Venus, is an airbrushed centrefold who is an ideal rather than a real woman. She seems as much as statue as she was before she was brought to life. … Masculine desire as represented in Victorian paintings and poetry is freighted with contradictions. Since men were supposed to be the only ones to experience sexual desire, unless the woman had “fallen” already, then men were both empowered and made culpable simultaneously by their role as the active sexual agent. (Danahy 47-49)
Arscott also comments on the lack of sexual distinctiveness between Pygmalion and Galatea.
The pictorial sequence, like a sculpture, is in the round. The composition is reversed to produced symmetrical enclosure, the open door to the world outside is moved left to right, the sculptor now faces in the other direction. Centrally the figure of the sculptor and that of the sculpture mirror each other, their eyes almost meet in the second canvas. They are matched in size, in orientation, in an erosion of marks of sexual differentiation. It is a curiously androgynous presentation of virility – and the substitution of the goddess for the sculptor, and/or sculpture, seems quite logical. We have a love of self which verges on narcissism, androgyny which does not necessarily move in to homoeroticism. (“Venus as Dominatrix” 118)
More than two hundred and fifty years separated Marston’s version of Ovid’s Pygmalion myth from that of Morris and Burne-Jones. In the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, Marston, in common with his contemporaries John Pettie (1839-1893) and Richard Braithwaite (1588-1673), used the myth as “a vehicle to criticise human vice” (Santano 261).[2]
Ellis adopts a Lacanian analysis of the poem’s signification:
“The poem thus contains not one but two of the epyllion’s central narratives: the maturation of the foolish Petrarchan youth (Pigmalion) into an adult lover of women (the statue), and the aggressive female wooer (Pigmalion) who pursues the youth (the statue). This also, of course, points to the connections between these narratives, both of which encode anxieties about male wholeness” (72).
Morris and Burne-Jones sought to give the myth renewed meaning through a stylised and romanticised version. The realisation of Pygmalion’s sexual desire for Galatea, whether as statue of living being, was airbrushed out of their adaptations, not least perhaps to avoid invoking the Victorian taboos of masturbatory relief and scopophilia, themes that are suggested in Marston’s text (Ellis 73). This “hesitation and ambivalence” (Yates 112) shared by Morris and Burne-Jones in their treatment removes the perversity inherent in the Pygmalion myth and results in “the shared exploration of love, including the courtly love represented in medieval manuscripts” (Yates 117), a far remove, indeed, from Marston’s direct and sexualised engagement with Ovid’s Pygmalion myth.
Works Cited
Arscott, Caroline. “Venus as Dominatrix: Nineteenth-century Artists and their Creations.” Manifestations of Venus: Art and Sexuality, edited by Caroline Arscott and Katie Scott, Manchester UP, 2000, pp. 109-25.
---. William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones: Interlacings. Yale UP, 2008.
Corbett, David Peters. Edward Burne-Jones. Tate Publishing, 2004.
Ellis, James Richard. Sexuality and Citizenship: Metamorphosis in Elizabethan Erotic Verse. U. of Toronto Press, 2003.
Danahy, Martin A. “Mirrors of Masculine Desire: Narcissus and Pygmalion in Victorian Representation.” Victorian Poetry, vol. 32, no. 1, 1994, pp. 35-54. JSTOR. www.jstor.org/stable/40003078.
Griffin, Alan H.F. “Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’.” Greece & Rome, vol. 24, no. 1, 1977, pp. 57-70. JSTOR. www.jstor.org/stable/642689.
MacCarthy, Fiona. The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination. Harvard UP, 2012.
Marston, John. “The Metamorphosis of Pigmalion’s Image and Certaine Satyres.” The Works of John Marston, edited by J. O. Halliwell, vol. III, John Russell Smith, 1856, pp. 199-237. Archive.org.
Morris, William. “Pygmalion and the Image.” The Earthly Paradise: A Poem, vol. II, Longmans, Green, 1905, pp. 231-57. Archive.org.
Ovid. “The Story of Pygmalion and the Statue.” Metamorphoses. Translated by Dryden, Congreve et al., Samuel Garth, 1826, Book X, pp. 254-57. Archive.org.
Rico, Barbara Roche Rico. “From ‘Speechless Dialect’ to ‘Prosperous Art’: Shakespeare's Recasting of the Pygmalion Image.” Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 48, no. 3, 1985, pp. 285–295. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3817424.
Santano, Sonia Hernández. “Marston’s The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion’s Image: The Ovidian Myth Revisited.” Sederi Yearbook, 12, 2002, pp. 259-68.
Yates, Amelia. “Poetic Narrative in William Morris’s and Edward Burne-Jones’s Pygmalion Project.” Poetry in Pre-Raphaelite Painting, edited by Sophia Andres and Brian Donnelly, Peter Lang, 2018, pp. 107-20.
[1] “The Ovidian text was itself an act of recovery; for as Brooks Otis notes, Ovid's version was actually a recasting of a more sensationalist story in Philostephanus' Kypriaka, an ancient collection of erotic tales” (Rico 285).
[2] Although for a study on Shakespeare’s restoration of the Pygmalion myth, notably in The Taming of the Shrew, Measure for Measure, and The Winter's Tale, see Barbara Roche Rico, “From ‘Speechless Dialect’ to ‘Prosperous Art’: Shakespeare's Recasting of the Pygmalion Image.”