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Narrative Messages Part 2

It is an arrogant presumption to think of oneself as the creator of another human being, as readers learn from Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein, if not from the myth of Pygmalion. If that other person is a woman, her creation by a man is sexist and chauvinistic as well as presumptuous. The students-or some of them-realize this: "Some of the coed students in Professor Higgins' Sculpture 101 class regard him as a sexist or, as Amanda Blake describes him, as if she were living back in the sixties, 'a male sexist pig.'" However, Natalie Mann, the story's protagonist, regards Amanda's views as extreme and, possibly, inspired by her latent lesbianism: "As a woman myself, who is, if I may say so without being labeled narcissistic, a true beauty, I resent feminists' arrogant assumption that anyone who has a cunt between her legs is, ipso facto, going to agree with women libbers' extremist views regarding men, sexism, the dreaded Patriarchy. . . . In my opinion, if anyone's sexist, anymore, it's the lesbo feminists." She decides to "stick it to Amanda" by creating "The Perfect Woman" and naming her "Galatea."

In presenting their work to the rest of the class, each student "must provide a brief oral report as to how and why we chose to create our particular versions of the ideal woman," and Natalie says that her account of her own work will include both a summary of the Pygmalion myth and a reference to psychologists' belief that "the story is an imaginative depiction of the consequences of narcissism, for, rather than falling in love with an actual woman, Pygmalion succumbs to the charms of an artificial woman-an image of the ideal woman he has made himself. Galatea, in the final analysis, they argue, is a "man-made woman" and, as such, she is a depiction of her creator's anima, the 'woman within.'"

Although Pygmalion had modeled his Galatea on Aphrodite, Natalie models her version upon herself, and it is anatomically complete in every detail, as her astonished fellow students discover when she unveils it to them: "In every detail, I'd obviously been the model.

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