pygmalion analysis essay

George Bernard Shaw

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Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

Pygmalion: Introduction

Pygmalion: plot summary, pygmalion: detailed summary & analysis, pygmalion: themes, pygmalion: quotes, pygmalion: characters, pygmalion: symbols, pygmalion: literary devices, pygmalion: quizzes, pygmalion: theme wheel, brief biography of george bernard shaw.

Historical Context of Pygmalion

Other books related to pygmalion.

• Full Title: Pygmalion
• When Written: 1912
• Where Written: London
• When Published: 1912
• Literary Period: Victorian period
• Genre: Drama, comedy, comedy of manners
• Setting: London
• Climax: In act four, after winning the bet concerning Eliza, Higgins says he has been bored with his experiment, and treats Eliza poorly. Infuriated, Eliza throws Higgins' slippers at him and argues and fights with him.
• Antagonist: While Eliza and Higgins argue with each other, they both cooperate in order to fool London's high society. The rigid hierarchy of social classes in Victorian England can be seen as the antagonist against which all the characters struggle, as they deal with issues of class and wealth.

Extra Credit for Pygmalion

Double Threat. George Bernard Shaw is the only person to have ever won both the Nobel Prize in Literature and an Oscar. He won the Oscar for his work on a film adaptation of Pygmalion .

Thanks But No Thanks. At first, Shaw declined to accept the Nobel Prize. He later changed his mind, but still refused the prize money, wanting it instead to fund translations of Swedish literature into English.

Introduction to Pygmalion

The play , Pygmalion, was first premiered in 1913 in England. It was written by George Bernard Shaw , a masterpiece based on the Grecian myth of the same name, derived from the myth popular during the Victorian period. George beautifully presents his social assumption of having a status based on the manners and sophistication of accent instead of the hereditary ownership and ethnic nobility. The play was inspired in making various adaptations both on-stage as well as in movies. It was first filmed in 1938 and then as a musical film version released in 1964 under the name My Fair Lady. Both films won applause from the audiences .   

Summary of Pygmalion

The play shows Professor Higgins meeting Colonel Pickering in the Covent Garden during a rainy night . Both are interested in linguistic; the first as a phonetician and the second as an expert of an Indian, especially Sanskrit dialects and language. Both have argument over the issue of the claim of Professor Higgins that he can transform anyone, even a simple flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, into a duchess through her phonetic training. Eliza was just a stranger taken by the men’s argument and becomes a subject of their bet and learning. He takes her with him to Wimpole Street to train her. She also takes some interest, seeing phonetic training to better her career prospects.

Eliza even offers him a small fee but he refuses her due to his idea that he would work on her to transform her personality by changing her accent. Pickering also bets on her that if Higgins succeeds by passing Eliza as a duchess, he would pay him the entire cost of the tuition and upkeep. For Higgins this is all an experiment and never seem to take Eliza’s feelings or emotions into consideration and how much it could hurt her if she found out. Higgins, taking up the challenge, first asks Eliza to change her personality, pruning herself when her father, Alfred, appears and asks Higgins to return his daughter. However, he pays him five-pound to leave his daughter to whom he could not identify in her new clothes and clean personality. Although Higgins was surprised how a father can sell his own daughter for money.

After a few months and a lot of hard work by Eliza, Higgins succeeds in making her speak fluently in the accent spoken by the nobility of England. To evaluate her progress, she is first set in the home of Higgins’ mother to talk to a family of the Eynsford. He wanted to check if Eliza can behave ladylike in the gathering by doing a small talk about the weather. However, Eliza slips into talking about her dead aunt in a suspicious manner and her father’s drinking problem. Everyone was taken aback by these manners of Eliza. When she meets the Eynsford family, Freddy, the son of the family, is impressed with her speaking style and takes her cockney moment as a slip of tongue only.

Although Mrs. Higgins warns her son that this experiment may cause problems to them and he shouldn’t treat her like a ‘live doll’, Higgins and Pickering do not listen to her seriously. In the second test, she is brought to a party where she performs brilliantly. Higgins states that he is relieved that the experiment has come to an end and won the challenge. However, seeing tedium befalling on the duo, Eliza indeed feels hurt ‘at heart’. She, feeling furious at this neglect, throws her slipper at Higgins as he asks her to marry somebody high class, a remark which hurts her the most after which she returns his jewelry. Higgins considers this as an ungrateful gesture.

The next morning when Professor Higgins gets up, he sees Eliza absent. On inquiry, he finds that she has fled. Panicked, he reaches his mother, asking about her whereabouts. Although she was with her and tell her not to come downstairs. Mrs. Higgins speaks to Higgins and Pickering and tells them that she had the right to leave the house and not want to live with him because of the way he has treated her and taunts for playing with the emotions of the girl. Pickering informs them that he had already talked to the police.

Meanwhile, Mr.Doolittle comes to their door, as he chasing Higgins after becoming rich through an inherited property, and that too, on the recommendation of Professor Higgins after he has declared him the most ‘original moralist’ and asks Higgins to teach him to speak proper English since he has to behave a certain way due to the wealth he has acquired. Meanwhile, Elizabeth appears on the scene, thanking Colonel Pickering but rebuking Professor Higgins and she learns that her father has become a rich man and is marrying her stepmother and was invited to the wedding along with others on the scene.

Also, she threatens that she would work with Higgins’s rival, Nepommuck. Also, she tells him that he could’ve been a little more compassionate towards her. He responds to her stating that he is cold to everyone in spite of their class and treats everyone the same regardless of their good or bad manners. Eliza says that if she can’t get kindness from him then at least she needs her freedom. Alongside, she will start teaching phonetics, stealing all his methods. The professor starts showering praise on her for the woman she has become and she is not that silly Flowergirl anymore. The play ends when Eliza leaves the room saying that she will not do his chores anymore and ask him to do himself and Higgins alone in the room, thinking she’ll do as he has asked her.

