Connor Mudrick -- Pygmalion

   This is a very good comparison between the Pygmalion story as told by 
   Ovid and the George Bernard Shaw play by the same name. There
   are a few places where you might have dug deeper for meanings in both
   of the stories, and also for connections and differences (see below 
   for some examples).  

   The metamorphosis stories in Ovid might seem strange and almost 
   "random" to us, but when you look at them carefully, it turns out 
   that they (and the myths they are based on) always have a sort of 
   internal logic.  The change almost always comes as either a reward 
   or a punishment for something one of the characters has done, or sometimes 
   for something they are.  In addition, the effector of the metamorphosis 
   is always a god--an agent who has a well-defined and established power 
   to effect the transformation. 

   In the Pygmalion story in Ovid, Venus (not Athena as you say once)
   is the agent of the transformation.  You argue that it's almost
   entirely a reward, but I think it's actually more subtle.  You can 
   see the transformation of the statue into a real woman as a hybrid:
   part *reward* and also part *punishment* for Pygmalion.  It's
   definitely rare to see things mixed that way!  Why is it in part 
   a punishment?  Well, Venus was the goddess of female beauty, 
   attraction, sex, fertility, prosperity etc.  So I think another 
   way to read this myth is that Venus is partly punishing Pygmalion 
   for being so scornful of women (as at the start) -- in effect he's 
   disrespecting her (Venus) with those attitudes too.  When he creates an 
   inanimate replacement for a real woman and falls in love with it,
   he begs Venus to turn her into a real woman.  But it's not clear
   he has any idea what that would really mean. So Venus grants
   his request to teach him a lesson and gives him the main consequence of that
   sexual attraction -- a child.  I think there's more to that than
   simple benevolence (as you say):  It's almost as if she's saying,
   "You say you want a real woman now -- OK, here she is! And by 
   the way, now you have to deal with all the complications of trying 
   to have a real relationship with a female!"  Of course it turns out 
   that Pygmalion and his woman (she's sometimes called Galatea, but
   not in Ovid) seem to have a happy life together
   too, so perhaps she relents somewhat and lets him have some
   of the rewards as well!

   Here are a few comments about specific aspects of the paper:

   You say Pygmalion was "published" by Ovid, which makes it sound as 
   though he originated the story.  However, that myth, like almost
   everything else in the Metamorphoses, was essentially a retelling
   of a myth from earlier sources that Ovid drew on and put his own
   "spin" on.  

   You say Ovid's Pygmalion has a "strange" relationship with the statue
   he creates and that's true from the point of view of normal, everyday
   life.  But of course this is a myth and the story has symbolic meanings
   as well as literal meanings!  The idea is that he has made the statue
   so much like his "ideal woman" that he really falls in love with
   her (or, rather, it).  Something like that can happen to anyone who
   creates something with a deep personal meaning for him or her.   

   You point out some of the parallels and differences between the myth
   and the Shaw play, but I think there is one key difference that you could 
   have done more with.  Namely, Eliza is never a statue -- she's a real human 
   woman from the very start, even before Higgins cleans up her English and 
   her accent.  Higgins' idea that he can transform her into someone who can
   pass as a duchess is an attempt to do almost the *reverse* of the 
   transformation in Ovid -- he wants to turn her from who she is into 
   a perfect, statue-like, image of something he has in his mind (the "science
   experiment").  Of course he fails and ends up alone:  she's an actual 
   person who resents his attempts to make her into something she is not, 
   and he's not a god who can do that sort of thing in the first place!

   Content:  A-
   
   Mechanics:  A-