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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
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...
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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
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,...
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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...
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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...
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Pygmalion
In the play Pygmalion, Professor Henry Higgins is a pragmatic professor of phonetics. His sole "joy" in life is the study of linguistics and how it impacts human interaction. He treats Eliza...
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Pygmalion
Mrs. Higgins tells Henry not to come to her social hour because he invariably ends up offending all of her friends when he meets them. She also complains to Henry that her friends eventually stop...
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Pygmalion
Two of the main characters in the play, Henry Higgins and Colonel Pickering, are experts in linguistics. The main plot elements of the play revolve around Higgins' bet with Pickering that he can...
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Pygmalion
An overarching example of the play's humor comes from how easily British society believes Eliza Doolittle, a lower class flower seller, is a member of the upper classes based on her new accent and...
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Pygmalion
The playwright George Bernard Shaw deliberately left the play Pygmalion open-ended, but thought that the most appropriate ending was Eliza and Freddy getting married and opening an upscale flower...
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Pygmalion
There are several themes in Pygmalion: appearance vs. realitysocial snobberysocial transformationphonetics and language educationthe marginalization of womenthe inadequacy of myth The main theme,...
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Pygmalion
These three plays span the entire twentieth century with Pygmalion first presented in 1913 (published in 1917), A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947, and Master Harold... And the Boys in 1982. Despite...