?Class Distinctions in PygmalionPygmalion, by George Bernard Shaw, is a thrilling dramain which a scientist of phonetics tries to transform acockney speaking Covent Garden flower girl into a woman aspoised and well-spoken as a duchess. The play considerssome of the illusions of the class distinctions. This isrepresented by the characters, their situations, and theirEliza Doolittle starts out as a sassy, smart-mouthedflower girl with disgraceful English. See goes to seeProfessor Higgins to see if he will teach her to speakproperly and act more like a lady. This also would requireher to become a high-classed member of society. I want to be a lady in a flower shop stead of sellin atthe corner of Tottenham Court Road.
But they wont takeme unless I can talk more genteel. He said he couldteach me. Well, here I am ready to pay himnot askingany favorand he treats me zif I was dirt. (1160)That was the flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, talking toColonel Pickering about how she want to become a lady andhow Mr. Higgins refused to help her because she belongs tothe lower-classed section of society. Later she finallyconvinces Mr.
Higgins to help her, but to him she is just anMr. Higgins is a high-classed professor of phonetics. He believes in concepts like visible speech, and used allmanners of recording and photographic material to documenthis phonetic subjects. This reduces people and theirdialects into what he sees as easily understandable units. However, he is also a very eccentric man. He goes in theopposite direction from the rest of society for mostmatters.
He is also very impatient with high society, eventhough he is a member of it. But even more then the highsociety, he treats the lower end of society with even lessrespect. Pickering: shall we ask this baggage to sit down,or shall we throw her out of the window (1160). That wasMr.
Higgins talking to Colonel Pickering about ElizaDoolittle. He talks to her with attitude and continuouslymakes rude comments just like that one towards her. He actsvery rudely towards her because he feels that she is just anexperiment of phonetics and sometimes he shows that heEliza Doolittle and Mr. Higgins are in a situation. Eliza wants to become a lady and Mr. Higgins is trying toturn her into one.
In order for Higgins to transform Elizainto a lady he must teach her to speak and act properly. They accomplish this after a couple months, but somethingstill wasnt right. She still had that low class attitudeand it was noticeable. In order for her to become a reallady, she had to become a member of high society.
Playing! The hardest job I ever tackled: make nomistake about that, mother. But you have no idea howfrightfully interesting it is to take a human being andchange her into a quite different human being bycreating a new speech for her. Its filling up thedeepest gulf that separates class from class and soulThat was Mr. Higgins talking to his mom. What he meant bysaying that was that teaching her to speak properly wouldend the difference between the classes.
However, he alsohas a long while until she is finally and completely a lady. This play also has lots of aphoristic comments. Theseare short, pointed sentences expressing a wise or clever Would the world ever have been made if its maker hadbeen afraid of making trouble? Making life means makingtrouble. Theres only one way of escaping trouble; andthats killing things.
Cowards, you notice, are alwaysshrieking to have troublesome people killed (1199). That was Mrs. Higgins talking to Liza. This comment thatshe made was definitely an aphorism. This is because shewas making a wise observation on trouble in life. She issaying that all parts of life including all social classeshave some trouble in them, but that is what makes it life.
Without trouble life would be boring and pointless. The fact that Pygmalion contains illusions of classdistinctions is clearly shown through the characters, theirsituations, and their aphoristic comments. In Elizas questto become a lady she had to deal with many social classproblems, however, she overcomes them with the help of Hr.Higgins and becomes a high class lady.Bibliography:
