미적 가치와 여성성의 교착: 피그말리온 신화를 넘어

Abstract

The myth of Pygmalion is a classical instance of male desire to mold femininity into men’s aesthetic ideals. It also illustrates how the creature embodying the male notion of ideal feminine beauty ultimately dismantles the structure of epistemological binarism. Many discursive variations of the Pygmalion myth are found in turn-of-the-century America and Europe, where the commodification of art and women centered around the bourgeois male subject’s conflation of femininity, aesthetic value, and the notion of beauty. I revisit Pygmalion’s story in an attempt to deconstruct layers of gender politics embedded in the myth. A close reading of the myth provides a relevant frame of reference for uncovering Pygmalion’s prototypical impulse for aesthetic idealization of the feminine and also for reconsidering the reinforcement of the cult of feminine beauty in the burgeoning modern consumer culture of the turn-of-the-century. Numerous literary works incorporate the motif of Pygmalion, reflecting the persistence of the myth’s archetypal gender dynamics as well as a perceived necessity for a critical intervention thereof. I turn to Edith Wharton’s tale “The Daunt Diana,” for it redefines the nature of artistic experience by revising power relations traditionally ascribed between the aesthetic/feminine object and the masculine artist/collector. Through its revised Pygmalionic paradigm, Wharton’s story envisions a sexual and aesthetic relationship that resists phallocentric proprietary desire to shape, confine, and control femininity.