pygmalion theme essay

11 Important Themes Of Pygmalion & Symbolism| By Bernard Shaw

Pygmalion, written by George Bernard Shaw, explores themes of social class, identity transformation, and the power dynamics inherent in language. Through themes of Pygmalion, Shaw shows the complexities and realities of the societal structure portrayed in the play.

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) was an Irish playwright and critic. Although he was renowned for his wit and sharp social commentary, Shaw became a main figure in the literary and theatrical world of the overdue nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Pygmalion by Shaw is a romantic comedy like Twelfth Night By Shakespeare .

He obtained the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925 for his contributions to drama. Here we’ll discuss the Themes Of Pygmalion;

Table of Contents

Themes Of Pygmalion

1. language and speech.

The central theme of “Pygmalion” is language, a potent instrument that creates connections and modifies perceptions. Here, Eliza Doolittle is the subject of Professor Henry Higgins’ bold experiment, which demonstrates the transformational power of words.

Eliza’s transformation from a rough-talking flower girl to a sophisticated lady via intense instruction highlights the significant impact of language proficiency on perception and social mobility.

The play also makes us consider the significance of our words and their weight, emphasizing the power of effective communication to influence people’s lives.

Shaw questions the idea that social supremacy and linguistic sophistication are mutually exclusive, encouraging listeners to think about the value of real human connection and the authenticity of language.

Shaw invites us to consider the nuances of language, identity, and social class through Eliza’s journey, emphasizing the power dynamics in communication and the transforming potential of linguistic self-expression.

2. Transformation

In addition, Pygmalion invites us to witness the metamorphosis of Eliza Doolittle from a humble flower girl to a refined lady. This transformation is not merely physical but also psychological, illustrating the profound influence of environment and education on an individual’s identity.

Additionally, Shaw challenges us to question the malleability of human nature and the power of external forces in shaping character.

3. Appearance and Identity

George Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion” explores the complex relationships between identity and appearance, upending social norms and encouraging in-depth reflection.

Shaw draws attention to the way society places a premium on outward looks and the malleability of identity through the dramatic metamorphosis of Eliza Doolittle from a rough flower girl to an elegant lady.

Shaw challenges viewers to think about the difficulties of self-expression and the shallowness of superficial social judgments based only on looks as Eliza struggles with issues of authenticity and self-worth.

In addition, the play forces us to consider the façades we put on for the outside world and the sincerity that resides beneath them.

Shaw challenges us to consider the underlying meaning of identity beyond cultural norms and surface-level impressions through Eliza’s journey.

4. Manipulation

Professor Higgins, with his linguistic prowess, becomes a puppet master, manipulating language to reshape Eliza according to his wishes.

Moreover, this theme deals with the ethical dimensions of influence, encouraging us to question the boundaries of mentorship and the responsibility that comes with the power to mold others.

5. Social Class and Manners

George Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion” features a recurring issue of socioeconomic class, most illustrated by Eliza Doolittle’s transformation.

Under Professor Henry Higgins’ guidance, Eliza, who was originally presented as a lower-class flower girl with gruff manners and a Cockney accent, has a dramatic makeover. Her extensive training in speech and manners allows her to blend in as a sophisticated woman in upper-class society.

Eliza still faces challenges with acceptability in both social circles and her identity, despite her improved appearance and manners. This shift calls into question the validity of society’s judgments of value based on outward appearances and emphasizes the arbitrary nature of class divisions.

Furthermore, “Pygmalion” deftly breaks down the inflexible framework of social class, questioning accepted ideas that establish societal hierarchies.

Moreover, Eliza’s journey from impoverishment to sophistication compels us to face the inequalities embedded in our societal structure, promoting a critical analysis of the obstacles impeding upward mobility.

6. Femininity

The play serves as a platform to challenge traditional notions of femininity. Eliza’s journey becomes a rallying cry against the limitations imposed by societal expectations.

Moreover, Shaw encourages us to question gender roles and recognize the inherent strength within every individual, regardless of societal norms.

7. Hopes and Dreams

In exploring the dreams of its characters, Pygmalion becomes a canvas of human aspirations. In addition, Eliza’s pursuit of a better life echoes universal desires for self-improvement and a brighter future.

Moreover, the play inspires us to reflect on the significance of dreams in propelling individuals forward despite societal constraints.

8. Sex Roles

With characters defying traditional gender roles, Pygmalion challenges the stereotypical constructs that confine individuals based on their sex.

Moreover, this play also urges us to reconsider societal expectations and appreciate the complexity of human identity beyond binary norms.

While wealth is an apparent theme of Pygmalion, Pygmalion goes beyond the materialistic interpretation. It deals with the values associated with wealth and the impact of socioeconomic status on individual perceptions.

Although Shaw prompts us to ponder the true worth of wealth beyond its tangible manifestations.

10. Stereotypes

Throughout Pygmalion, Shaw shares the themes of Pygmalion. As he skillfully shatters stereotypes associated with language, appearance, and social class in Pygmalion .

