Pygmalion by Bernard Shaw

Description

According to Greek mythology, Pygmalion was a king and a sculptor and a legendary character of Cyprus. He is known to fall in love with a statue he had given shape, as depicted in Ovid’s poem Metamorphoses.

In the first Act, Shaw introduces some of the characters from the play and their unique traits, Mrs Eynsford-Hill who has been portrayed as a superficial social climber and her daughter Clara. There is also Clara’s brother Freddy, the flower girl Eliza suffering from deep poverty and Henry Higgings a phonetician and Colonel Pickering, with his acute interest in phonetics. Eliza and Colonel Pickering share a mutual admiration for each other.

Act 2 is at Higgin’s home and Pickering is shown to come from India exclusively to meet Higgins and seemingly Higgins tells Pickering that he has the power to mould Eliza and present her as a Duchess simply by training her to speak appropriately. There begins a romantic comedy on love and the social class system. In the subsequent acts, we find that the challenge taken up by Higgins, to transform the Cockney flower girl to a sophisticated socially acceptable individual, gets to be a success.

But sadly at this juncture when the reader rejoices in the transformation of Eliza to a lovely young woman of refinement, sensitivity and superior taste, we find Higgins dismissing her unexpectedly as a singularly successfully completed experiment and nothing more. This acted unfavourably for Eliza, who now couldn’t be identified as a proper upper class with the elite mannerisms and speech that she had recently inculcated, nor could she be at peace as a woman belonging to the lower class, from which she hailed. She is disillusioned and terribly upset at the way things evolved and sets the reader’s mind too in a dilemma for a solution to this unique situation.