The original derivation of the word Hermione from Hermes…
 

…herm or herma entered English in 1597…in North’s Plutarch…
 

‘By throwing down and mangling of the Herms (to say, the images of Mercury).’ ‘Three Hermes of stone (which are four square pillars) vpon the tops of which they set up heads of Mercurie.’ An important step in freeing herma from inconveniently masculine—not to say phallic—connotations was achieved when in neo-Latin it came to mean simply a statue, not necessarily of Hermes. By the seventeenth century, herma was also used to mean a statue of a saint in a church, for instance one designed to contain relics. The saint could be female. This usage seems to have been confined, for obvious reasons, to Catholic literature.
 

…posts surmounted by the head of Hermes, were later sometimes used as memorials…
 

…a memorial constructed from words instead of stone comes very close to Hermione’s situation…
 

…her marmoreal appearance is an illusion created, maintained, and finally destroyed by Paulina’s manipulation of the poet’s medium: language.