-
Pygmalion
The original story of Pygmalion was about a sculptor who fell in love with the sculpture of a woman that he worked on over a long period of time. Eventually, due to his artistry and devotion, the...
-
Pygmalion
In this culture and society, class mattered; and one obvious indicator of class is how one speaks. In this case, Professor Higgins is doing a little linguistics exercise, and he's able to tell by...
-
Pygmalion
If this question was given to you by a teacher you should go back and ask her/him to clarify it. 'Pygmalion' is a play, a drama to be enacted on stage and is thus an example of one genre. Apart...
-
Pygmalion
Pygmalion is considered a dramatic comedy in a realist style. While there is a great deal of wordplay and comedic situations, the action is not treated as light farce, with much emphasis on the way...
-
Pygmalion
Freytag's theory of dramatic structure is usually referred to as Freytag's Triangle. This triangle charts the development of a story's action, separating these developments into five categories:...
-
Pygmalion
Pygmalion was written in 1913, in what is known as the Edwardian era (although King Edward VII had died in 1910, succeeded by George V). After the earnestness that characterized much of the...
-
Pygmalion
This play is based on an ancient Greek myth about a woman-hating sculptor, named Pygmalion, who created a statue of the perfect woman and then proceeded to fall in love with it. He named her...
-
Pygmalion
At the beginning of Pygmalion, George Bernard Shaw attempts to give anyone reading the play an idea of Eliza Doolittle's accent. This is her last line before he abandons the attempt: Ow, eez...
-
Pygmalion
Shaw's stage directions underscore how poverty-stricken Eliza Doolittle is as the play begins. For example, when Henry Higgins gives her a good deal of money for her flowers (while not taking any...
-
Pygmalion
As his title suggests, Colonel Pickering was once a soldier. Though now retired from the British Army, he still retains his old military title, as is customary. Since his days of soldiering came to...
-
Pygmalion
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...
-
Pygmalion
Professor Higgins is amused and delighted when Eliza offers to pay him at the rate of a shilling a lesson. The absurdity of the situation obviously appeals to him. He casually threw well over ten...
-
Pygmalion
Professor Higgins has great respect for Colonel Pickering. A fellow linguist with a similarly stellar reputation, Pickering is someone to whom Higgins is naturally drawn. As well as close...
-
Pygmalion
At the beginning of act 3, Higgins tells his mother that he has "A phonetic job" for her. When Mrs. Higgins protests that she doesn't understand phonetics, he immediately tells her that it isn't a...
-
Pygmalion
Freddy Eynsford Hill is a vacuous but nice young man who is in love with the protagonist of the play, Eliza Doolittle, an intelligent and ambitious cockney flower seller. They initially meet as...
-
Pygmalion
Almost all of Eliza's behavior is connected to her impoverished working-class background, which is one of the points Shaw is trying to make. The lower classes, he argues, are not genetically...
-
Pygmalion
Mr. Doolittle is a dustman or garbage collector as the play opens. He is very poor. He is not married to Eliza's mother and can provide nothing for Eliza, who lives in a cold room on whatever she...
-
Pygmalion
Mr. Higgins has made plenty of money from his work. He is described as a professor of phonetics, so presumably he holds a university appointment with a salary, but it appears that most of his...
-
Pygmalion
Study Guide Project Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw Summary George Bernard Shaw’s prefaces are usually long, complex works, often printed in a separate volume alongside the plays. The preface to...
-
Pygmalion
Shaw was actually a Fabian, a member of a group that believed socialism could be brought to England without the violent revolution Marx thought was a prerequisite to change. In Pygmalion, Shaw is...
-
Pygmalion
Shaw wrote 1913's Pygmalion against the backdrop of late Edwardian Britain. (Edward died in 1910 and was succeeded by George V, but the era between Queen Victoria and the start of World War I...
-
Pygmalion
Comedies of manners are plays which are "set in the world of the upper class, and ridicule the pretensions of those who consider themselves socially superior, deflating them with satire. With witty...
-
Pygmalion
As a Socialist, George Bernard Shaw was acutely displeased with what he perceived as the flaws of the British class system. In his play, Pygmalion, he incisively lampoons the rigid British class...
-
Pygmalion
The myth of Pygmalion is from ancient classical times, the most well-known version being that of the Latin writer Ovid. Pygmalion was a sculptor who fell in love with the beautiful statue of a...
-
Pygmalion
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...