Major Themes in Pygmalion

• Social Class: As a socialist, Bernard Shah presents the thematic strand of social class and social mobility through the character of Elizabeth Littlewood after Professor Higgins boastfully attempts to teach her phonetics and teach her to speak like a proper lady. He bets with Colonel Pickering that by training her accent, he can move her to another class and pass her as a duchess. This social mobility from the lower class to the upper class shows the role of language as the sophisticated language is associated with the elite class, while the cockney accent is associated with the lower class. Around the time Eliza improves her accent, her father changes his social class, courtesy of the recommendation by Professor Higgins. It shows the class consciousness in that Eliza becomes highly arrogant when she leaves the question of herself open to interpretation.
• Gentility and Manners: Cultured manners is another major theme of the play in that it is considered the major feature of the nobility of Britain of that time. Professor Higgins, as a phonetician, believes that by changing accent and manners, a person moves up in his social circles. However, Colonel Pickering thinks quite differently, the reason that he bets on Eliza, the flower girl, that both of them can experiment on her, who in turn, taunts Higgins for deceiving her at the end, thinking that she might have stayed ignorant of his pride and his arrogance.
• Marriage: Although Bernard Shaw has not touched upon marriage in Pygmalion as the central thematic idea, he has let Liza and Higgins develop a relation to a point where it seems possible that the duo is going to marry. However, its unresolved ending shows that both of them have deeper feelings about each other. Specifically, Eliza is quite hurt at the frivolous attitude of the Professor about her training without having any empathy or sympathy . However, her final departure and spurning of Higgins show that she rather has sound reason not to marry him, a logic held strongly by the middle class of that time against the upper class.
• Language: The play shows Bernard Shaw’s views about the gentry of those times. The play shows that anybody, even a flower girl like Eliza, could join the gentry without much effort. She only requires improving her accent and language. The experiment of Professor Higgins succeeds and Eliza joins the elite class but not without causing shock to Professor himself that she rejects him. It also transpires to the professor that even this mobility with language is not without hiccups as she, sometimes, resorts to her cockney accent.
• Professionalism: Although the play does not stress women’s professionalism, the reversion of Eliza to open a flower shop of her own shows that Bernard Shaw is not averse to the idea of women’s independence, even if they belong to the lower class. That is the very reason that Pickering almost sarcastically comments on her role in the party and the garden that she has done it.
• Gender Solidarity: The play shows the theme of gender solidarity through the mother of Professor Higgins in that, though, her son has brought a flower girl, yet she quickly turns sympathetic to Eliza when she sees that both her son and his friend, Pickering, have made her an object of their experiment. However, the opposite gender is painted as hostile to each other when Higgins first brings her to his mother. Later when she comes to know about her being their subject, she turns against them, showing solidarity with a woman.
• Dreams : The play shows the theme of dreams through Elizabeth in that she dreams of joining the elite class but ends up making a plan for her own shop. She realizes that her dream is not realistic, the reason that she wants to become independent now .
• Identity: The play shows the theme of fixed or flexible identity through Elizabeth. The social identity she has had is fixed in her mind. Although she tries to change it, she soon realizes that she cannot shed off her original identity of being the flower girl. Higgins, too, thinks that identity cannot be changed but by the end of the play it seems that he might have been wrong.

Major Characters in Pygmalion

• E liza: Known as Eliza, Elizabeth Doolittle appears in the first act of the play and goes off stage in the end. It is Eliza through whom Bernard Shaw has highlighted his philosophy of socialism in that a person can move in his social class on the basis of education, language, accent, and behavior. That is why when Professor Higgins, the phonetician, expresses his interest in training this flower girl and helping her in her social mobility, it seems a tangible idea. Although it is pure chance that her father inherits property on the recommendation of Professor Higgins, it becomes clear that it is possible to move up in the social class despite having some issues, though, Eliza wants to be independent through her flower shop as she envisages it by the end. However, she stands against the deception as she rejects Higgins’s further insults, leaving him in dismay by the point the play ends.
• Henry Higgins: A genius and strategic linguist, Higgins knows that accent changes a person’s life, and phonetics plays a significant role in this social mobility. His views contested by his friend, Colonel Pickering, show their application on the flower girl, Elizabeth Doolittle, and prove true to some extent. However, when she spurns him by the end, his notions about equality and social mobility almost get confounded in this ambivalence that Liza shows toward him. Yet, he has done enough to make it possible for Liza to move up in the social hierarchy.
• Colonel Pickering: As an academic and linguist himself, Colonel Pickering, has traveled across the world, shows his intellectualism through his opposition to the notion of Professor Higgins. In fact, he knows that merely linguistic outreach or excellence cannot let the person join the nobility, for it needs social, financial, and family connections. Although he loses his bet to some extent, he also wins when Elizabeth does not consent to the unspoken demand of Professor Higgins. However, he has the courage of his conviction and feels sorry before Eliza for subjecting her to the experiment which is quite contrary to his friend, who does not feel sympathy for her.
• Mrs. Higgins: As the mother of Higgins, she is bound to follow her son about his experiment, the reason that she becomes the host to the Eynsford family when it comes to testing Elizabeth. She, however, becomes almost estranged with her son for subjecting Eliza to experiment in this way. Also, she treats Eliza with love and sympathetically instead of being hostile toward her.
• Alfred Doolittle: Eliza’s father, Alfred Doolittle is engaged in minting money. He Is poor, greedy, and an absent father to Eliza. He even might be abusive and alcoholic. So, Eliza does not trust her father, knowing that he does not care much about her training. He becomes wealthy on the recommendation of Higgins when he calls him an original moralist, which was actually a joke played by the professor.
• Mrs. Pearce: Representing conventional Victorian matriarchy, Mrs. Pearce is the voice of the low strata of the life of that time. Her role becomes critical when she pinpoints the mannerisms of Higgins and also rebukes him for making a person subject to his experiment. She teaches Higgins table manners but also grooms Eliza to guard herself against Higgins.
• Freddy: The son of the Eynsford Hill family, Freddy is a young man with whom Eliza is infatuated in the first act when she adopts a new manner of speaking. He seems a puppet of the matriarchy in his family, the reason that his mother and sister are guiding him.
• Clara: Clara in Pygmalion demonstrates modernity to leave a good impression on others. She also agrees with Higgins and Pickering’s proposition that manners are cultivated and that they do not have anything to do with a moral framework.
• Mrs. Eynsford Hill: Mrs. Eynsford Hill takes part in the experiment taking her son, Freddy, and her daughter, Clara to Mrs. Higgins to test Elizabeth Doolittle whether she has become a duchess after changing her accent. She is a controlling woman and belongs to the upper-class society.

