Victoria Pierce -- Pygmalion

   The metamorphosis stories in Ovid might seem strange, almost 
   "random," and occasionally "creepy" 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. 

   The "creepiness" of the idea of someone falling in love with a
   statue he has created is definitely a part of the meanings here,
   but I think you are missing out on other aspects and your reading
   of the Ovid story is too one-sided as a result.  You're too focused
   on the fact that the statue isn't real to start with to allow
   for the fact that maybe Venus does have the power to turn her
   into an actual woman!  Also, I think the Cinyras/Myrrha story is more
   about the difficulty humans have controling sexual desire (see
   discussion of Venus in the next paragraph!) than an indictment 
   of Pygmalion's family.  

   To me, it's more revealing to try to fit this story into the 
   reward/punishment framework.  Venus is the agent of the transformation 
   and we can see the transformation of the statue into a real woman as a 
   hybrid:  *part punishment* and also *part reward* for Pygmalion.  (It's
   definitely rare to see things mixed that way in Ovid!)  Why is it in part 
   a punishment?  Well, Venus was the goddess of female beauty, 
   attraction, sex, fertility, prosperity etc.  She wasn't the goddess
   of the marriage relationship (that was Juno/Hera).  The ancient
   world tended to be much more accepting of prostitution and other 
   institutions designed to give men (and to a much lesser extent, women
   too) ways to express sexuality outside of marriage and Venus 
   was associated with some of that.  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) and the things she has power over 
   (especially sexuality) 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 the statue 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 also gives him the main 
   consequence of that sexual attraction -- a child.  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 somewhat happy life together too, so perhaps she 
   relents somewhat and lets him have some of the rewards as well!

   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.  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!  You say some of this,
   but I think you could have put things together more explicitly.

   Your writing is mostly good here, but there are a few incomplete sentences
   and other slips.  

   Content:  B+
 
   Mechanics:  B+