Womanufacture

Abstract

Women are ‘perceived’. We speak often not just of ‘women’, but of ‘images’, ‘representations’, ‘reflections’ of women. Woman perceived is woman as art-object; and paradigmatic of this phenomenon is the myth of Pygmalion.This article will consider Ovid's version of the myth, the story of the artist who loved his own creation. I shall suggest that the story reflects on the eroto-artistic relationship between the poet and his puella explored in Latin love elegy. The Metamorphoses myth of the art-object which becomes a love-object mirrors the elegiac myth of love-object as art-object. The elegists represent the puella as both art and flesh. Pygmalion deconstructs the erotic realism of elegy and by its frankness about the power of the male artist discloses elegy's operations. It tells us how to read the puella — as a work of art; and the lover — as an artist obsessed with his own creation. Pygmalion reflects and exposes the self-absorption of elegy, the heroization of the lover, and the painted nature of the woman presented in eroto-elegiac texts, that is, the way in which she is to be seen as an art-object.

Classical Myth on Screen

“…11. For the troubling aspects of various forms of desire in Book 10 of the Metamorphoses, see Janan (1988), Sharrock (1991), and James (2011). 12.…”

Plastic accommodations of female agency: Vergil, Horace and Antipater of Thessalonica

“…43 For further, different examles, though from a later period than that of Augustan Rome, see Rosenmeyer 2001. 44 Bömer 1980Sharrock 1991;Elsner 1991 and2007, 113-131;Hardie 2002, 186-193;Salzmann-Mitchell 2008. 45 I would like to thank Rasmus Brandt, Stephen Harrison, Marina Prusac and Greg Wolf for their helpful commentaries on this topic.…”

Signum and self: engraved gemstones and the expression of identity at Herculaneum

“…It was considered a woman's duty to uphold ideals of beauty and cultivation whilst also maintaining appropriate modesty; D'Ambra 2000, 102. For discussion of Roman cultus and the control of women's bodies, see also Sharrock 1991;Wyke 1994, 141;Kleiner, Matheson 1996, 13. 175 She appears often on Roman glyptic as a whole, as on other items of jewellery and female toiletry articles ;Segal 2011, 76;Swift 2017, 181.…”