Writing Style of Pygmalion

When it comes to the writing of the plot of Pygmalion, George Bernard Shaw constructed a tightly knit plot, showing all characters appearing at the exact time and place and speaking in their natural style. He has shown through his character, Professor Henry Higgins, that accent and language could change one’s manners and hence class in society. For his characters, the playwright has chosen carefully crafted sentences that are neither too small, nor too short, but suit the occasions. In terms of diction , it is quite informal at times but becomes formal when characters turn to formality. For literary impacts, the author has relied heavily on irony , sarcasm , and metaphors .

Analysis of the Literary Devices in Pygmalion

• Action: The main action of the play comprises the training and experimenting of Eliza Doolittle. The rising action occurs when Eliza goes through a test at the house of Mrs. Higgins and then at a party. The falling action occurs when she rebukes Higgins for bullying.
• Anaphora : The play shows examples of anaphora such as, i. You can spot an Irishman or a Yorkshireman by his brogue . I can place any man within six miles. I can place him within two miles in London . Sometimes within two streets. (Act-I) ii. A woman who utters such depressing and disgusting sounds has no right to be anywhere–no right to live. (Act-I) iii. I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins, because he always treats me as a flower girl, and always will; but I know I can be a lady to you, because you always treat me as a lady, and always will. (Act-III) These examples show the repetitious use of “I can place”, “no right” and “always treats me”, creating impacts on the readers.
• Alliteration : Pygmalion shows the use of alliteration in several places. A few examples are given below, i. The double doors are in the middle of the back hall; and persons entering find in the corner to their right two tall file cabinets at right angles to one another against the walls. (Act-1) ii. If you’re naughty and idle you will sleep in the back kitchen among the black beetles, and be walloped by Mrs. Pearce with a broomstick. (Act-III) iii. At the other side of the room, further forward, is an Elizabethan chair roughly carved in the taste of Inigo Jones. (Act-III) These examples from the play show the use of consonant sounds such as the sound of /d/, /b/, and /f/ occurring successively.
• Allusion : The play shows excellent use of different allusions such as, i. A woman who utters such depressing and disgusting sounds has no right to be anywhere–no right to live. Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech: that your native language is the language of Shakespear and Milton and The Bible; and don’t sit there crooning like a bilious pigeon. (Act-I) ii. Not like Science and Literature and Classical Music and Philosophy and Art. You find me cold, unfeeling, selfish, don’t you? (Act-III) iii. It shook her so violently, that when Mr. H. G. Wells lifted her on the point of his puissant pen, and placed her at the angle of view from which the life she was leading and the society to which she clung appeared in its true relation to real human needs and worthy social structure, he effected a conversion and a conviction of sin comparable to the most sensational feats of General Booth or Gypsy Smith. (Act-III) The first example shows the reference to classical authors Milton and Shakespeare and then to Bible, and the second refers to classical subjects and the last one refers to people.
• Antagonist : There is no main antagonist in the play. Although it seems that Henry Higgins, the professor of phonetics, is the antagonist because he subjects Eliza to his experiment. The early 19th society is the main antagonist as it does not treat people equally or permit them to enjoy social mobility.
• Conflict : The play shows the conflict between Eliza and the society, then between Henry Higgins and Eliza and between Eliza’s father and Higgins.
• Characters: The play, Pygmalion, shows both static as well as dynamic characters. The young girl, Eliza Doolittle, is a dynamic character as she shows a considerable transformation in her behavior and conduct by the end of the play. However, all other characters are static as they do not show or witness any transformation such as Professor Henry Higgins, Colonel Pickering, and Clara.
• Climax : The climax in the play occurs when Eliza Doolittle passes the tests and becomes an important candidate to join the nobility.
• Foreshadowing : The novel shows many instances of foreshadows such as, i. MRS. PEARCE. But what’s to become of her? Is she to be paid anything? Do be sensible, sir. (Act-II) ii. MRS. PEARCE. Will you please keep to the point, Mr. Higgins. I want to know on what terms the girl is to be here. Is she to have any wages? And what is to become of her when you’ve finished your teaching? You must look ahead a little. (Act-II) The use of “what is to become of her” shows the use of foreshadowing about Elizabeth’s future after the queen’s ball.
• Hyperbole : The play shows various examples of hyperboles such as, i. She’s to keep to two subjects: the weather and everybody’s health–Fine day and How do you do, you know–and not to let herself go on things in general. (Act-II) ii. Henry: you are the life and soul of the Royal Society’s soirees; but really you’re rather trying on more commonplace occasions. (Act-II) Both of these examples exaggerate things as both weather and the Royal Society could not be stretched too far.
• Imagery : Pygmalion shows the use of imagery as given in the examples below, i. There! As the girl very properly says, Garn! Married indeed! Don’t you know that a woman of that class looks a worn out drudge of fifty a year after she’s married.. (Act-I) ii. Oh, have I been rude? I didn’t mean to be. He goes to the central window, through which, with his back to the company, he contemplates the river and the flowers in Battersea Park on the opposite bank as if they were a frozen dessert. (Chapter-III) These two examples show images of feelings and sight.
• Irony : It means to use words having intended meanings different from the actual meanings such as, i. If you are not found out, you shall have a present of seven-and sixpence to start life with as a lady in a shop. If you refuse this offer you will be a most ungrateful and wicked girl; and the angels will weep for you. (Act-II) ii. Oh! don’t they? Small talk indeed! What about your large talk? Really, dear, you mustn’t stay. (Act-III) Both of these examples show the use of words in opposite meanings than the actual ones such as weeping of angels and the large talk of Higgins.
• Metaphor : Pygmalion shows good use of various metaphors such as, i. There! As the girl very properly says, Garn! Married indeed! Don’t you know that a woman of that class looks a worn out drudge of fifty a year after she’s married. (Act-I) ii. I tell you I have created this thing out of the squashed cabbage leaves of Covent Garden; and now she pretends to play the fine lady with me. (Act-III) iii. She will relapse into the gutter in three weeks without me at her elbow. (Act-IV) These examples show that several things have been compared directly in the play such as the first shows the comparison between a woman and a drudge, the second shows the girl compared to cabbage and the third shows the same girl again compared to a whore or something dirty.
• Mood : The play, Pygmalion , shows various moods; it starts with a highly humorous and witty mood and ends in an ambiguous and comic mood.
• Monologue : Below is the best example of the monologue given in the play, i. DOOLITTLE: Don’t say that, Governor. Don’t look at it that way. What am I, Governors both? I ask you, what am I? I’m one of the undeserving poor: that’s what I am . Think of what that means to a man. It means that he’s up agen middle class morality all the time. If there’s anything going, and I put in for a bit of it, it’s always the same story : ‘You’re undeserving; so you can’t have it.’ But my needs is as great as the most deserving widow’s that ever got money out of six different charities in one week for the death of the same husband. I don’t need less than a deserving man: I need more. I don’t eat less hearty than him; and I drink a lot more. I want a bit of amusement, cause I’m a thinking man. (Act-II)
• Motif : Most important motifs of, Pygmalion, are flowers, weather, and language.
• Protagonist : Eliza Doolittle is the protagonist of the play. The entire play revolves around her training by Professor Higgins to join the elite social circle.
• Setting : The setting of the play, Pygmalion , is London and the homes of the characters.
• Simile : The play shows perfect use of various similes such as, i. Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech: that your native language is the language of Shakespear and Milton and The Bible; and don’t sit there crooning like a bilious pigeon. (Act-I) ii. You’ve got to learn to behave like a duchess. (Act-III) iii. Oh, well, if you say so, I suppose I don’t always talk like a bishop. (Act-IV) The use of the word “like” shows the comparison between different things such as the person has been compared to a pigeon and then Elizabeth lady to a duchess.

