Galatea

The end of the story is an example of situational irony, which is what happens when an expected outcome is subverted.

When the sculptor created Galatea, he expected her to exist for his personal pleasure and increase his social and professional standing. This was the case early in Galatea’s life, when “people began to talk about the sculptor’s wife, and how strange she was, and how such beauty comes only from the gods […] suddenly they all wanted statues from him” (11). Prior to her escape attempt and subsequent confinement, Galatea’s husband regularly raped and brutalized her, which seems to be what he anticipated from their relationship.

However, when she transforms back into solid stone against his will, she becomes the instrument of his destruction and death rather than of his happiness and wealth. She even points out how she subverted his expectations as she kills him: “I think he expected me to fight and claw. I didn’t fight” (48).

The story makes frequent use of both metaphors and similes. A simile compares one thing to another using “like” or “as”; a metaphor compares one thing to another without “like” or “as.”

Many of the metaphors and similes in Miller’s story compare humans to animals. Early in the narrative, Galatea describes the nurse’s mole with a simile: “Some moles are beautiful and distinctive, like dappling on a horse. But some have hairs in them, and look pulpy like worms and hers was this kind” (2). When Galatea describes the awakening ritual in which her husband makes her take part, she says, “And that’s when I’m supposed to open my eyes like a dewy fawn” (15). Describing her feelings upon finally being allowed to go outside, she says, “I wanted to roll in the grass like a dog” (41). These similes underscore the different types of transformation that take place throughout Ovid’s Metamorphoses, many of which involve humans being turned into animals.

However, Miller’s story also uses figurative language and sensory detail to connect Galatea to the human world: Her hospital room, she says, “smelled sweet and sour at once, as though a thousand suffering people had lain sweating in it” (4). Thus, while Galatea is a figure with the transformative potential of the divine, she still highlights the parts of her that are human.