Galatea

Content Warning: This portion of the guide refers to scenes involving rape.

Galatea is the narrator and protagonist of the story. While her name is never explicitly acknowledged to be “Galatea,” this can be inferred by the story’s title and the long post-classical literary history in which this figure is named Galatea. She tells the story from a first-person point of view, providing a number of personal details about her current life, her past, and her feelings about the world around her.

Galatea provides few details about how she looks, but she describes herself as “pale” and “slow and fat from a year of lying in bed” (47). She exposes her breasts to her husband to gain favor with him because “[they] were very fine, he made sure of that” (20). Because her husband sculpted her in an attempt to create a perfect woman, it can be inferred that she is beautiful; however, she draws attention to how she has changed over time in ways that human women also change. For example, she has stretch marks from when she was pregnant with Paphos.

It is never entirely clear to what extent Galatea is literally made of stone and to what extent she is a flesh-and-blood woman: Until the last few pages, the story seems to suggest, somewhat fantastically, she is a little of both.