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A Summary and Analysis of the Pygmalion and Galatea Myth

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

The story of Pygmalion and Galatea is well-known: it’s a myth about art, about love, and about the relationship between the artist and his ‘muse’, in some respects. But there are also, as so often with classical myths, a few things we assume we know about this story but, it turns out, don’t really know. Or at any rate, we don’t know the full story.

So let’s delve deeper into the myth of Pygmalion and the statue he sculpted (did he?) and which came alive as the woman named Galatea (was she?) …

Pygmalion and Galatea: plot summary

There are actually two Pygmalions in classical mythology. The first one was a king of Tyre, the son of Mutto and the brother of Elissa. Elissa is better-known to us as Dido, of the Dido and Aeneas love story .

But that Pygmalion is not the famous one. The other Pygmalion was also a king, but a king of Cyprus. Famously, this Pygmalion fell in love with an ivory statue of a woman. In many versions of the myth, Pygmalion was the one who sculpted the statue (though this isn’t always the case in every single account).

Pygmalion went and asked Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, to give him a woman who looked as beautiful as the ivory statue: a real flesh-and-blood woman who looked exactly like the statue he had fallen head over heels for.

When Pygmalion got home, he discovered the statue had come to life. He married the statue-woman and they had a daughter together.

That’s the shorter version of the myth. But such a plot summary can be fleshed out if we turn to Ovid’s Metamorphoses , written much later than the original Greek myths arose, during the heyday of ancient Rome.

In Book 10 of the Metamorphoses , Ovid fleshes out the backstory for Pygmalion: in his account, the king – who was also the sculptor of the statue – was a raging misogynist. But when he sculpted the perfect woman, his misogyny was quickly forgotten and he longed for his creation to become a living, breathing woman.

As in the summary above, Pygmalion went to make offerings to Aphrodite and asked for a woman just like his perfect statue, and when he went back and kissed the statue, it came alive, and the two of them have a child together, a daughter whom Ovid names as Paphos.

Pygmalion and Galatea: analysis

You’ll notice that at no point in the above summary is the name of the statue mentioned. This is because Ovid doesn’t give Pygmalion’s statue a name, nor does the informative and comprehensive The Penguin Dictionary of Classical Mythology (Penguin Dictionary) .

And yet in the popular imagination, Pygmalion gives the statue a name: Galatea. The name of Galatea is found in the earlier Greek myths, given to several different women, but none of them is the statue from the Pygmalion legend. One of them is a maiden who was loved by Polyphemus, the Cyclops from the stories of Odysseus; she didn’t return Polyphemus’ love and when the Cyclops saw Galatea with Acis, her lover, he threw a boulder which killed the hapless man. Galatea turned Acis into a stream which contained sparkling water.

Indeed, according to the twentieth-century classical scholar Meyer Reinhold, it was only in the eighteenth century when Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote a play about the Pygmalion myth that the name Galatea began to be associated with the sculpture. The name is, however, entirely fitting for the ivory statue in the story, because it means ‘she who is milky white’ in ancient Greek (it’s related to words like lactic and galaxy and even, ultimately, latte , all of which mean ‘milk’).

And the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea (if we choose to call her that) is one that is laden with meaning and significance. Quite what that meaning and significance might be, however, is less easy to answer: we somehow feel that the story conveys something truthful about art, about inspiration, about masculine attitudes to femininity and womanhood (and, indeed, to their own desire for women), but reducing the various strands of the Pygmalion myth to a single line – as Aesop-like ‘moral’, if you will – is not at all straightforward.

