Pygmalion Essays

College

Pygmalion

In George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, linguists Henry Higgins and Colonel Pickering attempt to transform a lower-class girl, Eliza Doolittle, into the likes of a duchess. From this story of social transformation, Pygmalion comments on different...

College

Pygmalion

My Fair Lady, the 1964 musical film written by Alan Jay Lerner and directed by George Cukor, is a somewhat effective adaptation of the 1913 play Pygmalion written by George Bernard Shaw. Although slight changes in the characterization of central...

11th Grade

Pygmalion

In modern-day, power is an entity that everyone desires but the simplest things such as a person’s language or even the socioeconomic status can change the game. Language consists of many elements within but most are disregarded such as culture...

Pygmalion

On the title page of Pygmalion, George Bernard Shaw describes the play as 'A Romance in Five Acts'. Throughout the play, readers might assume that the heroine and hero of Pygmalion will end up romantically together. In fact, a common complaint...

Pygmalion

Many individuals are adept at recognizing changes in their environment, others, and themselves. To these people, whatever the "change" might be-a new hairstyle, a new article of clothing, or an affected spoken dialect-rarely goes unnoticed....

Pygmalion

The Greek Myth of Pygmalion, about a sculptor and the woman he creates and falls in love with, has been appropriated into various texts of different times and made relevant to a wide range of audiences. In particular, George Bernard Shaw’s English...

College

Pygmalion

Years before he became the greatest living writer of comedy, Shaw was an ardent social reformer. "My conscience", he once wrote, "is the genuine pulpit article; it annoys me to see people comfortable when they ought to be uncomfortable; and I...

12th Grade

Pygmalion

In comparing the Edwardian era - that is, the early 20th century - to the modern age, we can see that some distinct social constructs and class systems are present in both. However, social and class-related barriers are noticeably more porous in...

12th Grade

Pygmalion

In Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, Shaw attacks the relations between Victorian era classes by exposing their wretched treatment of the lower class, as seen in the flower girl, by the higher classes, upper and middle, iconified in Higgins and Mrs....

12th Grade

Pygmalion

George Bernard Shaw’s ‘Pygmalion’ is a play that is scathing in its attack on the pruderies, hypocrisies and inconsistencies of higher society in early 20th century London. Through the transformation of Eliza Doolittle, Shaw reveals to the...

12th Grade

Pygmalion

The play Pygmalion can be viewed through the lens of an anti romantic play. From the beginning itself Shaw creates a notion on the reader’s mind that, the play will end up in the union of Professor Higgins and flower girl Eliza. But what happened...

College

Pygmalion

George Bernard Shaw wrote Pygmalion in hopes that people would see what change can happen in an individual person. While reading this play it is easy to see it as being focused on Eliza Doolittle. However, it is important to understand and observe...

College

Pygmalion

The relationship between the body and soul is one obsessed over by playwrights since the morality plays of the medieval period. Renaissance writer Christopher Marlowe and 20th century American playwright Bernard Shaw are no exceptions to this: in...

College

Pygmalion

Bernard Shaw’s 1914 drama ‘Pygmalion’ finds its roots in the classical myth of Ovid, who writes an erotic tale of romance between a sculptor an this status in ‘Metamorphoses’. It is unsurprising therefore that Shaw’s play has often been celebrated...

College

Pygmalion

Social critique has long been at the heart of drama, whether through satire, allegory or more direct devices, enabling dramatists to comment on the state of the world as they see it, to pose their own idealized version of society or to put forward...