Pygmalion

Shaw took the title of his play from an ancient Greek legend. According to this legend, Pygmalion was a sculptor who disliked women and did not see any reason to ever get married. Nevertheless,...

The most famous part of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion is Eliza Doolittle's transformation from a Cockney flower girl to someone who can pass for royalty. The shift astonishes everyone who knew...

This seemingly straightforward question is a little complicated because the answer all depends on whom you believe offered the challeng. In Act 2 of Pygmalion, Liza shows up at Higgins' doorstep...

Pygmalion is a withering critique of Victorian society and its class structure. The upper-class professor of phonetics, Henry Higgins, sets out to transform a humble Cockney sparrow into a lady of...

Professor Higgins objectifies Eliza as the main component of his experiment, even bullying her at times. When Eliza takes a taxi and comes to Higgins for speech lessons so that she can "be a lady...

A problem play is one that addresses a social problem but that, more deeply, has a strain of darkness or ambiguity that renders the happy ending (most problem plays are comedies) problematic....

In the ancient Greek Pygmalion myth, Pygmalion is a sculptor who falls in love with a statue he carves out of ivory. Pygmalion makes the statue in honor of Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love. He...

Shaw's Pygmalion satirizes the social snobbery of the late Victorian era by focusing on speech and manners. Professor Higgins, though born well, stands outside the social conventions by his...

Henry Higgins isn't quite the misogynist we think he is. Neither is George Bernard Shaw, the writer of Pygmalion, even though Higgins seems at times to be speaking with Shaw's voice. Shaw was a...

The play Pygmalion, by George Bernard Shaw, belongs to the genre of Romanticism, which composed most of the mid to end of the 19th century literary scene. The reason why the play falls under the...

You already have a very thorough discussion of these two characters in Pygmalion. I would simply add a couple of things. Pickeringis, indeed, a rather harmless foil to Higgins, and he is the one...

In the Shavian play Pygmalion, the relationship between the characters of Mrs. Higgins and her son, Higgins, is perhaps one of the most comedic in literature. We come to learn about the...

An archetype is a pattern or type that occurs over and over again in literature. Shaw's Pygmalion derives from the Galatea story recounted in Ovid's Metamorphoses, and contains similar archetypes....

Mrs. Pearce is concerned about the swearing of Higgins when he speaks and his table manners when he eats because they now have an impressionable young "lady" living with them. She also...

Pygmalion is a wonderful play about Eliza Doolittle. Eliza is a young educated girl working in the flower district of London, England. On night she runs into Professor Henry Higgins, a noted...

The origin of the Pygmalion story lies in ancient Greek myth. Ovid's Metamorphosis continued its fame (Ovid being one of the more important Classical writers in the English Renaissance). The...

Mrs. Higgins has very conventional notions for her time and place, which is the early 1900s in England, where she is a lady in her early sixties of comfortable means. Her home, as described by...

The tale of Pygmalion is an adaptation of the Roman legend of Pygmalion the sculptor found in Ovid's work Metamorphosis and, as Shaw mentions at the end of the Epilogue of Pygmalion, Galatea (the...

Henry Higgins is an only child whose only living parent is his mother, Mrs. Higgins. He is also an eternal bachelor who will not change his single, arrogant ways. He is highly educated and treats...

A comedy of manners usually satirizes the behavior of a class of people, typically the nobility or other upper classes. This sort of comedy tends to be set in contemporary times. Dialogue tends to...

Pygmalion explores class conflicts: conflicts between an ideology that believes class attributes are in-born (nature) versus Higgins's belief that he can teach class to Eliza (nurture) and pass her...

Eliza and Higgins are characters who share a few things in common, and then drastically turn incompatible when specific events take place and shake the foundation of the scam that originally brings...

George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion contains many examples of humor; the play lampoons the rigid British class system of the Victorian era. Because this play satirizes the types that the characters...

Eliza Doolittle undergoes various transformations as she is changed from a poor, Cockney, downtrodden flower girl to a lady who is desired by men of social standing.This transformation occurs under...

The rain at the start of Act I of Shaw's Pygmalion is a convenient and convincing device that allows the conversations and interactions between Eliza Doolittle and Henry Higgins and other...