-
Pygmalion
After Eliza has been staying with Professor Higgins for a while, her father, Alfred Doolittle, calls on Higgins and Pickering. Seeing how wealthy Higgins is, he believes this is an opportunity for...
-
Pygmalion
I have linked below to the many themes of Pygmalion discussed on eNotes, including beauty, identity, appearance versus reality, and sexism. I will, however, talk about class, since that seems to me...
-
Pygmalion
George Bernard Shaw's play "Pygmalion" focuses on economic, cultural, and linguistic disparities between different social classes. The issue of the gap between rich and poor is very much a global...
-
Pygmalion
The unmarried Henry Higgins here makes a radical claim: women and men shouldn't become friends because they are, by nature, incapable of getting along. The woman "is driving at one thing," the man...
-
Pygmalion
Yes, Eliza does markedly improve her self-confidence. This comes about as she learns the speech and manners of a lady. Her confidence increases as she gains the acceptance and approval of...
-
Pygmalion
It symbolizes her loyalty and devotion to Prof. Higgins. Higgins has successfully trained Eliza to be a lady of quality in much the same way that you'd train a puppy to fetch your slippers. Despite...
-
Pygmalion
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...
-
Pygmalion
In Ovid's Metamorphoses, the famous Greek legend, king Pygmalion, who was also a sculptor, carved a statue of his ideal woman and named it Galatea. The statue he created was so beautiful and...
-
Pygmalion
Eliza comes into Mr. Henry Higgins's laboratory looking like a poor young flower-selling woman that she is. She tries to look nice by wearing a hat decorated with ostrich feathers in the colors...
-
Pygmalion
Act Two of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion opens on Colonel Pickering and Professor Henry Higgins reviewing the vowel sounds they both can pronounce in Higgin's home laboratory on Wimpole Street....
-
Pygmalion
Pygmalion, which was the basis for the later musical My Fair Lady, was about a man who studies language (specifically phonetics, if you believe him) and who claims his skills are so great he could...
-
Pygmalion
Shaw's play "Pygmalion" was inspired directly by Ovid's myth of Pygmalion. Ovid's version concerns a sculptor named Pygmalion who decided to sculpt a woman out of ivory. This statue of his own...
-
Pygmalion
There are quite a few influences that shape Liza Doolittle. First of all, the most apparent is Professor Higgins and his wager with Pickering to transform Liza from being a common guttersnipe into...
-
Pygmalion
Professor Higgins and Colonel Pickering spend the evening after the party in self-congratulatory celebration, ignoring Eliza and her contribution to the success of the deception. Eliza,...
-
Pygmalion
To paraphrase Freud, sometimes a rain shower is just a rain shower. It does not have any great symbolic significance. England has what is known as a temperate maritime climate, similar to that of...
-
Pygmalion
Higgins is quite sure of himself and confident in his own intelligence. Lets be honest - he's arrogant. He lives the way that he wants to with little concern to what society wants. Here is how...
-
Pygmalion
In Act Four of Pygmalion, Eliza, Colonel Pickering, and Professor Higgins have just returned from successfully passing Eliza off as a duchess at a series of socially significant events (a garden...
-
Pygmalion
Alfred Doolittle is very content in the lower class. He gives his speech on "middle class morality" and how he enjoys being in the lower class. He doesn't want to take too much money from Higgins,...
-
Pygmalion
The the tea party in Pygmalion during Mrs. Higgins "at home," there isn't very much dialogue given to Mrs. Higgins, however she does say a lot before and after the tea party. The tea party is short...
-
Pygmalion
In Pygmalion, Mr. Doolittle, the former dustman who thinks he'll end up in the poorhouse, comes into 3,000 pounds a year from the Pre-digested Cheese Trust. As a result, he says, "I have to live...
-
Pygmalion
Stubborn as always, Professor Higgins doesn't rise when everyone else does in order to attend Doolittle's wedding. (Doolittle, of course, is Eliza's father.) From Act IV, here is what the text...
-
Pygmalion
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...
-
Pygmalion
In George Bernard Shaw’s 1912 play Pygmalion, the character of Eliza Doolittle is described by the playwright as a destitute, clearly uneducated flower girl plying her trade on the rainy sidewalks...
-
Pygmalion
It is surprising that these two plays have been chosen for comparison, since, in my opinion they have little in common in plot, theme, or dramatic technique. The one thing that links them is that...
-
Pygmalion
The types of transformations undergone by Eliza Doolittle indicate, in a very astute manner, what constituted the concept of an upper-middle or upper class lady in her period. They embrace every...
