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...

The nature of the environment around us is governed by the sciences. Chemical reactions can be represented by equations, specific bonds form between certain molecules, and organisms act based upon biological processes. In a world where people can...

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...

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...

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...

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....

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...

Contextual attitudes and values regarding gender and class in Pretty Woman (1990), directed by Garry Marshall, and Pygmalion (1913), written by George Bernard Shaw, are predominantly maintained throughout both texts, although minor adaptions have...

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...

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...

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....

I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely. -Simone de Beauvoir Tête-à-Tête: The Lives and Loves of Simone de Beauvoir & Jean-Paul Sartre

This paper seeks to examine and...

At first glance and introduction, it seems Mr. Doolittle is no more than a slovenly and crude navvyman. He serves the plot as nothing more than a physical representation of where Eliza comes from. However, in the two scenes he is in, he steals the...

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...

The honest and compelling transformation of a simple flower girl from a disempowered ‘draggle-tailed guttersnipe’ to a ‘fierce’ woman who demands what she ‘want[s]’ and feistily laments the loss of her ‘independence’ is emblematic of the laudable...

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...

Most writers find it extremely difficult to convey the feeling of love via the written word. In fact, many people feel inspired to write by that challenge alone. Love cannot be summed up in a sentence or a paragraph, let alone a song or a poem....

In the play Pygmalion, we get to know Mister Higgins as a man who knows what he wants, he is not afraid to say what he thinks and he acts like nobody can tell him what to do. But even though he looks a bit arrogant, self-assured and bossy, he is...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and Bernard Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession both follow characters who are portrayed as existing on the limits of their respective societies. Santiago and Mrs. Warren both maintain their fringe positions...

Nobody with any literary merit would deny that the title character of Charlotte Bronte’s novel, Jane Eyre and Vivie Warren of George Bernard Shaw’s play, Mrs. Warren’s Profession are groundbreaking feminist characters of Victorian Literature....