Twisting and turning
Your feelings are burning
You’re breaking the girl
She meant you no harm
Think you’re so clever
But now you must sever
You’re breaking the girl
—The Red Hot Chili Peppers

In his Metamorphoses, Ovid is concerned with, among other things, images of woman and the men that love them. Perhaps that is a euphemistic way of saying: Ovid’s book of changes often features women as the victims of men’s desire. Ovid frequently and incisively examines how the desire of men, usually with the help of some divine force, change women, both physically and psychologically. Often, in tales like “Apollo and Daphne” and “Io and Jove,” women are broken in order to be made again, in an image that is more pliable to the desires of men.

In Book X, Ovid relates the story of Pygmalion. Ovid’s narrator here is Orpheus, but more on him in a minute. The story of Pygmalion and Galatea (who is not named in Ovid’s account) is often depicted in narratives since Ovid as a romantic tale of a lonely artist who falls in love with his perfect sculpture of a woman. The gods take pity on him, and turn his “ivory” women into flesh and blood — someone whom he can really love, marry, and live happily ever after with. Ostensibly, Ovid’s narrative is a happy one: the marriage of Pygmalion and Galatea is blessed by the gods with a child, a very real product of a real man and a real woman.

Yet, Ovid’s tales are seldom ever what they seem. Closer examination of “Pygmalian” reveals a more sinister story of misogyny, lust, fetishization, introversion, and sexual oppression. Pygmalion is the first-century equivalent of the loner, the socially ostracized man who resents the culture that marginalized him. Living by himself, he especially despises the women: he considers them whorish and is “disgusted by / the many sins to which the female mind / had been inclined by nature.” For Pygmalion, they are naturally flawed, probably because they want nothing to do with him, and by shunning him, they emasculate him. So, in what could probably be described as his skeevy little studio, he carves his idea of the perfect woman out of “ivory” — creating the perfection that does not exist in nature. His simulacrum is naked, of course, but he adorns it with shells and and ribbons, and rests the statue on his bed, between the covers, talks to it, kisses it. What a scene.

Pygmalion falls in love with his statue, so much so, he prays to Venus “if you can indeed grant all things, / then let me have the wife I want . . . / one like my ivory girl.” What follows is a grotesque fumbling and groping and poking and prodding of a now “more pliant” statue turned flesh and blood. He rejoices and continues in his lusty explorations while

She seeks “light,” perhaps an understanding of her situation beyond the rapacious form of Pygmalion towering over her. She becomes pregnant immediately. Pygmalion probably decides that he must impose his order on her, at least before she meets the emasculating women of Cyprus and is influenced by their natural propensities. So, in order for the Pygmalion creature to regain his manhood stolen by the these women, he must break their hold on him by making his own girl whom he can master.

Almost two millennia later, Edgar Allan Poe’s own Pygmalion figure, the narrator of “Ligeia,” attempts to assert his will over the nature of the story’s two women, the eponymous Ligeia and Rowena Trevanion of Tremaine. Yet, Poe’s narrator is, in a sense, an anti-Pygmalion figure, one who tries to control ostensibly through love (or lust) and hate, both of which he feels intensely — passionately. Like Pygmalion, Poe’s narrator is moody and introverted, prone to a fierce temper that his wife dreaded. He is also an opium addict, who “loathed [his wife] with a hatred belonging more to demon than to man” (1382). After the death of his beloved Ligeia, the narrator marries Rowena, but longs to be reunited with the former, calling on her and hoping to “restore the departed Ligeia to the pathways she had abandoned upon the earth” (1382).

The narrator’s will (desire, lust, passion) is so strong, that it seems to have a role in defeating nature. Yet, instead of just praying to Venus to have his love restored to him, he seems to sacrifice Rowena on the alter of his desire. She has bouts of illness and increasing irritability, like she’s becoming frightened of her husband; and who could blame her really: they live in the English countryside is an old gothic cathedral that seems to have a life of its own — an appropriate place for this horror story. Perhaps she realizes that the narrator is poisoning her wine, but becomes too weak to do anything about it. She eventually succumbs to the poison, or her illness, and dies as the narrator looks on. As the narrator watches, the corpse seems to move; this happens three times until it finally rises from its “bed of ebony.” To the narrator’s eyes, his dead wife Rowena seems to have risen from the dead as Ligeia.

