Pygmalion Effect and the Strong Women Who Prove it Wrong

Make this fair statue mine…Give me the likeness of my iv'ry maid (Ovid).

In Metamorphoses X, Ovid's Pygmalion prays that his idealized statue will become real. Strong female characters were a threat to Victorian sensibilities. Like the Pygmalion character in Ovid's Metamorphoses X, males in the Victorian age created ivory-like stereotypes of the ideal woman. In late nineteenth and in early twentieth century literature, Victorian culture was frequently lampooned or criticized by creating ivory-maiden characters that broke or flouted the stereotype in various ways in order to deal with the insane male dominated reality.

Like the statue in the original Pygmalion, women have to deal with the stereotypical images dictated by the male society. In all three of our works Riders to the Sea by J.M. Synge (Maurya), Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw (Eliza) and Trifles by Susan Glaspell (Minnie),...
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