In this play, characters show conventional expectations, challenging us to confront our biases and reassess the judgments we unconsciously place on others.

11. Reality

As the curtains draw, Pygmalion confronts us with the inescapable reality of life. Despite the transformative journey, the characters are tethered to the undeniable truth of their existence.

Furthermore, Shaw reminds us that, amidst dreams and aspirations, one cannot escape the gravity of reality.

Symbolism in Pygmalion

Characters In Pygmalion

Professor henry higgins.

Professor Higgins is a renowned linguist who is self-assured, unconventional, and witty. He also has a low tolerance for social graces.

At first, he views Eliza as nothing more than an experiment, but as she changes, he becomes more and more involved, displaying his social incompetence as much as his intelligence.

Eliza Doolittle

Eliza Doolittle: Eliza, a vibrant and driven young lady, starts off as a flower girl in Cockney with hopes for a better life. Her trip tackles topics of identity, self-discovery, and how socioeconomic class affects one’s prospects throughout the play.

Colonel Pickering

Professor Higgins finds a counterpoint in Colonel Pickering, a polite and elegant gentleman. Unlike Higgins, who is frequently harsh, he is truly interested in phonetics and has a more kind and caring manner.

Alfred Doolittle

Eliza’s father, Alfred, is a charming mischievous person who enjoys lavish parties. His persona injects humor into the drama, and his dealings with the upper classes offer satirical insight into Edwardian England’s inflexible class system.

His genuineness and irreverence have a charming aspect despite his shortcomings.

Famous Quotes Of Pygmalion

“The moment I let you sit down in that chair and talk to me as if we were equals, you presume to give yourself airs.”

“It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.”

In addition, Here Shaw discusses the themes of Pygmalion, exploring the depths of human experience through the lenses of language, transformation, appearance, manipulation, social class, femininity, hopes and dreams, sex roles, wealth, stereotypes, and reality.

Moreover, as we navigate these themes, we are compelled to introspect, challenging our perspectives and embracing the profound complexities that define the human condition.

The central theme of Pygmalion is the transformation of a person’s identity through education and social change.

The moral of Pygmalion emphasizes the impact of societal expectations on individual identity and the potential for personal growth.

The theme of Pygmalion regarding society and class explores the influence of language, behavior, and appearance on social status and acceptance.

The main plot of Pygmalion revolves around a bet between Professor Higgins and Colonel Pickering to transform Eliza Doolittle, a working-class flower girl, into a refined lady through speech and etiquette training.

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A Summary and Analysis of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Although it is often conflated in the popular imagination with the much-loved musical it inspired, George Bernard Shaw’s 1912 play Pygmalion is somewhat different from the romantic comedy My Fair Lady . Let’s take a closer look at Shaw’s play and some of its prominent themes. Before we offer an analysis of Pygmalion , though, let’s briefly recap the story of the play.

Pygmalion : summary

The ‘plot’ of Shaw’s play is easy enough to summarise. Henry Higgins, a professor of phonetics, has an almost Sherlockian ability to deduce the hometown or region of anyone based on their accent. He overhears a flower girl named Eliza Doolittle and mocks the common way she talks. The next day, Eliza shows up and asks Higgins to give her elocution lessons so she can learn to talk ‘proper’.

Eliza’s father, Alfred Doolittle, shows up and tries to get some money off Higgins: he shows himself to be boorish and prone to violence – he tries to strike his daughter when she sticks her tongue out at him – and Higgins, realising the upbringing his young protégé has had, acknowledges that he has taken on a mammoth task in trying to make Eliza into a respectable-sounding lady.

Higgins nevertheless accepts the challenge, with his friend Colonel Pickering betting him that he can’t pass Eliza off as a lady at the ambassador’s party in six months’ time. Higgins is emboldened by this challenge, and a few months later he tests his progress on Eliza by taking her to his mother’s drawing-room party, where Eliza’s diction impresses the partygoers. However, her use of vulgar language – including the swearword ‘bloody’ – is greeted less enthusiastically.

But the young Freddy Eynsford-Hill is smitten by her, and pursues her. At the ambassador’s ball, Eliza charms everyone with her diction and her language, and Higgins wins his bet. However, he loses interest in her afterwards, much to her annoyance. Indeed, he even crows that her transformation is only superficial and possible because of his work on her; when her father appears, announcing his marriage, and Eliza immediately reverts to her Cockney speech, he is triumphant. Eliza accepts Freddy’s attention instead, agreeing to marry him.

Note: the most famous line from the play was also the most daring. When Eliza is leaving Mrs Higgins’s party and Freddy asks her if she plans to walk across the park, Eliza replies, ‘Walk? Not bloody likely!’ Mrs. Patrick Campbell, for whom Shaw wrote the part of Eliza Doolittle, was risking her whole career in saying such a strong swearword, for the times, on the public stage.

