pygmalion essay

George Bernard Shaw

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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.

A Summary and Analysis of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Although it is often conflated in the popular imagination with the much-loved musical it inspired, George Bernard Shaw’s 1912 play Pygmalion is somewhat different from the romantic comedy My Fair Lady . Let’s take a closer look at Shaw’s play and some of its prominent themes. Before we offer an analysis of Pygmalion , though, let’s briefly recap the story of the play.

Pygmalion : summary

The ‘plot’ of Shaw’s play is easy enough to summarise. Henry Higgins, a professor of phonetics, has an almost Sherlockian ability to deduce the hometown or region of anyone based on their accent. He overhears a flower girl named Eliza Doolittle and mocks the common way she talks. The next day, Eliza shows up and asks Higgins to give her elocution lessons so she can learn to talk ‘proper’.

Eliza’s father, Alfred Doolittle, shows up and tries to get some money off Higgins: he shows himself to be boorish and prone to violence – he tries to strike his daughter when she sticks her tongue out at him – and Higgins, realising the upbringing his young protégé has had, acknowledges that he has taken on a mammoth task in trying to make Eliza into a respectable-sounding lady.

Higgins nevertheless accepts the challenge, with his friend Colonel Pickering betting him that he can’t pass Eliza off as a lady at the ambassador’s party in six months’ time. Higgins is emboldened by this challenge, and a few months later he tests his progress on Eliza by taking her to his mother’s drawing-room party, where Eliza’s diction impresses the partygoers. However, her use of vulgar language – including the swearword ‘bloody’ – is greeted less enthusiastically.

But the young Freddy Eynsford-Hill is smitten by her, and pursues her. At the ambassador’s ball, Eliza charms everyone with her diction and her language, and Higgins wins his bet. However, he loses interest in her afterwards, much to her annoyance. Indeed, he even crows that her transformation is only superficial and possible because of his work on her; when her father appears, announcing his marriage, and Eliza immediately reverts to her Cockney speech, he is triumphant. Eliza accepts Freddy’s attention instead, agreeing to marry him.

Note: the most famous line from the play was also the most daring. When Eliza is leaving Mrs Higgins’s party and Freddy asks her if she plans to walk across the park, Eliza replies, ‘Walk? Not bloody likely!’ Mrs. Patrick Campbell, for whom Shaw wrote the part of Eliza Doolittle, was risking her whole career in saying such a strong swearword, for the times, on the public stage.

Pygmalion : analysis

Most theatre critics regard the musical adaptation of Shaw’s play, the Lerner and Loewe musical My Fair Lady , as a sentimental travesty of Pygmalion , and with good reason – not least because the friendship between Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle in Shaw’s play is founded on Higgins’s professional pride (read: arrogance) rather than any romantic interest he has in her. His lifelong bachelorhood is a result of his love for his mother, as Shaw himself made clear, and his interest in Eliza is purely professional.

Indeed, as the great critic Michael Billington notes in The 101 Greatest Plays: From Antiquity to the Present , Pygmalion is actually an ‘ironic inversion’ of the standard romantic plot. It gives us a boy (well, man) who meets a girl and then uses her to try to win a bet, before casting her aside as soon as he’s done so: hardly the way we expect a romantic comedy to end. Shaw felt the need to qualify his ending by adding a long epilogue to the play when it was printed.

Taking the superficial structure of the romantic comedy and inverting it for his own ends, Shaw explores the English class system with all of its petty attitudes and posturings. The fact that a Cockney flower girl can, with a few months’ tuition, be trained up so she will convince even the most blue-blooded within society that she is one of them doesn’t say much for the inherent superiority of the upper classes. It’s all a sham, a show: class is not just a social construct, but an artificial one.

The title of Shaw’s play alludes to the classical myth of Pygmalion, a Cretan king who fell in love with his own sculpture. She was transformed into a woman, Galatea, by Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love. But here again, as Billington observes, Shaw inverts this love story: in Pygmalion a woman is turned into a statue, a ‘mechanical doll who resembles a duchess’.

As Shaw makes clear in the epilogue to the play, Eliza makes a carefully considered decision not to marry Professor Higgins, not least because she realises she could never supplant his mother in his affections.

Shaw’s socialist thinking is central to his exploration of the English class system in Pygmalion . In his depiction of the ease with which Eliza is transformed into a lady in fashionable upper-class society, he exposes the hollowness at the heart of that society.

And yet just as Eliza is easily made into a passable lady, so the spell can instantly wear off and she can be transformed back into her former self, such as when Mr Doolittle appears in the final act. It is, apparently, harder to lose or forget our humble roots than it might first appear.