Does the myth represent the triumph of love over hate, of male desire over male hatred of women? Does erotic desire and love trump misogyny in the case of Pygmalion, perhaps with a bit of help from Aphrodite? Perhaps love does conquer all here.

And yet it’s hardly representative of all male attitudes, given Pygmalion’s special status as a sculptor (at least in many retellings of the myth). Is the story, then, not about love but about art? Pygmalion hates women and can only love one that is, in a sense, a reflection of his own self: a ‘woman’ who is his own creation, and thus speaks, on some level, to his own inward-looking narcissism.

This is obviously a less positive interpretation of the Pygmalion myth, because it suggests that men can only like or love women who are made in the man’s own image, like ordering a bespoke tailor-made suit. Galatea (as she has become known, albeit only relatively recently) isn’t given any agency in the story, and is instead first a dumb statue and then, so far as the narrative goes, an equally dumb flesh-and-blood woman, voiceless and passive.

In this connection, it’s hardly surprising that Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale is one of Shakespeare’s most powerful explorations of misogyny. It’s a play in which Leontes’ wronged wife Hermione returns as a statue (the real Hermione being thought dead by Leontes) only to ‘come alive’ when it’s revealed this is the real Hermione who is not dead at all. The reconciliation of Leontes and the wife he had falsely accused can leave a bitter taste in many readers’ and spectators’ mouths.

Shaw’s play Pygmalion (1913) obviously takes its title from the myth, but Shaw inverts this love story: in Shaw’s Pygmalion a real woman is turned into a statue, a ‘mechanical doll who resembles a duchess’ in the words of the theatre critic Michael Billington. As Shaw makes clear in the epilogue to the play, Eliza makes a carefully considered decision not to marry Professor Higgins, the Pygmalion of the play.

Numerous poets have written about the Pygmalion myth: Robert Graves, who believed strongly in the idea of the female muse inspiring the male artist, wrote two poems about the story. Roy Fuller’s villanelle about Pygmalion and Galatea takes a less happy view: in the poem (not available online, sadly, but Fuller’s New and Collected Poems, 1934-84 is well worth picking up second-hand), Pygmalion voices his regret at making the wish that the statue would come alive.

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by George Bernard Shaw

Pygmalion essay questions.

How does the play deal with the issue of social class? Does Shaw ultimately uphold it or not--is there enough evidence in the play to demonstrate Shaw's point of view? Consider Pickering, for example, who is very much a product of the British hierarchy, and who is one of the most sympathetic characters.

Does the play suggest that true love is possible and good? On the basis of evidence in the text, what are the feelings that Liza has for Higgins and Freddy, and why does Liza marry Freddy?

Does language itself have transformative power, or does its power come entirely through the people who use it? In what sense is Eliza a new person after she learns to speak differently?

The subtitle of the play is "A Romance in Five Acts." Discuss the ways that the play is a romance--or might it more properly be called a tragedy or a comedy?

Is Freddy the perfect match for Eliza? If the story is a romance, is Freddy or Higgins a romantic hero?

How does the knowledge that Shaw was a socialist color one's reading of this play? Consider, for instance, Doolittle's speech on the undeserving poor. Does Shaw sympathize with this "class" of people, or should we view his presentation of each character uniquely?

How does the movement from the public space of Covent Garden to the private spaces of Wimpole Street and Mrs. Higgins's home affect the behavior of the characters? What is the safest space for Eliza?

How does the audience appreciate dramatic irony in the play? For instance, What does it mean when Clara swears using the term "bloody"?

Shaw gives one of the reasons that a marriage between Eliza and Higgins would never work out as that Eliza would have been unable to come between Higgins and his mother, suggesting that such a dynamic is necessary in marriage. Given the events of the last act, does this reason seem accurate?

How does the quotation from Nietzsche that Shaw quotes at the end of the play, "when you go to women, take your whip with you," relate to Eliza's relationship with Higgins? With Pickering? With Freddy?

Pygmalion Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Pygmalion is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

What tensions already show in the relations between the Mother (later named as Mrs. Eynsford Hill), the Daughter (later named as Clara), and the son, Freddy?

It is raining in Covent Garden at 11:15 p.m. Clara complains that Freddy has not found a cab yet. Freddy returns to his mother and sister and explains that there are no cabs to be found. They chide him, and as he runs off to try again to find a...

What does Higgins mean when he says, “teaching would be impossible unless pupils were sacred”?

Higgins is answering Pickering's charge that he cannot be involved in an experiment where the girl (Eliza) is not treated with the utmost respect. Higgins replies that his pupils are sacred, which means regarded with reverence and respect.

explain the myth of pygmalion in what significant ways and with what effect.has shaw transformed that myth into his plav?

This story is about a sculptor who sculpts the most beautiful woman in stone ever and then falls in love with her. The sculptor's name is Pygmalion; the goddess in the myth transforms the stone into a real woman and they live happily ever...

Study Guide for Pygmalion

Pygmalion study guide contains a biography of George Bernard Shaw, literature essays, a complete e-text, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Pygmalion
• Pygmalion Summary
• Character List

Essays for Pygmalion

Pygmalion essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw.

• An Atypical Romance in Five Acts
• Nurture or Nature: The Gentleman Versus the Guttersnipe
• Pygmalion and Pretty Woman
• The Extent Contextual Attitudes and Values Regarding Gender and Class are Maintained or Altered in Pygmalion and Pretty Women
• The didactic purpose of Shaw's 'Pygmalion'

Lesson Plan for Pygmalion

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to Pygmalion
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• Pygmalion Bibliography

E-Text of Pygmalion

The Pygmalion e-text contains the full text of Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw.

• Preface to Pygmalion

Wikipedia Entries for Pygmalion

• Introduction
• Inspiration
• First productions
• Critical reception

Back to: Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw

Pygmalion as Socialist Play

The story shows the characters’ interplay from various classes and positions in society. The hierarchy is represented in the form of upper class like Higgins, a middle class like Freddy, working-class like Mrs.

Pearce and the dependent lower class like the Doolittles. The range of social conditions of people from these different classes in manifested in their accents, language, priorities, and values. In a way, through the grooming of Eliza, the author tries to display a level of mobility in terms of different classes.

