Pygmalion: the Play and Higgins Essay Sample
Pygmalion is a chiefly Shavian reworking of Ovid’s Metamorphoses with undertones of Cinderella. Romance and sarcasm dominate both the play’s secret plan every bit good as manner. Shaw takes a strong cardinal situation–the transmutation of a common flower miss into a lady–and surrounds it with superficial fixingss. There is proficient invention in the secret plan construction since Shaw. under the influence of Ibsen. replaces the stock Victorian expression of expounding. state of affairs and unknoting with expounding. state of affairs and treatment. The secret plan therefore has three distinguishable phases of development. In the first phase Professor Henry Higgins. who is an expert in phonetics. transforms a common flower miss into an unreal reproduction of a lady by learning her how to talk right. Prior to this Eliza’s life has been suffering. As a hapless flower miss she coaxes money out of prospective clients and is thrilled when she all of a sudden receives a smattering of coins that Higgins throws into her basket. She lacks the capacity to show her feelings eloquently and an indiscriminate sound of vowels “Ah – ah – ow – ow – oo” serves to imply a battalion of emotions runing from hurting. admiration. and fright to delectation.
However she is non wholly depraved and is at least autonomous plenty to gain her ain support by selling flowers. In Act Two Eliza arrives at Higgins’ research lab at Wimpole Street and haughtily demands that Higgins learn her to talk right so that she can go a lady in a flower store. This desire for fiscal security and societal reputability constitutes a measure frontward in her larger pursuit for self- realisation. For Higgins Eliza is merely a phonic experiment. a position that dehumanizes her and consequences in the creative activity of an unreal automaton-like reproduction of a lady. In the 2nd phase of the drama the audience encounters an Eliza who has become an unreal duchess. She is no longer a flower miss but is non rather a lady. During Mrs. Higgins’ at-home she proceeds to present Lisson Grove chitchat with an upper category speech pattern. She is nil more than a unrecorded doll and there is an component of crudeness in her parrot-like conversation. The mask of breeding that she wears merely partly hides her low category background. Shaw demonstrates here that holding all right apparels and the right speech pattern are non plenty to do a lady. The fact that the Eynsford-Hills fail to see through her facade implies that they excessively do non possess true breeding.
By the clip that Eliza returns after her exultant society visual aspect at the Ambassador’s ball. she no longer exhibits this component of crudeness. She has benefited from Higgins’s lessons in accomplishing societal poise and has acquired the ability to joint her ideas and feelings. She has begun to believe for herself and is capable of pull stringsing any state of affairs to her advantage. The drama enters into the 3rd stage of development in Act Four. Eliza now encounters the great minute of truth and world of her state of affairs. Her instruction has created in her an intense dissatisfaction with the old manner of life and she is non precisely pleased about the avenues open to her as a lady. She realizes that her societal acquisitions do non enable her to carry through her aspirations or even gain a life. She becomes cognizant of the broad disparity between her desires and the insufficiency of the agencies for carry throughing them.
She repudiates Higgins’ suggestion that she could get married a affluent hubby and wryly remarks that earlier “I sold flowers. I didn’t sell myself” while now that she has been made a lady she isn’t tantrum to sell anything. She has thrown away her mask and reveals a newfound adulthood. She throws Higgins’ slippers at him and thereby interruptions free from a life of subjection and dependance. Critics feel that at this point the drama enters into a period of composure and the chief drift of the action dissipates. Eliza’s society visual aspect has been a enormous success and after the climatic brush between Higgins and Eliza in Act Four the dramatic tenseness disappears. Eliza runs off to Mrs. Higgins and the lone issue left is the declaration of her relationship with Higgins. The readers have to hold that the chief drift of the action has disappeared since all the predating Acts of the Apostless had been pitching up for the important minute of Eliza’s trial. Now Alfred Doolittle’s strategic 2nd visual aspect performs a resuscitating act for the drama in its death phase. Doolittle’s transmutation from a garbage man to a gentleman besides provides an dry remark on Eliza’s metabolism.
After this brief spirit of energy the action returns to the issue at manus – the relationship between Eliza and Higgins. Eliza has developed into a self-sufficing adult female and has become a perfect lucifer for Higgins. She has garnered the needed strength of character and adulthood of idea to confront life bravely. Gentility has become an built-in facet of her personality. No longer afraid of Higgins. she treats him as an equal. She negates his function in her transmutation and insists that it was the Colonel’s generousness and gracious behaviour. which genuinely made her a lady. She rejects Higgins’ proposal that he. she and Pickering unrecorded together like old unmarried man friends and astounds him by denoting that she will get married Freddy alternatively and back up him by offering herself as an helper to Nepommuck. Higgins. although injury at Eliza’s suggestion of helping the abhorrent Nepommuck. is however happy that Eliza is no longer a whining incapacitated animal but a tower of strength and a adult female at last. The drama concludes on an unsure note and the readers do non cognize whether she might so get married Higgins. This reflects Shaw’s built-in antipathy for conclusiveness.
In the bulk of his dramas the issues and struggles they deal with are ne’er rather resolved and the audience is left inquiring about what will go on after the drape falls. However Shaw recognizing the importance of an stoping does supply a declaration in the epilogue. The dramalies neither in the struggle. nor in the treatment or the expounding. The struggle itself arises over the issue of the declaration of the job. Unless there is a declaration. there is no play. for the action remains uncomplete. Action ever has to be completed either comically or tragically. Hence in the epilogue. Shaw resolves the issue by doing Eliza marry Freddy Hill. It was typical of Shaw to hold provided such an anti-romantic decision to the drama. Many observers accuse Shaw of intentionally writhing the natural terminal of Pygmalion simply to do the drama unromantic. But critics would make good to retrieve that the existent point of stoping is non the issue of Eliza’s matrimony but her accomplishment of autonomy. While throughout the drama Higgins boasts of holding transformed a common flower miss into a duchess. after Eliza’s climactic averment of independency from his domination he comments. “I said I’d make a adult female of you ; and I have. ” In this position the original equivocal stoping seems preferred to the orderly declaration given in the epilogue.
