Pygmalion皮格马利翁分析.docx

Why are there so many references to “what is to become” of Eliza? Trace these references throughout the play. What broader concern for society might Shaw be expressing?George Bernard Shaw, an Irish playwright of the 20th century, is universally recognized as the greatest of all dramatists since Shakespeare. Of his 51 plays, we are deeply impressed by many female images, such as Mrs. Warren, Major Barbara, and Joan of Arc etc. Generally speaking, these females mostly are endowed with similar personalities: diligence, courage, independence and rationality. While, from Eliza, the heroine of Pygmalion, we could not find anything doughty in her, but a more human, natural progress of self-awareness and self-growth. The myth of Pygmalion came from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Pygmalion was a sculptor who sculpted an incredibly beautiful maiden for himself, due to his intense antipathy for the secular females. Then, he fell in love with the sculpture and begged Aphrodite to give life to it. Finally Aphrodite turned the sculpture into a beauty named Galatea; Pygmalion and Galatea got married at last. In Shaw’s play, the linguist Higgins betted with Colonel Pickering that he could turn the rude flower girl Eliza into a fair lady of the upper class by adjusting her pronunciation, making up her appearance and teaching her etiquettes within 6 months .Through kinds of hell-like trainings, they finally succeed. In the myth, the sculpture turned into a beauty and she only knew she was the wife of Pygmalion; in Shaw’s play, Eliza was transformed from humble flower girl into an elegant lady and everyone in the party believed she must be “a Hungarian princess”. Compared with Galatea, the transformation brought Eliza so many puzzles that she lost herself for a time and impelled her to consider self-positioning. There is something more important than the outside changes; that is the self-awareness and self-growth of the heroine. She was no longer an inferior flower girl, but became a resistan