Like “Pygmalion,” “Ligeia” has the inanimate become animate with the help of some external, divine power. Poe’s narrator, like Pygmalion, passionately longs for his vision of perfection to become flesh. His obsession with the dead Ligeia becomes an oppressive and violent force that literally kills Rowena — sacrificing her in lieu of the narrator’s vision of womanly perfection: Ligeia. The imperfect Rowena must be broken and recast in a form that our narrator sculpted from his own desire. “Ligeia,” a form that only now lives in the narrator’s mind, one that he has elevated above all other women, has replaced Rowena, literally and figuratively sacrificing her autonomous personality for the narrator’s oppressive desires.

Interestingly, too, Poe calls Rowena his “wife,” but his relationship with Ligeia remains ambiguous. In fact, he seems to have doubts as to whether or not Ligeia even loved him. He alludes, too, to her passion, intelligence, and will as a match for his own. He fixates on her eyes: he says that they “delighted and appalled” him. Perhaps they both reflect his desire for her and her defiance of him, so much so, that in order to possess her completely, our narrator comes to the conclusion: “I saw that she must die” (1380). These textual clues imply that Poe’s narrator kills Ligeia just as he later kills Rowena: if he cannot sculpt them into his vision of what a woman should be, then, as much as it might pain him, they would have to die. Ligeia’s return at the story’s end could be interpreted as her vampiric will defeating death, or psychologically as a manifestation of the narrator’s guilt and remorse as the ghastly form of Ligeia.

Stanislaw Lem’s 1961 novel Solaris, brings our Pygmalion story into space and gives us a science fiction (or perhaps a postcolonial) vocabulary with which to discuss it. In Lem’s novel, Kris Kelvin travels to the planet Solaris to find out what has happened to the crew — particularly why his friend Gibarian killed himself — while they were studying this seemingly alien oceanic intelligence. Similar to Moby Dick, Solaris has a fairly simple plot interspersed with expository chapters about the history of “Solaristics”: the decades of academic studies about the enigmatic Solaris. Solaristics encompasses science, physics, philosophy, religion — any human intellectual attempt to figure out a world that is utterly alien. Kelvin is both a Solaricist and a psychologist, so he seems an appropriate person to send in order to help the crew.

Kelvin soon finds what’s troubling the denizens of Solaris Station: they have been getting “visitors” ever since they began bombarding the planet with x-rays. These visitors remain a mystery to Kelvin until he falls asleep his first night on the station and awakens to find his own: his dead wife Rheya has ostensibly appeared out of thin air. I’m reminded of Ligeia coming back from the dead; Kelvin is initially shocked, but quickly becomes enamoured with and grows to love the Rheya-visitor.

She seems to have an irrational attachment to Kelvin, getting violently anxious if he tries to leave her. Kelvin eventually consults the other two scientists on the station, Snow and Sartorius, and they explain that the visitors seem to represent some sort of “psychic trauma” made manifest by Solaris. It’s as if the ocean probed their brains and made flesh that which is connected with primal feelings like trauma, passion, or desire — at least in Kelvin.

Rheya, Kelvin’s real wife, had killed herself years earlier when he left her after an argument. He dismissed her threat of suicide, but he is devastated when she actually does, carrying the guilt of his inaction with him to Solaris. The Rheya-visitor simultaneously represents his love for his dead wife and the guilt he has over her death. The intelligence that the men call Solaris has made the Rheya-visitor out of Kelvin’s memory of her, so his attachment to her is even more understandable: she is like the statue of Pygmalion, created out of the head of Kelvin and animated by some external force. The Rheya-visitor is even more perfect for Kelvin than the original ever was.

