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Pygmalion
Shaw wanted to puncture the idea that genetics or a person's family background "naturally" fitted them to be upper or lower class. He believed that people from any class could be born with brains...
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Pygmalion
While Alfred Doolittle's speech is delivered humorously, and for comic effect, we can certainly identify some good points underlying the humor. Doolittle describes himself as "one of the...
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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...
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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...
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Pygmalion
Professor Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle are the main characters in George Bernard Shaw's classic play Pygmalion. The story involves the attempt by Higgins, a professor of phonetics and...
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Pygmalion
The flower girl is worried because she believes that the man with the notebook is a police informer. In the play, the gentleman cannot buy a flower from the flower girl because he does not have...
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Pygmalion
Eliza Doolittle is transformed from a poor, lower-class Cockney flower seller to a lady, showing that social class is only skin (and accent) deep. Henry Higgins bets that by dressing her in fine...
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Pygmalion
Shaw uses several devices to communicate Eliza's frustration with her situation. Shaw primarily wants to reveal her annoyance at the insensitive Mr. Higgins, who treats her as less than human. Shaw...
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Pygmalion
Much of the humor in Pygmalion and other plays by Shaw revolves around undermining traditional gender expectations. Although the women in Shaw's plays often appear conventional on the surface, they...
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Literature
Pygmalion explores class conflict. In a class-bound society like England, a conflict raged: was social class inborn or socially constructed? In other words, were people from the lower classes...
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Pygmalion
Higgins first encounters the flower girl outside Covent Garden and transcribes her speech. He boasts to Colonel Pickering that by means of his skills as a speech coach he could pass her off for a...
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Pygmalion
The Ambassador's garden party is the culmination of what might appear to be the major plot arc of the play. Higgins has made a bet with Colonel Pickering that he will be able, in six months of...
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Pygmalion
After the party, Henry, Pickering, and Eliza return to the Wimpole Street laboratory. At this point, everyone is tired and ready to call it a night. Nevertheless, Henry and Pickering carry on a...
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Pygmalion
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...
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Pygmalion
The title and basic concept of Shaw's play Pygmalion are taken from an ancient legend most famously recounted by Ovid, the story of Pygmalion and Galatea. In this story, Pygmalion was a Greek...
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Pygmalion
The mother overhears Eliza, the lower-class, Cockney flower girl, refer to her son as Freddie and asks Eliza how she knows her son's name. Eliza, trying to survive, asks Freddie's mother to buy...
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Pygmalion
Mrs. Higgins says her son has no manners. He is uncivilized, first, from his inability to make small talk, such as when, at her home, he says, "what the devil are we going to talk about until Eliza...
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Pygmalion
Act IV begins to illustrate a change in Higgins' attitude towards Eliza. When Pickering, Higgins, and Eliza return to the Wimpole Street laboratory after the party, both Higgins and Pickering...
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Pygmalion
Clara shows up early in the play, while Eliza is selling flowers on the street. She treats Eliza haughtily, even wanting change from the sixpence her mother has her offer Eliza for a bouquet of...
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Pygmalion
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...
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Pygmalion
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....
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Pygmalion
Henry Higgins is a provoking character, rude and obnoxious and lacking in self-awareness about how badly he treats Eliza. There's a dark humor as well in how he addresses her, calling her a...
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Pygmalion
In Ovid's myth, Pygmalion is the name of a man who carves an ivory statue and falls in love with it. He is so in love with it that he wishes it would come to life, so he could marry it. Aphrodite,...
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Pygmalion
The title of the play Pygmalion is based on a classical myth about a story of a sculptor, Pygmalion, who crafts a beautiful statue of a woman and names the statue Galatea. He falls in love with the...
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Pygmalion
First, Higgins is an intimidating character, "storming" around, insulting Eliza and telling Mrs. Pearce to burn her clothes. He also tells Mrs. Pearce to "put her in the dustbin" and threatens to...
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Pygmalion
I would agree with this statement, but say the play is probably less unsettling to a modern U.S. audience than an upper-class British audience of a hundred years ago. The play challenges notions of...
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Pygmalion
Higgins and Pickering are fascinated by the way Liza speaks. Higgins is a scientist of phonetics. When he meets Liza in the rain, he jots down her words phonetically and then guesses her exact...
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Pygmalion
Eliza sells flowers on the streets of east London, Pickering is a linguist and retired soldier, and Higgins is a linguistic scientist and professor of phonetics. But this doesn't really tell us all...
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Pygmalion
Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw has a plot derived from the classical myth concerning Pygmalion and Galatea, in which the sculptor, Pygmalion, fashioned Galatea, the perfect women, and then...
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Pygmalion
This question misunderstands Shaw's quote in the preface to Pygmalion. When Shaw mentions "touches" of Sweet in the play, he means Henry Sweet, a renowned phonetician and grammarian who studied...
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Pygmalion
Shaw skewers and satirizes (makes fun of) the British class system in Pygmalion through its protagonist, Eliza Doolittle. A class-based ideology asserts that certain people are naturally better...
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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...
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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...
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Pygmalion
Shaw was a Fabian, part of a group that believed socialism could be achieved peacefully, without a revolution, putting him at odds with the Marxists. But both groups shared the belief that...
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Pygmalion
The title of Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw is drawn from classical mythology. Shaw's actual source was a story found in Ovid's Metamorphoses about the sculptor Pygmalion who had forsworn love of...
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Pygmalion
One might be tempted to say that the pig-headed Henry Higgins learned nothing from Eliza Doolittle, but that's not entirely true. While he continues to treat her rudely and orders her around as if...
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Pygmalion
Feminism looks at how women are perceived and what kind of opportunities they have in life. One of Henry Higgins' problems is that he can't see Eliza as fully human. Part of this is her class, but...
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Pygmalion
Shaw's Pygmalion is a comedy. To a certain degree, Shaw's purpose in writing it was to entertain people. Shaw, however, even at his most entertaining, does have a polemical streak and tends to...
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Pygmalion
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...
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Pygmalion
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...
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Pygmalion
Pygmalion premiered in 1913, a period during which gender and class roles in British society were changing rapidly. Shaw himself was aware of these changes and generally favored them, regarding...
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Pygmalion
Colonel Pickering isn't a character so much as a narrative device. His presense appears to challenge Higgins' ideas, but he's actually just a sounding board, an opportunity for Higgins to say what...
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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....
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Pygmalion
Eliza Doolittle, the Galatea to Higgins' Pygmalion, is first encountered selling flowers outdoors. Shaw gives an elaborate description of her in his stage directions, describing her as dirty,...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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Pygmalion
Pygmalion, Shaw's play about an impoverished East End flower seller who passes as an aristocrat after she is coached by the rich and highly insensitive Henry Higgins, find its roots in Shaw's...
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Pygmalion
Act One of Pygmalion opens with Professor Higgins taking notes on the dialects of strangers in Convent Garden during a torrential downpour, including one impoverished flower girl: a certain Eliza...
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Pygmalion
In Pygmalion, Eliza believes that she owes everything she learned about being a lady to Colonel Pickering. In Act V, Mr. Doolittle, Eliza's father, has come to take her home. Mr. Doolittle is now a...