The major difference between the play Pygmalion and the musical film (dubbed My Fair Lady) that it was later made into is also one of the most controversial aspects of its adaptation. This...

Great question! Professor Higgins never acknowledges any deep feelings for Eliza in the play. What he does admit is that he has grown accustomed to Eliza's voice and appearance and that he rather...

Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856–2 November 1950) was first staged in 1913. Shaw himself was a lifelong socialist, vegetarian, social critic, and spelling reformer. His quirky and...

In his play Pygmalion, Shaw criticizes the British class system by depicting situations that show that it is nurture, not nature, that influences the worth of a person. For example, Eliza is...

Alfred Doolittle is a man changed by wealth at the end of the story. He returns to reflect how money has hurt his lifestyle since his earlier appearance. He complains that while earlier in life he...

The original Pygmalion myth derives from Ancient Greece. The most famous version is told by the Roman poet Ovid in his Metamorphoses. In Ovid's story, the sculptor Pygmalion creates a statue of...

Eliza, coming from a very poor background, is not familiar with a bathtub or a bathroom when Henry Higgins commands Mrs. Pearce to give her a bath. At first, Eliza exclaims with a curse word...

Henry Higgins is the Pygmalion figure in this play. Just as Pygmalion sculpts a female figure so beautiful that it turns into a real woman, so Higgins turns flower seller Eliza Doolittle into a...

Shaw's socialism is also relevant here. In the figure of Eliza Dolittle, he wants us to see how the working classes are so often cynically exploited by the social elite, as exemplified by the...

Eliza is a determined, resourceful young woman who wants to get ahead in life and rise from the lowest class in society to a place of better opportunity. When she hears Henry Higgins, a linguist,...

No. "You certainly are a pretty pair of babies, playing with your live doll," Mrs. Higgins quips to her son, Henry, in Act III of Pygmalion. Though Mrs. Higgins is a woman of society and though she...

Eliza, prior to her transformation at the hands of Professor Higgins, was essentially a beggar—impoverished and working on the street. She was the exact opposite of well-dressed and dignified, with...

Pygmalion is a Greek name. In Greek mythology, Pygmalion was a sculpture who carved a statue of a beautiful woman out of ivory. The statue was so beautiful, that Pygmalion fell in love with it. The...

It is hard to see Eliza's conflict as one in which nature rather than society or other people is most responsible. Other people's prejudices against lower-class individuals and society's rigid...

If one of Shaw's goals in Pygmalion is to demonstrate that social class is based on nurture not nature (i.e., education not genetics) another is to illustrate that being middle class is not all it...

It's worth noting that Eliza did not, in fact, receive an education of any real substance, but was taught the surface mannerisms an educated woman of the age might affect. Although she was taught...

Redpenny is a medical student and all-round dogsbody for Dr. Ridgeon. He acts in the capacity of the doctor's laboratory assistant as well as dealing with his voluminous correspondence. The latter...

Your question almost answers itself. One must only look at the definition of "Shavian" which means a play written by or in the same style as George Bernard Shaw. Considering that Pygmalion is...

Though the ambassador's garden party is not actually staged, it plays a significant role in Shaw's play Pygmalion. During the garden party, which takes place months after the start of Eliza's...

Shaw was very interested in language and in how accents and vocabulary stigmatize people and separate classes. One of the things he wanted to show in his play was that a person could rise in social...

The play Pygmalion, by George Bernard Shaw is, like the previous post accurately stated, primarily a social satire that belongs to the genre of Romanticism, and most specifically, to the form of...

Henry Higgins, a linguist, happens to overhear Cockney flower seller Eliza Doolittle speaking in lower class dialect at Covent Garden. He brags that: in three months I could pass that girl off as...

There is another way of interpreting Eliza Doolittle’s transformation by Professor Higgins. After she passes Higgins’s test, the Professor and his partner Pickering treat her coldly, not even...

In Act 2 of George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion, Higgins and Col. Pickering discuss Higgins's true character with women. Higgins had declared that he has a huge problem with women because it seems...

Excellent answer above. Higgins, in many ways, resembles Shaw himself. He represents the tradition of science, which sees all people as equal, as against conventional society, in which people are...