Yet, this Rheya simulacrum also has the flaws of the original, magnified by Kelvin’s psychic residue. The Rheya-visitor tries to kill herself several times, but is always resurrected by Solaris until the scientists develop a machine that disrupts their ability to return. The Rheya-visitor takes this opportunity to end her life for good, despite Kelvin’s multiple and emphatic pleas of his need and love for her. The irony is that the Rheya-visitor is created from his own memories of Rheya, but he ultimately remains ineffectual in his attempts to control her.

A recurrent theme in Solaris is first uttered by Snow, one of the resident scientists on Solaris station, when talking with Kelvin. Snow claims that humans explore the galaxy not to find the new, but because they “need mirrors” of themselves (72). Humans do not explore to find the new, but to impose the familiar: we are like immature, mad gods who attempt to create the universe in our own image. Lem seems to suggest that even our attempts at science, philosophy, and religion are ultimately to glorify our own presence in the universe, not about seeing the different. Solaris is about the impossibility of knowing the other. We make tenuous connections, but relationships seem to become battles of will: where one person’s will dominates and breaks (writes, determines) the other’s. So often, men assert their primacy through dominate ideologies, breaking the girl in order to remake her in an image of subordination and a reflection of the desires of men.

Unlike Ovid’s “Pygmalion,” Poe’s and Lem’s revisionings seem to carry with them more sinister implications. Both protagonists are haunted by the images of women they created, and neither seems to have the ability nor the will to escape. In a sense, they also become victims of their own desires. Granted, the women suffer more from these visions than the men, but the vision enslaves both.

Perhaps the latter two examples can again be linked with Ovid’s “Pygmalion” through its narrator Orpheus. Orpheus was the consummate musician: his music so lovely that it charmed death himself. After his wife, Eurydice, was killed by a serpent, Orpheus travelled to the Underworld to get her back. Hades and Persephone were so taken by his plea, they allowed Eurydice to return to the land of the living on the condition that he not look back as they make their way to the surface. He does — anxious that Eurydice might not be following — and she is snatched back into Hell. Ovid seems to comment ironically on love:ﾠ

Indeed, the Metamorphoses again reasserts what might be its central theme: the major cause of women’s suffering is the love of men. After losing Eurydice again, Orpheus becomes misogynistic, singing tales of women who do not follow the lead of men, like the women of Cyrus that Pygmalion so despised. Ironically, Orpheus sees the nature of women as the problem, not the men who try to break them.

One of my other Flickr buddies Jim sent me a recent Newsweek article, also about Palin and the GOP’s surprising support of her. Quindlen writes that the “conservatives have probably used the word ‘sexist’ more in the past week than they have in the past 50 years” in support of Palin. However, it’s a bunch of crap.

This would all have been entertaining if it were not such rank hypocrisy. These are people who have inveighed against affirmative action, a version of which undoubtedly played a part in this selection. These are people who inveighed against personal attacks on their new nominee when the wingnuts of their own party elevated such attacks to a fine art by accusing Hillary Rodham Clinton of fictitious misdeeds ranging from treason to murder. To try to suggest Sarah Palin might garner the Hillary Clinton vote, that one woman is just the same as another, that biology trumps ideology, is the ultimate evidence of true sexism, and I hope Senator Clinton will travel the country and say so.

One might also suggest that the GOP still wishes to roll back the clock, but as Quinlen goes on to say “expediency is an astonishing thing.” Again, I state: the irony. Be sure you read the whole article; it’s worth it.

Ophelia is the beautified victim of a system that is flawed, yet still holds sway. I’m reminded of those women that oppose abortion rights — battling to grant others the control of their bodies. Or Mary Cheney, a full supporter of a father that tells her she does not deserve the same rights as normal people by supporting the Bush administration. Or the millions of women that go under the knife to change their bodies for a culture’s conception of the beautiful, the desirable. Women caught between the displeased father, the obdurate brother, and the demanding husband, the Wife of Bath, Edna Pontellier, Emma Bovary, Medea, Ephigenia, Penelope, Sister Carrie, Daisy Miller, Daisy Buchanan, Brett Ashley, Lavania, Lucrece, Daphne, Io, Dido, Virginia Woolf, Kate Chopin, Emily Dickinson, Silvia Plath — fact or fiction does not matter in seeing the devastation wrought on women. When will it end?