But another of Shaw’s interests – indeed, his life’s project – is at the core of Pygmalion : the English language as it is spoken. In his preface to the play, Shaw famously argued, ‘It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.’ He also states in the preface: ‘If the play makes the public aware that there are such people as phoneticians, and that they are among its most important people in England at present, it will serve its turn.’

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Pygmalion Essays

“The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain,” a few snippets from the all so memorable lines from both the play, Pygmalion, and its silver screen version, the 1938 film, “Pygmalion.” There are few departures from the on-screen adaptation of what is perhaps one of Shaw’s greatest works, Pygmalion...

Bernard Shaw’s comedy Pygmalion presents the unlikely journey of an impoverished flower girl into London’s society of the early 20th century. Professor Higgins proposes a wager to his friend Colonel Pickering that he can take a common peddler and transform her into royalty. Eliza...

My Fair Lady and Pygmalion: Connections and Contrasts Through the years, countless film directors have adapted and recreated various novels and plays to make them ideal for the big-screen. In many cases, directors strive to keep their screenplay adaptations true to the original literature; however...

1 026 words

Bernard Shaw Pygmalion A Romance in Five Acts 1. Summary of the Play, page 2 2. Introduction and Short Analysis of the Main Character, page 4 3. Interpretation, page 5 4. Additional Information, page 7 5. Literature and Links, page 8 1. Summary London at 11. 15 a. m. , on a rainy summer day...

3 452 words

Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion primarily highlights the definitive contrast between different levels of modern society. Though people generally accept that there are distinct social classes present in their lives, they rarely consider what makes this distinction so clear. In the play, Shaw illustrates...

How Higgins and Pickering treat Eliza Different but yet the same! The play Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw is about how a poor simple woman is taught how to become an elegant flower girl by professor Higgins and Colonel Pickering. How come that although Mr Higgins and Colonel Pickering treat...

The play of Pygmalion, written by George Bernard Shaw is an appropriation of the famous story of Pygmalion in Ovid's Metamorphoses. The main character of the tale, as the title suggests, is Pygmalion. Pygmalion, repulsed by the apparently loose and reprehensible lives of the women of his era...

Twentieth century Britain is dubbed the victorian era in which the woman is just the female of humanity, and that they have certain things to do in society. It is socially accepted that women care solely for the children, the house, the cooking and the cleaning and the men are the breadwinners and...

1 313 words

The play Pygmalion by Bernard Shaw has many different characters that bring much to the play due to their backgrounds, feelings, and intentions. One of these remarkable and famous characters is Eliza Doolittle. How Eliza comes across, how she is treated by others, and how she changes are what make...

OVERALL ANALYSES CHARACTER ANALYSIS Shaw has often been criticized for his inability to create well- developed round characters. His characters are usually seen as mere puppets propelled by the crisis of the plot or as mouthpieces for his socialist viewpoint. However in Pygmalion,, Shaw vindicates...

1 578 words

As proven in Pygmalion, the novel by George Bernard Shaw and "Pygmalion", the Greek myth, neither a creator, nor or anyone, should control the fate of another, be it a creation or simply another human.. It is neither moral, nor possible to control another's fate, and arguable that one cannot even...

Like all of Shaw's great dramatic creations, Pygmalion is a richly complex play. It combines a central story of the transformation of a young woman with elements of myth, fairy tale, and romance, while also combining an interesting plot with an exploration of social identity, the power of science...

2 274 words

poetry Deconstruction: The Story of Pygmalion and the Statue (1713 translation) The poem “The Story of Pygmalion and the Statue” was originally written in Greek by Ovid, and is found in Book Ten of his work, Metamorphoses. It was translated into English in 1713, and this translation employs...

Pygmalion is perhaps Shaw's most famous play and, ironically, it is among his most abused and misinterpreted ones. Almost everyone knows the basic outlines of this story of the Cockney flower girl who is almost magically transformed into a duchess by taking speech (phonetic) lessons from her...

1 247 words

Apart from being problem plays , Pygmalion and A Doll 's house deal with the common theme of transformation of individuals . In Pygmalion, Shaw explores the idea that if a person is born in a low class and gets the opportunity to be trained in the ways of correct speech and manners then he or she...

Pygmalion George Bernard show Pygmalion as a problem play Problem play: defined and explained A problem play is a play in which a number of problems are presented and analyzed thoroughly but no solutions to those problems are provided by the dramatist. Such a play serves as a great irritant to the...

