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Essay On Pygmalion

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George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) the versatile dramatist used contemporary social, political and religious problems as subjects for his plays. Pygmalion, perhaps the only one of his many plays in which he points out to his audience and his readers that he has used an ancient classical myth to explore a problem that is not merely contemporary but one that has lasted through time. This myth is the story of Pygmalion – Galatea which has been told and retold by several later writers in differing forms. In the most familiar version of this myth, Pygmalion was the king of Cyprus. He was also a great sculptor who used to make beautiful statues of bronze, marble and ivory. He was devoted to his art and always sought for perfection at any …show more content…

In Shaw’s play Henry Higgins, a professor of Phonetics, is the modern-day Pygmalion, and Eliza (Elizabeth) Doolittle, an uneducated girl who sells flowers in London Street is Gatatea. Shaw’s Pygmalion revolves around the transformation of this poor-ignorant flower girl into a cultured and aristocratic one. Professor Higgins, the Phonetician, had made phonetics as his profession and his hobby. His absorbing passion for the sounds of the language is revealed when he comes in contact with Eliza, who is an “incarnate insult to the English language”. (14) The play begins in a dramatic circumstance. It is 11:15 P.M. in London. Torrents of heavy rain bring various classes of people together in the portico of St. Paul’s Church. Among them is a young poor flower girl, a mother with her daughter and son, a note-taker and one colonel, picking by name. The bystanders present a cross section of London Life. As a flower girl Eliza, young but very dirty, bargains over prices, a bystander points out the presence of a note-taker among them – Professor Higgins. The bystanders are very suspicious and angry but Higgins calms them down by identifying the places to which each of them belongs through the way they speak. He declares that Eliza’s “Kerb stone English that will keep her in the gutter to the end of her days” then he also says; “Well, sir, in three months I could pass that girl of as a duchess at an …show more content…

Dressed in Opera Cloak with diamonds, fan, flowers and all other accessories she passes like a Duchess, creating sensation in the whole atmosphere. Nepummuck, the marvelous interpreter (and Higgins’ previous student also to whom he taught phonetics) identifies her as a Hungarian princess. Thus her success at the ambassador’s reception is overwhelming. But the experiment is followed by its aftermath. As euphoria of triumph is over, Eliza is faced with the stark reality. She has become disclassed, left unfit for her old life and unable for her old life and unable to forge a new one Eliza is tragic in her fear and despair. Higgins is also quite unsentimental and unromantic in his approach to Eliza. Looking to this attitude of Professor Higgins Eliza shouted on him asking; “What am I fit for? Where am I to go? What am I to do? What to become of me? Higgins’ this attitude of indifference drives her to Freddy, who worships her. Eliza leaves Higgins house and so takes decisive step into the future. Shaw explains the sexual attitude of Higgins towards Eliza in terms of the Oedipus Complex. In Appendix he says “If an imaginative boy has a suffering rich mother who has intelligence, personal grace, dignity of character without harshness and a cultivated sense of the best art of her time to enable her to make her house beautiful, she sets a standard for him a disengagement of his

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