Plato, Pygmalion and my fair lady

In our time, the best known include William S. Gilbert, who wrote about two characters he called Pygmalion and Galatea. With music by his equally famous partner, Arthur Sullivan, his play was the hit of the 1871 London comic opera.

Renowned Irish writer George Bernard Shaw took the idea into the realm of higher art with a work entitled ‘Pygmalion’ for which he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925. Shaw’s work has been successfully performed in numerous West End productions and on Broadway. In 1938, he won the Oscar for his screenplay for the film adaptation titled ‘My Fair Lady’.

One of the earliest versions of the story involves an ancient king of Cyprus who fell in love with a statue of Aphrodite, known to us as the goddess of love. Perhaps this was even the original that set our man Ovid in pursuit of a bestseller tale of immortal romance that conquers common sense. ‘Metamorphosis’ is Ovid’s parable about what is called ‘the Pygmalion effect’.

The theory is that the longer parents and teachers wait for a child, the better that child will perform. In my own childhood experience, I saw the opposite result. The greatest expectations of our father were placed on the shoulders of my older sister. An intelligent girl with excellent powers to memorize data, she finally found that the burden of expectations was too great to bear. Not much was expected of me, so I navigated through life without thinking of failure.

As a child, I first came across the story of the sculptor and statue in picture books of Greek and Roman myths that my parents had never examined too closely. Back then, the only thing that interested me was the color illustration plates. When I was able to read the stories to myself, they opened a window on the oddities of human perceptions. In particular, these ancient stories uncovered the non-event called ‘The battle of the sexes’.

Perhaps due to my random choice of reading, based on which books had the best illustrations, I never managed to get the idea of ​​female inferiority to settle properly in my mind, or in my expectations of the life ahead.

It was no surprise to discover that Plato credited a woman with being Socrates’ teacher. Diotima was a priestess who appears in one of the ‘Dialogues’ in which Plato shows Socrates introducing his method of asking a student questions, rather than simply handing over information.

This method of teaching, drawing from the “students” the wisdom that is already available to them through the exercise of their reason, is called the Socratic method. Plato, like all of us, had a mixture of theories and opinions. One that resonates in the world today is his statement:

• “A state that does not educate and train women is like a man who trains only his right arm.”
• Personally, I have never been able to treat the basic idea of ​​the Pygmalion tale with anything more respectful than a laugh. For me, it raises these wacky questions:
• What happened after Galatea came to life?

What happened when the Body grew old, without any of the compensations of a developed Mind?

Did she and Pygmalion live happily ever after?

Or did he end up strangling her for her doggy devotion to her creator?

Did he hang himself desperately by the emptiness of their conversation?

Did you try again, this time trying to endow your ideal body with an ideal mind?

• GOLD

If Galatea, like Athena, came to life imbued with a clarity of thought to match the perfection of her form, was she disappointed, even disgusted with her human creator?

Did your sense of compassion and gratitude lead you to try to re-educate Pygmalion to a higher plane of thought? It is not probable.

There can be no speech or debate. After all, she was man’s Ideal Woman: mute.

• Was she tempted to use Pygmalion’s own trick and plead with a probable god, Loki, perhaps, to turn him into a pet poodle?

Probably not, because even female goddesses, having been invented by human males, rarely granted women’s prayers.

Also, I doubt that she would seriously consider taking a little revenge for the human mess he had dragged her into. Maybe she became a philosopher and erased the blackboard.

• Or, just maybe, she put the bodysuit on the runway, became the first supermodel ever, and giggled all the way to the bench.