Socialism as an ideology accepts the arrangement of people in various classes and explains their interactions and intercourse as well as conflicts. The writer was a well known socialist and tries to present this worldview through the tales of his characters.

Pygmalion as Romance Play

The story of the play is based on realism and depiction of real-life struggles and aspirations. The fixation of society with pretense and superficial appearances is highlighted by the play. The insistence of moral standards and class differences in Victorian England is quite visible in the play. 

The hypocrisy of the rich and the constraints of the poor are contrasted much like the existing inequality even in present-day and age. Romanticism celebrates and narrates such real and pressing issues and thus Pygmalion falls under the same genre.

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Pygmalion Analysis

I chose the archetype The prostitute with a heart of gold. An archetype is defined as a universal idea that can take many forms, appearing spontaneously, at any time, at any place, and without any outside influence (Pygmalions Word Play, Carl Jung, p. 82). When present in the unconscious, an archetype shapes thoughts, feelings, moods, speech, and actions. The prostitute with a heart of gold originated in early Greek mythology as the story of Pygmalion. Next, a more modern version called My Fair Lady was written and performed in the 1950s. Then in the 1980s the movie Pretty

Woman came out, which has the same story line as the other two, although it is a lot more modernized and the theme of a prostitute with a heart of gold is much more evident than in of its predecessors. Although the oldest profession was just as large a factor in society in 1912 when George Bernard Shaws Pygmalion play was released as it is today, it was talked about much less freely and the idea of reforming street girl was not as feasible as it is today. My Fair Lady was one of the first versions of a poor street girl metamorphasizing into an elegant, proper lady.

Pretty Woman can closely trace ts roots back to My Fair Lady, because both women reform to a better life that they never dreamed was possible, the most striking difference being that Pretty Woman is a more modernized version and the evidence of prostitution is much more evident. In the story of Pygmalion, he wanted a wife, yet he saw too much corruption in women and always doubted their true motives. He was a very talented sculptor, and one day he began sculpting an ivory maiden statue.

No woman was physically comparable to this statue, not the most perfect naturally created woman. His art was so good that it caught him in his own web of deceit. Eventually Pygmalion fell in love with this counterfeit creation, full well knowing that he would drive himself mad obsessing over an inanimate object while at the same time knowing that nothing good could come from his love. He caressed her, gave her presents and decorated her body with fine clothing and jewels. He even laid her on his royal bed at night to sleep, calling her his wife.

Finally, the festival of Venus came and Pygmalion stood before the altar and timidly said, Give me, I pray to you for my wife – he dared not say my ivory wife, but said instead – One like my ivory virgin (Metamorphoses by Ovid, p. 10). The golden goddess of Venus knew that he meant he wanted his statue to be his wife, so she granted his wish. When Pygmalion returned home he placed his hands upon his statue, and to his surprise she felt warm and alive! Her lips became soft, and her skin molded to his touch. Nine months later a baby girl was born to them. In this Greek myth Pygmalion creates an ideal woman, made out of ivory.

Although he never expected her to become real he still treated her like his wife and took great care of her. Eventually his wish was granted and she was brought to life. The perfect woman, in his eyes, was now his wife. Pygmalion reated and formed this woman, showing that if you want something bad enough and love it as much as he loved his statue, you can make it happen. In My Fair Lady, written during the era of the 1950s in England, there was a high aristocratic society which demarcates itself from the rest of English society, consisting of the elegantly dressed bourgeois class sharply contrasting the poor peasant class.

Eliza Doolittle, a disheveled cockney flower vender who was lucky enough to catch the eye of a Professor Henry Higgins who gives her an offer she cant refuse. Higgins is a well known phonetic expert who studies … the cience of speech… speech patterns and their corresponding locations… (Pygamalion, p. 19). He brutally criticizes Elizas detestable boo-hooing and crude pronunciations of words. To the snobby, intolerant Higgins inarticulateness and ignorance concerning proper dialect and language produces a verbal class distinction that functions as an external indicator of what class in society you belong to.

He cannot understand why some English men and women do not take the time to learn how to speak proper English. Higgins makes the offer to Eliza to stay with him for six months and he would teach her how to speak articulately nough to pass in the most exclusive social gathering, the Embassy Ball, without anyone being aware of her Cockney origins, which is no small task. He says that she will become a proper aristocratic lady who speaks proper English. Once Eliza and Professor Higgins begin business, they practice the skills and pronunciations of the proper use of English.

Everyday they repeatedly practice Elizas grammar, dialects, and speech patterns with a recording device that enables Eliza to learn from her own mistakes. In just weeks there are dramatic differences in Elizas speech patterns that are apparent by listening to their recording lessons. Not only has her English improved, but her manners and etiquette have improved as well, due to the help of Professor Higgins. Months later, Eliza has been transformed into one of them, a member of the exclusive bourgeois class in England, able to pass at any social event she chooses, which is no easy accomplishment.

Thanks to Professor Higgins, Eliza can mingle with the snobs of the elite class, and no one has any idea where she is originally from. Higgins has not only traversed the phonetic stream, transforming one polar opposite dialect into another, but he has simultaneously developed an affection for his star pupil. Although he denies it to by telling himself that he can live just the same without her, just as he did before, he knows it is just a lie. The six months have passed quickly, and it is time for Eliza to leave.

Eliza is a fresh new woman, and is capable of playing off the aristocratic role, to live a sophisticated and proper life of her own. In fact she won the heart of a fine gentleman, Freddy, and is planning a marriage with him. Higgins is surprised, although he doesnt show it, and continues to act as if he is not bothered at all by this development. In his mind though, hes remembering how accustomed he has grown to her face, that he ill soon miss. The two say their good-byes, and Higgins returns home to find himself listening to the first recordings of Eliza.

