The Dialectic of the Pygmalion Myth in the Age of Modernity

Abstract

The thesis of this dissertation is that the versions of the Pygmalion myth in Ovid, Boureau-Deslandes, Rousseau, Gilbert, Shaw, and Brant are attempts at demythologization, which are paradoxically destined to introduce their own mythology. The Pygmalion myth is reality for protagonists in these works, but even for them it attains a controversial status of both an illusion and a miracle. Given that myths are refuted as illusions, and new myths inevitably installed in their place, only the balance of knowing and not-knowing provides the possibility of critically assessing the process of enlightenment, endangered by the triumph of unreflective reason. Opening up the myth, the modern authors imbue it with the inherent features of modernity: ambivalence and uncertainty.