“Galatification” of Woman: An Example of Literary Neologism as a Patriarchal Attitude to Woman

Throughout the centuries of patriarchal society, women have been shaped, identified and educated from a male perspective under male domination. However, in the 20th century, women began to challenge this perspective and seek their own identities. New words were introduced into literature to replace many discriminatory and degrading concepts and definitions of patriarchy against women. To introduce a new term to literature on gender, this study focuses on the derivation of a new word through neologism based on the unnamed female statue in “Pygmalion”, the well-known story of Ovid. Based on the name “Galatea” given to the female statue in the following centuries, the word “Galatification” was derived as a noun denoting the education, shaping and identification of a woman by her husband or father, making her acceptable to that man. The word was produced in accordance with the linguistic structure of English with suffixes and was presented as a verb meaning “to Galatify” and as a noun meaning “Galatification”. Furthermore, this concept, developed upon Ovid’s story, was explained practically in William Shakespeare’s famous comedy The Taming of the Shrew, written in the 1590s, through the taming of the female character Katherine by the male character Petruchio. Shakespeare used the verb “tame” in the title as a demeaning expression to imply that a woman is made acceptable to a man through transformation from a wild animal into a domestic animal. Here, Shakespeare’s character Petruchio replaces Pygmalion in Ovid, and both men sculpt and shape the woman who will enter their lives like a kind of statue, and this action can be expressed as the “Galatification of woman”.