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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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:...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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
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...
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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
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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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
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
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...
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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
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...
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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,...
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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
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...
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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
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,...
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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...
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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
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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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
Probably the most popular movie with this theme is My Fair Lady, made in 1964. It was directed by George Cukor and starred Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn. My Fair Lady won eight Oscars, a real...
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Pygmalion
Act II presents rising action and complications in the play, as well as important character development. In Act II, Eliza goes to Higgins' house to ask him to teach her to speak more properly. As...
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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
The topic of "dependence of men" is illustrated in George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion in two ways: women are dependent on men because they have no choice, and, women are dependent on men but do not...
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Pygmalion
I tried very hard to locate information about this topic for you, but there is not much to be had on Higgins and the Oedipal complex. I did find one article, from 1958, titled "Shaw's Childhood...
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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
The answer to this question poses a very subjective answer. While some may agree that Eliza does represent the "new woman," others may disagree. On one side, Eliza has become a woman of the...
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Pygmalion
Alfred Doolittle, Eliza's father, is a less complex character than his daughter. He is unequivocally miserable with his new status as a middle class man after he is granted a very generous stipend...
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Pygmalion
It is quite acceptable to deem Eliza's first test in Act 3 as a "precious bit of drama" in many respects. In this Act we find Mrs. Higgins at her in-house, around 4 to 5 in the afternoon expecting...
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Pygmalion
There is a sense in which Act III exposes a number of characters for who they really are. Not only has the illusion of Eliza been somewhat punctured by her use of her common tongue to narrate the...
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Pygmalion
Alfred Doolittle enters the home of Mr. Higgins after finding out that Eliza is there. At this time, Higgins and Col. Pickering are still having an avid conversation about Higgin's impressions of...
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Pygmalion
The answer to this question can be found in the rather lengthy afterward that the author provides us with at the end of the play which describes the future of the main characters after the curtain...
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Pygmalion
In Pygmalion, in Act I, Higgins predicts that, given six months, he'll be able to take Liza "anywhere and pass her off as anyone." He also makes it clear that her accomplishment will be based on...