Shortly thereafter Eliza returns back to Higgins home and surprises him with the truth of her true feelings for him. She finally admits to herself that she has grown to love both him and his lifestyle, and that Freddy is not her true love. The story of My Fair Lady is similar to Pygmalion because of the similarities between the archetypal characters Professor Higgins and Pygmalion. Professor Higgins has the intelligence and ability to take a poor and uneducated woman with no manners and culpt her into an elegant and sophisticated lady who is able to ascend into the upper echelons of high society from the streets of England seamlessly.

At the same time, Professor Higgins has unknowingly molded Eliza into his ideal woman. On the other hand, although Pygmalion did not actually teach and transform his statue into his ideal woman, his undying hope for an ideal intellectual mate to suit the physical beauty he created brought together divine intervention with divine creation and formed his ideal woman, in his eyes. Again, this is evidence that anything is possible, if you really devote your ind to it.

Although Professor Higgins was rude and snobby, he still held a strong belief in his ideal and it took a lot of devotion to take an unmolded human being and bring qualities out in her that no one ever thought were there. This example gives hope to every little girl who aspires to be something she is not. Although Professor Higgins did bring to the surface the elite qualities that were necessary to fit into society at this time, it was the untapped potential in Eliza which made it possible for her to fit in and have confidence to become something that she wasnt previously.

Higgins clearly lacks the roticism of Ovids Pygmalion, but his distaste for women in lifes gutters, his passion for creation, for an art that conceals its art in carrying a thing of beauty from raw materials, his dressing Eliza in gowns and jewels, and his desire to articulate life and achieve an ideal, all echo Ovids hero. Pygmalions passions finally impregnate his creation; Higgins finally sparks Eliza to give birth to the woman within her (Berst, p. 13).

Elizas growth involves increasing self-realization, an evolution from a lower to a higher state of being, and an important quality that sometimes is not innately there nd must be developed. Pygmalion spent great time and effort in creating his ideal woman. This gives hope to society, especially the lower classes, that one can change and succeed if they just try hard enough. The more advanced and modern version of My Fair Lady was spawned in a film entitled Pretty Woman.

This 1980s film is more blunt than its predecessors because the Higgins character (played by Richard Gere) chooses a prostitute (Julia Roberts) not as someone to try to pass into high society, but as a companion to himself. The movie takes place in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, in a ealthy area in present day, and is not so unlikely a scenario to happen considering the day and age that we live in today. Gere is a rich, cool executive who finds a soft spot for Roberts, who turns out to be a strikingly honest, real and charming woman.

Gere decides to hire her for business and social reasons (as a woman for display) with the agreement that she is treated like a princess for a week. She gets a new wardrobe, goes to the opera, and learns proper etiquette manners for fine dining. We see Higgins plight paralleled in Geres attempt to pass her off as a normal, Beverly Hills debutante. We see Eliza Doolittle represented in Roberts because she decides she wants more from Gere than money. Julia ends up like a fairy tale character, succeeding in passing as well as getting her man, like Eliza Doolittle and similar to Pygmalions statue.

Each woman is transformed into a new identity. My Fair Lady and Pretty Woman are the stories that more young women will be able to take inspiration from and shows once again that its very possible to find true women with hearts of gold. Pretty Woman really shows society that regardless of your living status, class or occupation, all women have the bility to grow, change and succeed buried deep inside. Not all prostitutes or street people are helpless, and meaningless.

They can have genuine hearts as well and sometimes they are truly more honest and real because of the experiences that they have lived through and the challenges they have faced thus far in their lives. In all three stories, both the man and woman can be seen as an archetypal hero. Pygmalion, Professor Higgins and Richard Gere all each take the risk of helping these women, and society could view them negatively for their involvement with the lower class. Eliza and Julia take a big risk in being tepped on and being ridiculed lower than they already are compared to the mens lifestyles.

They are archetypal heroes because they have strong character and are willing to change. These women have the confidence and ability to change and this shows society that again, anything is possible. The only downfall was the verbal abuse both women took from the elite class, as they were learning to adapt. High society doesnt appreciate or care for prostitutes, but for everyone to be fooled and convinced of this new woman shows their absurdity. A person has a heart of gold regardless of their status even if it is not evident to the naked eye.

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Pygmalion Eliza’s Character Analysis

The play Pygmalion is one of Bernard Shaw’s best pieces of art. The play is Shaw’s account of the young flower lady from the ghettos who was trained to talk so appropriately that she was able to be accepted as a duchess at a diplomat’s garden party. The story later became famous as it inspired the film My Fair Lady, a musical drama film adapted from the play. We are introduced to the character Eliza Doolittle, the daughter of Alfred Doolittle as an easy-going young lady. She progresses along with the play, grows in stature, and has outperformed her maker in numerous ways. This paper focuses on the excerpt of the Pygmalion part II in Higgins’ laboratory, where Eliza is portrayed as rebellious, humble, and with a great sense of humor.

Eliza is rebellious, and although the author portrays her as attractively rebellious. The first act of rebellion is seen when Eliza returns to Higgins’ laboratory in his home. Even though Higgins sends her away when he recognizes her after he had sent her away the previous evening, “Why, is this girl I jotted down last night, 428.” Higgins claims that he has already recorded a lot of her type of “Lisson grove Lingo” and was unwilling to spend more time on it. Eliza is rebellious and insists that her proposition will interest Higgins. Secondly, when Higgins asks Eliza to sit down, she rebels bewilderedly, and she has to be asked repeatedly,” sit down, girl. Do as youre told, 429″.

Humble and Modest; Eliza comes out as humble. On hearing that Eliza came in a taxi, Professor Higgins challenges Eliza to ride in many taxis as possible in the future. Professor Higgins tells Eliza that in the end, she will be able to ride in a taxi every day, and he tells him that while she thinks about her future, she should also think about gold, diamonds, and chocolates. Eliza insists that she is a good girl and is not interested in gold and diamonds, “No: I don’t want no gold and no diamonds. I’m a good girl, 432.”

