28 pages • 56 minutes read
Galatea
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Symbols & Motifs
The Sea
The hospital where Galatea is confined is located on a cliff overlooking an unidentified sea. This body of water plays a crucial role in the story’s climax, and also has significant symbolic resonance. Throughout classical mythology, including in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, bodies of water represent change, flux, and transformation.
At the end of “Galatea,” Galatea makes intentional use of the sea to not only kill her husband but to transform herself back into solid stone, and thus liberate herself from her imprisonment. She describes this change in vague terms, saying only that “[it] crept up my fingers and my arms,” and “it was in my legs too, and my belly and my chest” (49). While she does not define “it,” the text suggests “it” is a gift from a deity, given after Galatea prays. Thus, the sea is simultaneously benevolent and violent, generous and cruel: It grants freedom to Galatea but only by taking her husband’s life. In this sense, it symbolizes the interconnected nature of creation and destruction, eroticism and violence, apparent throughout the story.
Reproduction
Reproduction is an important motif throughout “Galatea.” It serves dual purposes: to clarify what the text is saying about acts of artistic creation, and to draw attention to maternity and motherhood. The story contrasts the sculptor’s perception of reproduction with Galatea’s: The sculptor’s acts of creation are motivated only by self-interest, but for Galatea, reproduction—even the pregnancy that she fakes—is an act of sacrifice motivated by love.
Galatea believes that when her husband created her and the goddess endowed her with life, her husband wanted her to be human but silent, “real” but completely obedient, and thus easy to control and dominate. When Galatea does not turn out this way, the sculptor becomes increasingly disillusioned with her and attempts to recreate this ideal, silent object of sexual gratification in his new statue. Galatea, however, embraces the pain that accompanied her pregnancy and Paphos’s birth, and ultimately gives up her life to save her child.
In the end, the sculptor’s view of reproduction is a fantastical one disconnected from the actual world. In contrast, Galatea’s vision of it is rooted in the reality of emotional, psychological, and physical relationships, as messy as they may be.
Tea
The doctor and nurse repeatedly make Galatea drink a mysterious tea in order to keep her still and silent; Galatea despises this to such a degree that she has identified ways of behaving and communicating that help her avoid it. Tea, often associated in literature with the comforts of home, is thus transformed into a weapon that robs Galatea of self-expression and self-control. Rather than embracing something nourishing and safe, she is forced to actively resist in order to maintain her dignity and autonomy.
Early in the story, she describes it in detail: “The tea is the thing they give me when I won’t lie back, and I hate it, for they sit beside me until I drink it all, and then my head aches and my tongue hurts and I piss the bed” (8). Later, when she pretends to be pregnant, the doctor arrives with “a different kind of tea” and tells her she must drink it to cause a miscarriage, which she eventually does before running away (39). While this particular tea does nothing to her because she is not actually pregnant, it functions similarly to the kind of tea given to Galatea earlier in the story: It is a way for the uncaring medical establishment to control her body and dictate her future.
Tea is divorced from its traditional association with domesticity and transformed into something brutal and frightening. In this way, the story speaks to larger concerns about the blurring of boundaries between the public and private spheres, as well as anxieties about gendered acts of consumption and violence.
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