The Creator’s Curse

[Introduction] Ovid’s “Pygmalion” seems to be the ultimate creator’s success story: Pygmalion’s dream woman, born of his own imagination and made corporeal by his own creativity and ingenuity, comes to life. However, while her physical form may be Pygmalion’s ideal, the questions of whether she will develop her own personality, and whether he will accept it, remain. Jane Austen’s Emma provides one possible answer to this dilemma. The novel uses Emma’s relationship with her friend Harriet to explore how sculpting a person into an idealized vision can ultimately sow dissent between creator and creation.