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Notes -
Just to interject: I’ve never seen either play, but this is a big theme in the original myth as told by Ovid. Notably, the sculptor Pygmalion decides that women are all immoral sluts, essentially, and as such resolves to never take a wife. But he can’t help but fall in love with the statue: he starts to give it gifts, and dress it up, and, well, get intimate with it. By the end, Pygmalion himself transforms from a grumpy man averse to love into a perfect exemplum of the Roman “lover” archetype (the kind of character that Ovid presents in his other love poetry). There’s a neat parallel where the statue’s transformation into a real woman is described with the metaphor of cosmetic wax melting in the sun, which parallels the “fires of love” (the plural Latin word for fire tends to have this connotation) melting the sculptor’s hardened heart. As such, to the extent that any of the modern reimaginings also deal with this theme, they’re exhibiting fidelity to the original intention of Ovid.
(Sorry for the tangent. I just wanted to monologue a bit about this topic.)
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