28 pages • 56 minutes read
Galatea
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Background
Authorial Context: Madeline Miller
Madeline Miller was born in Boston in 1978 and grew up in New York City and Philadelphia. She attended Brown University, receiving both a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in classics, in 2000 and 2001, respectively. She went on to teach Greek, Latin, and Shakespearean literature at the high school level. While still working as a teacher, she began her first novel, The Song of Achilles (2011), which took her 10 years to complete. Upon its publication, The Song of Achilles received widespread acclaim and the UK’s prestigious Orange Prize for Fiction. Miller’s next novel, Circe (2018), was also published to great acclaim. As of 2021, Miller is working on a novel about the goddess Persephone.
Miller’s novels and short stories frequently reconceive well-known classical myths from the perspective of a minor character or a character who does not speak in the original story. The Song of Achilles, for example, reimagines the relationship between legendary warrior Achilles and his best friend and lover, Patroclus, from Patroclus’s point of view. Similarly, Circe takes as its starting point the relationship of Circe and Odysseus as depicted in The Odyssey. The novel explores Circe’s origin story and expands upon her wishes and desires, decentering Odysseus from the narrative. Miller addressed her interest in reimagining classical myths, pointing out that these stories have been told in new and varying ways for millennia, and that is part of the reason they have survived: “There’s no such thing as a definitive myth, nor should there be, because the retelling is what keeps them alive” (de Bertodano, Helena. "Madeline Miller, Author of this Summer’s Must-Read Novel, Circe, on Seeing History Through Women’s Eyes." The Sunday Times, 2018).
Literary Context: Ovid’s Metamorphoses
The original Galatea story can be found in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The poem chronicles the history of the world from its creation until the deification of Julius Caesar. It is made up of 15 books and over 250 individual narratives. While inspired by existing stories, Ovid took artistic license when retelling them, often deviating greatly from his source material.
Scholars have struggled to identify the most accurate generic label for the Metamorphoses. It is acknowledged to have many characteristics of a traditional epic: It is appropriately lengthy, focuses on myth as an elevated literary subject, and is written in dactylic hexameter, the same poetic meter as epics like the Iliad and the Odyssey. However, the text also frequently jumps from one transformation story to another in an arbitrary fashion, which means that it lacks a logical narrative through line; it also does not focus on the great deeds of human heroes, a core component of the traditional epic poem. These deviations have led some scholars to label it an anti-epic or a mock-epic.
Ovid’s text often explores how transformations can be brought about by acts of love or violence. Some of these transformations involve humans turning into animals, plants, or inanimate objects, and some—like the story of Pygmalion and Galatea—involve non-human objects being made human. The text also pays attention to how widespread cultural changes happen over time, dividing its historiography into different segments like “The Golden Age” and “The Silver Age.” While some of its narratives focus more on deities and others more on humans, the Metamorphoses as a whole ultimately inverts the accepted order of these relationships, elevating human passions and making the gods the objects of ridicule and disdain.
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