1 448 words

SCASI: Pygmalion Setting Physical: London; torrents of heavy summer rain, cab whistles blowing in all directions; portico of St. Paul’s church Political: Post WWII Economic: Big gap between rich and poor Time: 11: 15 p. m. Characters Traits: Eliza: proud; independent; dignified Higgins: studied...

Pygmalion Essay The Feminist Literary Criticism that I am going to apply is the importance of woman, their relationships with one another, what each of them do like occupation, etc. , and explaining what Shaw is trying to say about Feminist. First, in this essay, I am going to talk about the...

PYGMALION 1. Significance of Title: The significance of the title, ”Pygmalion” is in Greek mythology, The town Cyprus Pygmalion was a king who deeply fell in love with the statue of Aphrodite. Pygmalion had pictured nothing but beauty in his mind. He worked many countless days and nights in search...

1 560 words

“Pygmalion”, by George Bernard Shaw, is a modern metamorphosis of the story Pygmalion, legendary sculptor and king of Cyprus, who fell in love with his own statue of Aphrodite. At his prayer, Aphrodite brought the statue to life as Galatea. In his own play, Shaw reveals a twist in the Greek myth...

1 033 words

64 pages • 2 hours read

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.

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Character Analysis

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Discussion Questions

Discuss the similarities between Higgins and Pygmalion. Examine how Eliza and Pygmalion’s statue are alike and how they are different. How might Shaw be commenting upon the Pygmalion story? How are the lessons in the two stories similar or different?

How does Eliza Doolittle change over the course of the play? Which changes are the most meaningful? What do the constants in her character suggest about her character and Shaw’s themes?

How does Shaw reveal the hypocrisy and inconsistency of Victorian high society throughout the play? How does the transformation of Eliza reflect these flaws? Does Shaw present the possibility of social transformation as a positive or negative idea?

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Pygmalion George Bernard Shaw

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

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Pygmalion Essays

Categorical thinking in pygmalion geoffrey yu zhang college.

In George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, linguists Henry Higgins and Colonel Pickering attempt to transform a lower-class girl, Eliza Doolittle, into the likes of a duchess. From this story of social transformation, Pygmalion comments on different...

Our Control of Fate: The Possibility of Free Will in 'Pygmalion,' 'Galileo,' and 'Arcadia' Geoffrey Yu Zhang College

The nature of the environment around us is governed by the sciences. Chemical reactions can be represented by equations, specific bonds form between certain molecules, and organisms act based upon biological processes. In a world where people can...

Pygmalian and My Fair Lady Comparative Analysis Anonymous College

My Fair Lady, the 1964 musical film written by Alan Jay Lerner and directed by George Cukor, is a somewhat effective adaptation of the 1913 play Pygmalion written by George Bernard Shaw. Although slight changes in the characterization of central...

Dialect as a Signifier of Social Class in Pygmalion Kruthik Ravikanti 11th Grade

In modern-day, power is an entity that everyone desires but the simplest things such as a person’s language or even the socioeconomic status can change the game. Language consists of many elements within but most are disregarded such as culture...

An Atypical Romance in Five Acts Tauhira Hoossainy

On the title page of Pygmalion, George Bernard Shaw describes the play as 'A Romance in Five Acts'. Throughout the play, readers might assume that the heroine and hero of Pygmalion will end up romantically together. In fact, a common complaint...

Nurture or Nature: The Gentleman Versus the Guttersnipe Michael Martin

Many individuals are adept at recognizing changes in their environment, others, and themselves. To these people, whatever the "change" might be-a new hairstyle, a new article of clothing, or an affected spoken dialect-rarely goes unnoticed....

Pygmalion and Pretty Woman Casey Bassett

The Greek Myth of Pygmalion, about a sculptor and the woman he creates and falls in love with, has been appropriated into various texts of different times and made relevant to a wide range of audiences. In particular, George Bernard Shaw’s English...

The Extent Contextual Attitudes and Values Regarding Gender and Class are Maintained or Altered in Pygmalion and Pretty Women Jennifer Liu 11th Grade

Contextual attitudes and values regarding gender and class in Pretty Woman (1990), directed by Garry Marshall, and Pygmalion (1913), written by George Bernard Shaw, are predominantly maintained throughout both texts, although minor adaptions have...

The didactic purpose of Shaw's 'Pygmalion' NEHA IMRAN College

Years before he became the greatest living writer of comedy, Shaw was an ardent social reformer. "My conscience", he once wrote, "is the genuine pulpit article; it annoys me to see people comfortable when they ought to be uncomfortable; and I...

Society, Superficiality, and the Lessons of Pygmalion Anonymous 12th Grade

In comparing the Edwardian era - that is, the early 20th century - to the modern age, we can see that some distinct social constructs and class systems are present in both. However, social and class-related barriers are noticeably more porous in...

