Pygmalion remains Shaw's most popular play. The play's widest audiences know it as the inspiration for the highly romanticized 1956 musical and 1964 film My Fair Lady.
Pygmalion has transcended cultural and language barriers since its first production. The British Museum contains "images of the Polish production...; a series of shots of a wonderfully Gallicised Higgins and Eliza in the first French production in Paris in 1923; a fascinating set for a Russian production of the 1930s. There was no country which didn't have its own 'take' on the subjects of class division and social mobility, and it's as enjoyable to view these subtle differences in settings and costumes as it is to imagine translators wracking their brains for their own equivalent of 'Not bloody likely'."[19]
Joseph Weizenbaum named his chatterbot computer program ELIZA after the character Eliza Doolittle.[20]
3. Analyzing social distinction in the Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw.
Although it is often conflated in the popular imagination with the much-loved musical it inspired, George Bernard Shaw’s 1912 play Pygmalion is somewhat different from the romantic comedy My Fair Lady. Let’s take a closer look at Shaw’s play and some of its prominent themes. Before we offer an analysis of Pygmalion, though, let’s briefly recap the story of the play.
Pygmalion: summary
The ‘plot’ of Shaw’s play is easy enough to summarise. Henry Higgins, a professor of phonetics, has an almost Sherlockian ability to deduce the hometown or region of anyone based on their accent. He overhears a flower girl named Eliza Doolittle and mocks the common way she talks. The next day, Eliza shows up and asks Higgins to give her elocution lessons so she can learn to talk ‘proper’.
Eliza’s father, Alfred Doolittle, shows up and tries to get some money off Higgins: he shows himself to be boorish and prone to violence – he tries to strike his daughter when she sticks her tongue out at him – and Higgins, realising the upbringing his young protégé has had, acknowledges that he has taken on a mammoth task in trying to make Eliza into a respectable-sounding lady.
Higgins nevertheless accepts the challenge, with his friend Colonel Pickering betting him that he can’t pass Eliza off as a lady at the ambassador’s party in six months’ time. Higgins is emboldened by this challenge, and a few months later he tests his progress on Eliza by taking her to his mother’s drawing-room party, where Eliza’s diction impresses the partygoers. However, her use of vulgar language – including the swearword ‘bloody’ – is greeted less enthusiastically.
But the young Freddy Eynsford-Hill is smitten by her, and pursues her. At the ambassador’s ball, Eliza charms everyone with her diction and her language, and Higgins wins his bet. However, he loses interest in her afterwards, much to her annoyance. Indeed, he even crows that her transformation is only superficial and possible because of his work on her; when her father appears, announcing his marriage, and Eliza immediately reverts to her Cockney speech, he is triumphant. Eliza accepts Freddy’s attention instead, agreeing to marry him.
Note: the most famous line from the play was also the most daring. When Eliza is leaving Mrs Higgins’s party and Freddy asks her if she plans to walk across the park, Eliza replies, ‘Walk? Not bloody likely!’ Mrs. Patrick Campbell, for whom Shaw wrote the part of Eliza Doolittle, was risking her whole career in saying such a strong swearword, for the times, on the public stage.
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