This time it's personal
Madeline Miller's Galatea, a short story first published in 2013 and now available in a slim 60-page stand-alone edition, begins with an intriguing question: What if Ovid's Pygmalion was the first “incel?” It's a provocative premise. Definitionally, the term “incel” — a portmanteau of the words “involuntary” and “celibate” — doesn't include Pygmalion, whose celibacy is self-imposed out of disgust for “the myriad faults that nature gave women's minds.”
In Ovid's telling, Pygmalion is a gifted sculptor whose encounters with sex workers leave him so disgusted that he forgoes female companionship. Instead he carves a woman out of ivory and quickly falls in love with it, ultimately praying to the goddess Aphrodite to bring his sculpture to life. The goddess hears his plea, the statue comes to life, and the two marry and have a child for whom the city Paphos is named. They presumably all live happily ever after.
A classics scholar, Miller has long been comfortable wedding modern concepts of identity to ancient stories in ways that make them feel new. Galatea begins with its lead character in repose. She's not asleep, waiting to be awakened by her lover, but relegated to a hospital after attempting to escape her husband, Pygmalion, who goes unnamed in this story, just as Galatea does in Ovid's original.
Miller's Galatea is as matter of fact as the stone she came from. She is keenly aware of the motivations of those around her. She spends much of her time indulging her husband's fantasies. She must be careful to hold herself “just the way he likes, or it ruins everything.” But her guilelessness doesn't mark her as an ingenue. She's equal parts perceptive and playful, brave and calculating.
She is everything her husband resents in women, and the story of their marriage will come as a surprise only to those who saw romance in Pygmalion's devotion to his stony creation rather a cautionary tale of what happens when women don't live up to the delusions of men. Fans of Miller will find Galatea a captivating, if brief, return to the worlds that she so richly conjures.
They also might find Galatea to be her most personal work. We see more of Miller's disposition take shape; we see her reaction to and interpretation of the male-centred narratives that her work springs from and pushes against.
But the responsive nature of Galatea doesn't stop at the story. Miller has always enjoyed critical acclaim, winning the 2012 Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles. But it was almost a decade later that the novel started selling more than 10,000 copies a week, a phenomenon that shocked Miller and her publishers but not the denizens of Booktok, who by that point were used to running the New York Times bestsellers list.
Miller may be one of Booktok's biggest beneficiaries, along with Sarah J. Maas and, most recently, Colleen Hoover. The top two Song of Achilles hashtags on Tiktok have a combined 432 million views. The Madeline Miller hashtag has more than 70 million.