Eliza Doolittle is portrayed as a wellspring of great humor. She entertains us significantly by coming to the place of Professor Higgins and letting his maid know that she wishes to meet with the Professor as her guide to train her in communicating in English. She would pay the Professor his charge for the lessons. She again entertains us while, when asked the amount she proposes to pay, she answers that he ought to be happy with pushing for every illustration. “Now you’re talking, I thought you’d come off it when you saw a chance of getting back a bit of what you chucked at me last night, 429”, she says in a tone of conclusion.

As this paper demonstrates, Eliza is rebellious, humble, and with a great sense of humor. The author brings out Higgins’s personality using his acts. He is “violently interested in everything that can be studied as a scientific project.” This shows that Higgins does not have dignity for humanity and would be very willing to experiment on human beings just like any other specimens. Although, Higgins is forthright and without any ingenuity or vindictiveness. I can’t entirely agree with this imagery used by the author as I believe that despite having a professional relationship like Higgins and Eliza, humanity is vital for its fruition.

Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw, Pages 428-433

Rai, Emmanuel. N.p., 2022. Web. 20 June 2022.

Xiaowei, Z. O. U. “A Study on Feminism of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion.” Studies in Literature and Language 17.3 (2018): 6-9.

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Clear and engaging language, the nature of change, the story of daphne and apollo, the story of pygmalion and galatea, in conclusion.

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A Critic’s Plea for Maximalism: ‘Crack Us Open Like Eggs’

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ALL THINGS ARE TOO SMALL: Essays in Praise of Excess , by Becca Rothfeld

The essays I love favor abundance over economy, performance over persuasion. Zadie Smith’s exemplary “Speaking in Tongues” juggles Barack Obama, Shakespeare, Shaw’s “Pygmalion,” Pauline Kael on Cary Grant, Thomas Macaulay on the Marquess of Halifax and her own “silly posh” speaking voice. Its modest argument, that “flexibility of voice leads to a flexibility in all things,” disappears into the spectacle of a nimble mind reveling in its omnivorous erudition.

The critic Becca Rothfeld’s first collection, “All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess,” is splendidly immodest in its neo-Romantic agenda — to tear down minimalism and puritanism in its many current varieties — but, like Smith, she makes her strongest case in her essays’ very form, a carnival of high-low allusion and analysis. Macaulay, Cary Grant, Obama and a posh accent? Rothfeld will see you and raise you: How about Simone Weil, Aristotle, “Troll 2,” Lionel Trilling, Hadewijch of Brabant (from whom she takes her title), serial killer procedurals, Proust and the Talmud? Not that she neglects Cary Grant; in an essay on love and equality, she filters a smart reading of “His Girl Friday” through the philosopher Stanley Cavell.

Cynthia Ozick (who ought to know) has favorably — and justly — compared Rothfeld to “the legendary New York intellectuals,” though Rothfeld lives in D.C., where she’s the nonfiction book critic for The Washington Post. She’s also an editor at The Point, a contributing editor at The Boston Review, and has published in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, The Atlantic, The Baffler and The British Journal of Aesthetics. Of course she also has a Substack, and she declares on her website — which links to many splendid pieces not collected in this book — that she’s “perhaps delusionally convinced” she’ll eventually finish her Harvard Ph.D. dissertation in philosophy.

The costive and the envious might wonder if she’s spreading herself too thin, but Rothfeld’s rigor and eloquence suggest that in her case, as the title of one essay has it, “More Is More.” That piece begins in dispraise of “professional declutterers” such as Marie Kondo, whose aesthetic amounts to “solipsism spatialized,” and from whose dream houses “evidence of habitation — and, in particular, evidence of the body, with its many leaky indecencies — has been eliminated.”

But it soon morphs into dispraise of minimalist prose and the “impoverished non-novels” of fashionable writers including Jenny Offill, Ottessa Moshfegh and Kate Zambreno, whose “anti-narratives are soothingly tractable, made up of sentences so short that they are often left to complete themselves.”

Rothfeld, by contrast, leaves no phrase unturned. Her maximalist prose abounds in alliteration — “I recommend bingeing to bursting,” she writes, exhorting us to “savor the slivers of salvation hidden in all that hideous hunger” — as well as such old-school locutions as “pray tell” and “cannot but be offensive.” If these mannerisms sit uneasily next to her f-worded celebrations of sexuality, the dissonance is deliberate, and the unease is a matter of principle.

In “Wherever You Go, You Could Leave,” a takedown of “mindfulness,” Rothfeld reports that when she “decided to live” after a suicide attempt in her first year of college, she rejected the soothing blankness of meditation and concluded that “perturbation is a small price to pay for the privilege of a point of view.”

Despite her disdain for “professional opinion-havers” — among them the columnist Christine Emba, lately also of The Washington Post — she doesn’t mind laying down the law. In the book’s longest essay, “Only Mercy: Sex After Consent,” Rothfeld taxes Emba, author of the best-selling “Rethinking Sex,” with an “appalling incomprehension of what good sex is like.”

So, pray tell. “We should choke, crawl, spank, spew, and above all, surrender furiously, until the sheer smack of sex becomes its own profuse excuse for being.” Some sexual encounters, she continues, “crack us open like eggs” and “we should not be willing to live without them.”

We-shoulding is an occupational hazard of opinion-having, but we need take these pronouncements no more — and no less — to heart than Rothfeld’s paradoxical admiration for both the “beatifically stylized” films of Éric Rohmer and the “magnificently demented” oeuvre of David Cronenberg. Do we agree or disagree with her that Sally Rooney’s novels are overpraised, and that Norman Rush’s “Mating” is really “one of the most perfect novels of the past half century”?

More to the point, do we agree that “the aesthetic resides in excess and aimlessness,” and that extravagance is “our human due”? I’d say no to the former and yes to the latter, but who cares? What counts in these essays is the exhilarating ride, not the sometimes-dodgy destination. William Blake wrote that the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom; Rothfeld might say that they’re one and the same. No argument there.

ALL THINGS ARE TOO SMALL : Essays in Praise of Excess | By Becca Rothfeld | Metropolitan Books | 287 pp. | $27.99

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