George Bernard Shaw 's Pygmalion

HIGGINS [with the look of confusion on his face]: Fine thank you, Eliza we need to…

Eyes have guided mankind throughout all history, whether they allowed us to foresee danger or helped us find our loved ones. They have granted us sight over what would otherwise be invisible to us. When looking at someone, one can tell how they are feeling by staring into his or her eyes. Our eyes never lie. Our eyes will often mirror our souls and display our true inner emotions. In Elie Wiesel’s autobiographical narrative, Night, he uses the eye motif to portray characters’ true souls.

George Bernard’s Pygmalion portrays women as objects that can be molded to whatever man’s desires are. Eliza, a young poor woman is used as an experiment by Henry Higgins. Higgins was challenged by his friend Colonel Pickering to transform Eliza into a duchess. Feeling challenged Higgins gladly accepted. Both Frankenstein and Pygmalion are prime examples of the notion that women are incapable of leading their own lives; on the other hand men are depicted as god-like creatures.

“Writers consistently use novels as a lens through which they scrutinise society.” To what extent do you agree with this view?

Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw is a play that shows a great change in the character Eliza Doolittle. As Eliza lives in poverty, she sells flowers to earn her living. Eliza does not have an education. This shows through the way that she does not have the most proper way of speaking. This happens through when Eliza is speaking to the other characters when she meets then when she is still at a low level of poverty in her life. To understand the reasons Eliza is able to change and be changed into an almost Cinderella like character. With Eliza going from and growing and changing through the hardship she faces. In the play Eliza begins with no confidence and works towards having a way to reach trough from learning during her life

One’s class would be one the greatest stereotypical perceptions pertaining to language and groups. In Shaw’s Pygmalion, the storyline starts with a horrible storm. This storm forces classes of all types to crowd together out to seek shelter. Ideally, the higher class would not be caught associating with the lower class. However, a mother sees Eliza talking with her son, Freddy, and immediately goes to investigate. As a mother of that time, it is believed that Freddy should not associate himself with someone like Eliza. Eliza Doolitttle is roughly eighteen years of age, speaks what is called ‘gutter language’, and she sells flowers illegally. Appearance and actions “…reveal speakers’ memberships in particular speech communities, social classes, ethnic and national groups” (Edwards, 21). Due to her obvious state of being lower class, a stereotype is immediately placed on her.

I believe that James Shaw is a hero in our society. I believe this because he made an act of honor. Even though there was a man that was shooting, he decided to help the man out because he was hurt. James Shaw have a family and he never want to lose his family, but he believed that helping others is good and is better than seeing someone die. Being able to help someone is courageous and a generous act. James Shaw could have let the man die or help save the man and he chose to the man out. James Shaw is someone that deserves respect and that will always have respect due to his actions of honor.

This sudden change in character shows that an upgrade in social class not only changes the way that people look at you but that it can also have many benefits as well. Going against the thesis, there is one character, Colonial Pickering. Colonial Pickering is a friend and a safe haven to Miss Doolittle. She trusts him, and with good reason, from the beginning to the end of the play, he treats her the same, like a lady. ?Colonial Pickering is a compete contrast to the character of Henry Higgins in terms of manners and behaviour. Colonial Pickering is Shaw?s evidence that wealth and poverty can mix.? (Galens and Scampinato, 245). Most characters in Pygmalion expect the rich and poor to stay separate except for the open hearted and minded, Colonial Pickering.

Shaw and Brecht both used invention and radical ideals as stimuli for their protagonists to radically change society’s overall perception by eliminating its inherent prejudices passed down through generations. In Galileo, the central flaw in society’s perception was that society saw the earth as the center of the universe, and it saw any challenges to this long-held belief as heresy. Galileo worked relentlessly in order to gain society’s acceptance of his profound discovery; however, he had to disprove decades of scientific theory and understanding, essentially having to work past layers of society’s thoughts and understanding of the fundamental nature of science to allow them to see the truth, independent of long-held beliefs and biases. Similarly, in Pygmalion, Higgins attempts to disprove society’s perception that the upper-class possesses an intangible intellectual property that distinguishes them from the lower-class. In this case, the fundamental flaw in society’s perception lies in the fact that society self-imposes supposedly insurmountable boundaries within itself to artificially create social hierarchy. However, Higgins disproves the existence of these boundaries by transforming Eliza, a common girl, into a duchess. This purge of society’s prejudices and biases passed down through generations essentially places society in a dynamic state of continual reform, constantly changing and evolving its perceptions.