I’m thinking of these Ophelias today, for some reason.

Rich says that it is exciting to be alive at a time of “awakening consciousness” when women are starting to question the myths about them in the canon of the past. She says that re-vision is an “act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction.” This is more than just a new outlook but an act of survival “not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us.”

This act of revision is stated very clearly in “Diving Into the Wreck.” The woman-diver-poet has come to the scene of the wreck with her book of myths to view for herself “the wreck and not the story of the wreck/the thing itself and not the myth.” Rich is looking into the past, before patriarchal control, and creating her own reality in an androgynous being that is capable of strength and love. This new myth sets the stage for the ultimate truth and understanding without the dichotomy of male and female. Only together can they understand the mistakes of the past and re-write history that can include the names of women in their proper places and perspectives.

As Rich grew as a poet she started seeing herself in a different way. Her earlier poetry was defined by the craft she learned from the men she had studied. As she examined this earlier work she began to see an obvious maturing and was

startled because beneath the conscious craft are glimpses of the split I even then experienced between the girl who wrote poems, who defined herself in writing poems, and the girl who was to define herself by her relationships with men. (2050)

Rich goes on to discuss her life and how it was defined in the patriarchal society. There was a conflict between her relationship with her family and her poetry. Her final answer to her conflict was freedom and that “to be a female human being trying to fulfill traditional female functions in a traditional way is in direct conflict with the subversive function of the imagination.” Rich stresses the word traditional as it is defined by the patriarchal society and she believes in the need to unify the “energy of creation” with the “energy of relation.” She needed to think for herself and come up with her own understanding and conclusions that are unaffected by society.

In the poem “Myth,” Muriel Rukeyser examines the patriarchal society in the Oedipus plays of Sophocles. Oedipus is himself a victim of a society that he helped to create. Communication, or lack of, is the problem in this instance where Oedipus believed that “man” was an all-encompassing word for all of humanity. This myth, which he helped to create, brought his tragic degradation. The dichotomy that man created between men and women, separating the aspects of each, has ironically wrought doom upon Oedipus.

Margaret Atwood takes a strong position against the patriarchal society in her poem “Circe/Mud Poems.” Communication and the relationships between men and women are her motifs and focuses. She metaphorically shows the victims of society who refuse to conform to tradition as having their limbs ripped and cut from their bodies. They are the “silent ones” who refuse tradition and the mythical roles placed on them by society. Atwood has stripped away the faÁade of society to get down to reality, even if it is not pretty. “Around me everything is worn down, the grass,/the roots, the soil, nothing is left but the bared rock,” the rock of truth and reality that cannot be hurt or influenced by society. Atwood also elaborates on the image of women as it is literally created by men. This “perfect” woman was just the torso and sexual organs of a woman; a woman who could not think or argue but only perform sexually for her creators. Circe says

Is this what you would like me to be, this
mudwoman? Is
this what I would like to be? It would be so
simple.

It would be simple, but unfulfilling — existing, but not living. Circe is eventually left by Odysseus in the myth. In effect, by Odysseus visiting her island he created her, and by leaving he destroyed her. Is this true, Atwood questions, would life cease to exist for Circe, or does it become unimportant and trivial now that the men have left?

Rich compares the contemporary woman’s verse to a blues song: “a cry of pain, of victimization, or a lyric of seduction.” She states that of womens’ poetry today is full of anger for these very reasons that are “everywhere in the environment, built into society, language, the structures of thought.” The anger has justification and seems to be a method of uniting women to take a look at the past and re-define love, and re-write what it means to be a woman.