‘Monumental Alabaster’: Sculpture in The Winter’s Tale and When We Dead Awaken

Matthew Taunton

Origin: Static Issue 05
Content: Text

In the Ovidian story, Pygmalion is rewarded for his hatred of women with a perfect wife of his own design; his sculpture, which softens and comes to life under his loving touch, is Woman, pure and untainted, in a world in which, as he perceives it, women are without exception licentious and base. In this essay, I will examine two highly self-reflexive plays which are deeply concerned with the nature and role of art (Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale and Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken) in light of the gender politics of Galatean metamorphosis. The metamorphosis which transforms woman’s representation into her ontology provides a powerful image of birth through which the plays’ thinking about sculpture can be brought into focus. Female fecundity plays an interesting role in both texts, which seem to ask, in different ways, ‘what is the relation of the creation of art to the creation of life?’

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Contributor:

Matthew Taunton is a writer and academic living in London. His disciplinary background is in English Literature, and he completed a BA and then an MA in the subject at UCL before moving to the London Consortium where he is currently working towards his PhD. His research has moved in a multidisciplinary direction, and his thesis is a study of literary and filmic representations of the city, with a focus on the development of mass housing in modern London and Paris. The thesis examines narrative responses to major developments in housing types and tenures in the two cities – from Haussmann’s rebuilding of Paris to the genesis of the London council estate – in order to explore the relation between subject, city and home, and some attendant political and social problems. For the past two years, Matthew has been teaching part time in the English department at UCL.