It didn't surprise me at all that my first-year students have never heard of Pygmalion. I mean, why should they? Is anyone seriously teaching Ovid or George Bernard Shaw in high school these days? I was a little surprised that none of them admitted familiarity with My Fair Lady, but why should twenty-first century college students watch a musical released in 1964? Old news. Nothing to see here.
What surprised me most, though, was that when they encountered a reference to Pygmalion in Tara Westover's Educated, none of them looked it up. It appears at a pivotal moment: a scholarship has enabled the unschooled Tara to study in Cambridge, where she suffers deeply from impostor syndrome and feels her unusual childhood ill suits her for academic life. She doesn't know what to wear, what to read, or what to think, and her mentor, Professor Steinberg, is titillated by her ignorance, seeing her as a blank slate ready to be molded into his idea of a scholar. "It's as if I've stepped into Shaw's Pygmalion," he says, and my students just read on without stopping to wonder what that might mean.
Pygmalion was a dude who fell in love with a statue, I tell them, and I show them some images showing a sculptor crafting a beautiful woman in marble. They are unimpressed--like, why do they need to know this? So I explain: Pygmalion was disgusted by the women available to him, finding some flaw in every single woman he saw, so he set out to make one of his own, crafting the perfect woman from marble and then falling in love with the work of his hands. What can you say about a dude who falls in love with his statue? The word desperate comes to mind--like a twenty-first century guy who can't deal with real women and so creates his own AI-generated sweetheart. But today's Pygmalion has no Aphrodite so moved by the depth of his love that she transforms the statue into a real live girl ready to meet his every need. No word on what Galatea thinks of the deal, but whatever.
My students' eyes glaze over.
Look at the image, I tell them. Who has power here? They look: Pygmalion dominates the scene, making and crafting and designing. Galatea is passive, submissive, silent. Who wants to be that girl?
Here I should probably note that I have only four female students in the class (out of 17), and all but two of the men are athletes, mostly football or basketball players. But that shouldn't make a difference: anyone with a few functioning brain cells ought to be able to look at the representation of Pygmalion and Galatea and understand that the myth envisions the ideal woman as silent, submissive, passive, and designed primarily to serve the needs of men.
But my students don't want to talk about that.
So I turn back to the text: Tara is trying to reinvent herself in an academic environment that will free her from the restrictions of her home back in Idaho, where she was repeatedly (and violently) shoved into certain models of feminine behavior promoted by her church, her community, and her father (who referred to six-year-old girls in tutus as whores because they were showing too much leg). Young Tara hopes academe will free her to become her own person, but the first mentor she encounters at Cambridge takes glee in viewing her as Galatea to his Pygmalion.
Why would Tara Westover compare her mentor to Pygmalion? How free is she in this scene? No one wants to touch the question. No one wants to consider the irony involved in creating an AI-generated image of Pygmalion sculpting Galatea. No one wants to explore who has the power to craft our identities or what sorts of constraints might deter today's students from becoming their best selves.
It's possible that I see myself as playing the part of Pygmalion in my students' lives, trying to craft them into the scholars I hope they are capable of becoming. But even if I admitted this out loud to my students, how many of them would be willing to look up the words?
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