Gilly Hopkins is a difficult and full of troubles foster child who just wants to live with her biological mother, Courtney. Gilly begins the story as the type of child who thinks she is smarter than others and uses her brilliance to perform sneaky tasks. After Gilly realizes she finally found acceptance and love from Maime Trotter, she redeems herself and finally accepts her new foster family. Katherine Paterson’s The Great Gilly Hopkins assumes a developmental and troubled view of childhood through the changing Gilly Hopkins as we watch her break out of her tough, stubborn, hard protective shell she created and slowly transform into a helpful, caring, and loving girl who respects her foster family in her own unique way.

However, readers of the play may argue that Eliza and Higgins stop working together and conflict later on so that supports the theory of class struggle by Marxism. But when the two characters conflict with each other it’s not because of class struggle or anything related to hierarchy, it’s because of Eliza not accepting Higgins as a teacher as Higgins starts mistreating her so rather Eliza gives the credit for her transformation to Colonel Pickering and have constant arguments with Higgins now that she have learned the dialect of a higher class. “Mrs Higgins. I’m afraid you’ve spoiled that girl, Henry.” Eliza can also be seen as spoiled because of all those higher class ways and lifestyle she just adapted to. This type of conflict can be related to a house dispute and doesn’t show a behavior of lower class revolting against higher class to gain rights. “Liza. That’s not true. He treats a flower girl as if she was a duchess. Higgins. And I treat a duchess as if she was a flower girl.” “Higgins. The question is not whether I treat you rudely, but whether you ever heard me treat anyone else better.” As for Higgins’s personality, he always treats people with rudeness so

The different classes in both plays had their advantages and disadvantages; however, some classes had more benefits than others. In Pygmalion, the upper-class was the most privileged money-wise. Henry Higgins was an upper-class educated man who had quite a reputation and enough money to take on the challenge of transforming Eliza, a lower-class woman, into an upper-class citizen. As a member of the upper-class, Higgins had access to “chocolates, and taxis, and gold, and diamonds” that members of the lower-class didn’t necessarily have (Shaw 19). These objects are associated with

     After long, excruciating lessons, Eliza starts to get it and begins to talk in perfect English. Now, its time to try her newly learned skills. In the play, Higgins takes her to his mother’s house, while in the musical he takes her to the Ascot Races. Here they learn that she may speak perfectly, but she still can revert to her “flower girl” ways. This is where Freddy Eynsford-Hills falls in love with Eliza. Eliza’s father is forced into Middle Class after he inherits a large sum of money.

From the very beginning of the play, we can see the unequal relationship between Mr. Higgins (the man) and Eliza (the woman). This difference can be seen by the parallelism between these two

The urge to write an article in tribute to George Bernard Shaw made me study the plays, written by him, back-to-back. In this course, I came across a short play named “Farfetched Fables”, which had the collection of six short fables. Fables, heard so far, being an expressive form of fiction, were filled with mythical places and creatures, and with the morals at the end of the story. But G.B. Shaw's fables, in contrary, were filled with his several idiosyncratic personal ideas of the realistic nature like the invention of poisonous gas, lighter than air, and its wrong use that unleashed a "dark age" in the first two fables; development of techniques to measure the human capabilities and the tests conducted to develop the same in third fable; the fifth one, being the discussion about the human reproduction, ending with the dialogue "The pursuit of knowledge and power will never end"; and the sixth & final fable is the discussion between the students about the existence of purely disembodied beings, who live their entire life for "Knowledge and Power" and use embodied persons to help them