Victorian Society in Pygmalion Anonymous 12th Grade

In Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, Shaw attacks the relations between Victorian era classes by exposing their wretched treatment of the lower class, as seen in the flower girl, by the higher classes, upper and middle, iconified in Higgins and Mrs....

The Creator of a Lady: The Illusion of Empowerment in the Reformation of the Female Identity in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion Hridaya Parag Ajgaonkar College

I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely. -Simone de Beauvoir Tête-à-Tête: The Lives and Loves of Simone de Beauvoir & Jean-Paul Sartre

This paper seeks to examine and...

The Morality of a Scoundrel: Understanding Mr. Doolittle's Importance Lillian Grace Richardson 10th Grade

At first glance and introduction, it seems Mr. Doolittle is no more than a slovenly and crude navvyman. He serves the plot as nothing more than a physical representation of where Eliza comes from. However, in the two scenes he is in, he steals the...

Pygmalion and the Dissolution of Class Barriers Jack Duckett 12th Grade

George Bernard Shaw’s ‘Pygmalion’ is a play that is scathing in its attack on the pruderies, hypocrisies and inconsistencies of higher society in early 20th century London. Through the transformation of Eliza Doolittle, Shaw reveals to the...

The Mutual Exclusivity of Class and Morality in George Bernard Shaw’s ‘Pygmalion’ Jack Duckett 12th Grade

The honest and compelling transformation of a simple flower girl from a disempowered ‘draggle-tailed guttersnipe’ to a ‘fierce’ woman who demands what she ‘want[s]’ and feistily laments the loss of her ‘independence’ is emblematic of the laudable...

The anti-romantic elements in Shaw's "Pygmalion". Anonymous 12th Grade

The play Pygmalion can be viewed through the lens of an anti romantic play. From the beginning itself Shaw creates a notion on the reader’s mind that, the play will end up in the union of Professor Higgins and flower girl Eliza. But what happened...

Romance: A Dramatic Convention from Shakespeare to 'My Fair Lady' Anonymous 12th Grade

Most writers find it extremely difficult to convey the feeling of love via the written word. In fact, many people feel inspired to write by that challenge alone. Love cannot be summed up in a sentence or a paragraph, let alone a song or a poem....

The Insecurity of Mister Higgins: A Close Reading of a Multi-Sided Character Maarten Bronk College

In the play Pygmalion, we get to know Mister Higgins as a man who knows what he wants, he is not afraid to say what he thinks and he acts like nobody can tell him what to do. But even though he looks a bit arrogant, self-assured and bossy, he is...

George Bernard Shaw’s Emphasis on Change in Pygmalion Anonymous College

George Bernard Shaw wrote Pygmalion in hopes that people would see what change can happen in an individual person. While reading this play it is easy to see it as being focused on Eliza Doolittle. However, it is important to understand and observe...

The Relationship of Body and Soul Anonymous College

The relationship between the body and soul is one obsessed over by playwrights since the morality plays of the medieval period. Renaissance writer Christopher Marlowe and 20th century American playwright Bernard Shaw are no exceptions to this: in...

The Subtitle ‘A Romance in Five Acts' Amelie Maurice-Jones College

Bernard Shaw’s 1914 drama ‘Pygmalion’ finds its roots in the classical myth of Ovid, who writes an erotic tale of romance between a sculptor an this status in ‘Metamorphoses’. It is unsurprising therefore that Shaw’s play has often been celebrated...

Drama as an Instrument of Social Critique Anonymous College

Social critique has long been at the heart of drama, whether through satire, allegory or more direct devices, enabling dramatists to comment on the state of the world as they see it, to pose their own idealized version of society or to put forward...

Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Pygmalion — Pygmalion Eliza’s Character Analysis

Pygmalion Eliza’s Character Analysis

• Categories: Pygmalion

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Words: 614 |

Published: Jan 30, 2024

Words: 614 | Page: 1 | 4 min read

Table of contents

Eliza's appearance and social status in the beginning, eliza's motivation for change, eliza's transformation through education and training, eliza's struggles and resilience during the transformation, eliza's gradual assertiveness and self-confidence, eliza's ultimate empowerment and independence, references:.

• Shaw, George Bernard. Pygmalion. Penguin Books, 2003.
• Hornby, Richard. The Social and Economic Context of Shaw's Pygmalion. The Modern Language Review, vol. 60, no. 2, 2015, pp. 215-230.
• SparkNotes. Pygmalion Study Guide. Spark Publishing, 2019.

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