Pygmalion

Pygmalion · published 1913 · ISBN 9780141439501

George Bernard Shaw — George Bernard Shaw (1856 – 1950) — Ireland (based in England), writing in English. Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925.

“for his work which is marked by both idealism and humanity, its stimulating satire often being infused with a singular poetic beauty.” — The Nobel Committee citation

About George Bernard Shaw

Irish playwright, critic and polemicist — the sharpest wit of the modern English-language stage. He used comedy to dissect class prejudice, hypocrisy and social injustice, and remains the only person to have won both a Nobel Prize in Literature and an Academy Award (for the screen adaptation of Pygmalion).

How it came to be

Shaw wrote Pygmalion in 1912; it premiered in 1913. A passionate student of phonetics, he modelled Higgins partly on the phonetician Henry Sweet. The play satirises Edwardian England, where an accent could decide a destiny, and became one of his most-performed works — later adapted into the musical and film My Fair Lady.

What Pygmalion is about

On a rainy night in Covent Garden, phonetics professor Henry Higgins meets Eliza Doolittle, a flower girl with a broad working-class accent. He bets Colonel Pickering that in six months he can teach her to speak like a lady well enough to fool high society. The experiment succeeds beyond expectation — but once Eliza has become a poised gentlewoman she finds she belongs to neither her old world nor her new one, and forces Higgins to reckon with the person he has remade.

Analysis & legacy

Pygmalion takes the myth of the sculptor who falls in love with his own statue and turns it into a razor-sharp social comedy: phonetics professor Henry Higgins bets that, merely by changing her speech, he can pass off Covent Garden flower girl Eliza Doolittle as a "duchess." Shaw makes the voice itself a mirror of class — arguing that the English divide between gentility and poverty is largely a matter of learned pronunciation and manners, not birth. Beneath the laughter lies a thornier question: having "made" a new person, what does Higgins owe her? Eliza is no grateful statue; she demands to be an independent human being. Shaw deliberately refuses the romantic ending audiences expect, and even wrote a prose sequel arguing why Eliza could never belong to Higgins.

Themes: Social class · Language & identity · Feminism · Social satire · Transformation

Rating: 3.9/5 from 50 ratings (Open Library).

What critics say

• for his work which is marked by both idealism and humanity, its stimulating satire often being infused with a singular poetic beauty. — Swedish Academy, Nobel 1925
• Higgins is called a professor of phonetics, but he is really an artist—that is the interesting thing about him, and his character is a study of the creative temperament. — Desmond MacCarthy, Shaw (collected theatre criticism)

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