Pygmalion : analysis

Most theatre critics regard the musical adaptation of Shaw’s play, the Lerner and Loewe musical My Fair Lady , as a sentimental travesty of Pygmalion , and with good reason – not least because the friendship between Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle in Shaw’s play is founded on Higgins’s professional pride (read: arrogance) rather than any romantic interest he has in her. His lifelong bachelorhood is a result of his love for his mother, as Shaw himself made clear, and his interest in Eliza is purely professional.

Indeed, as the great critic Michael Billington notes in The 101 Greatest Plays: From Antiquity to the Present , Pygmalion is actually an ‘ironic inversion’ of the standard romantic plot. It gives us a boy (well, man) who meets a girl and then uses her to try to win a bet, before casting her aside as soon as he’s done so: hardly the way we expect a romantic comedy to end. Shaw felt the need to qualify his ending by adding a long epilogue to the play when it was printed.

Taking the superficial structure of the romantic comedy and inverting it for his own ends, Shaw explores the English class system with all of its petty attitudes and posturings. The fact that a Cockney flower girl can, with a few months’ tuition, be trained up so she will convince even the most blue-blooded within society that she is one of them doesn’t say much for the inherent superiority of the upper classes. It’s all a sham, a show: class is not just a social construct, but an artificial one.

The title of Shaw’s play alludes to the classical myth of Pygmalion, a Cretan king who fell in love with his own sculpture. She was transformed into a woman, Galatea, by Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love. But here again, as Billington observes, Shaw inverts this love story: in Pygmalion a woman is turned into a statue, a ‘mechanical doll who resembles a duchess’.

As Shaw makes clear in the epilogue to the play, Eliza makes a carefully considered decision not to marry Professor Higgins, not least because she realises she could never supplant his mother in his affections.

Shaw’s socialist thinking is central to his exploration of the English class system in Pygmalion . In his depiction of the ease with which Eliza is transformed into a lady in fashionable upper-class society, he exposes the hollowness at the heart of that society.

And yet just as Eliza is easily made into a passable lady, so the spell can instantly wear off and she can be transformed back into her former self, such as when Mr Doolittle appears in the final act. It is, apparently, harder to lose or forget our humble roots than it might first appear.

But another of Shaw’s interests – indeed, his life’s project – is at the core of Pygmalion : the English language as it is spoken. In his preface to the play, Shaw famously argued, ‘It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.’ He also states in the preface: ‘If the play makes the public aware that there are such people as phoneticians, and that they are among its most important people in England at present, it will serve its turn.’

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by George Bernard Shaw

Pygmalion Themes

T he main themes in Pygmalion include social class and accent, manners and etiquette, and subversion of conventional romance.

• Social class and accent: Shaw demonstrates the extent to which accent reflected social class and determined respectability in England in the early twentieth century.
• Manners and etiquette: Higgins is able to teach Eliza etiquette, but as he is self-centered, he cannot teach her manners: she learns manners from those who treat her with respect.
• Subversion of conventional romance: Though Higgins and Eliza are attracted to each other, Shaw implies that they will not end up together, as he disliked those sorts of endings.

Pygmalion Study Tools

Social class and accent.

Although all countries have social classes and divisions between rich and poor, England is unusual in the degree to which accent and vocabulary are correlated with class. Bernard Shaw points out in the preface that

It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.

Higgins is a professor of phonetics and conducts serious scientific research, but he makes his money by using his knowledge of phonetics to help people whose origins lie in the lower classes to pretend that they are part of the upper class. No matter how much money they have or how much they achieve, they will never be accepted in aristocratic or even middle-class society unless they have the right sort of accent.

Although this linguistic phenomenon was well-established by 1913, it was actually of comparatively recent origin, as Shaw was well aware. By the middle of the nineteenth century, it had become established practice for rich families to send their sons to public schools (which were called “public” because they were famous, not because they were open to the general public). Higgins immediately recognizes that Colonel Pickering attended Harrow, one of the best-known of these schools. At these public schools, the pupils all learned to speak in the same way, giving rise to a single “received pronunciation,” which had not existed before. In 1750, an aristocrat from Yorkshire would have spoken approximately the same sort of English as the men who worked on his estate. By 1850, he would have barely been able to understand their dialect. 

Shaw had lived in England for a long time when he wrote Pygmalion , but he remained an observer and an outsider. In the play, he is constantly commenting on the extreme importance of accent in English social life. For Higgins, correct and articulate speech is so central to identity that he imagines (quite wrongly) that he can remake Eliza into a completely different person simply by changing the way she speaks. It is Colonel Pickering and Mrs. Higgins who teach Eliza what it really means to be a lady, and they begin by treating her like one, which Higgins never does. They demonstrate to Eliza and to the audience the fallacy of Higgins’s view that accent is synonymous with class. In this respect, Higgins is guilty of the same mistake as the social snobs he describes with such scorn at the beginning of act 4.

Manners and Etiquette

Etiquette is a matter of correct form, whereas manners involve considering the feelings of others. A man who holds his knife and fork incorrectly commits a breach of etiquette, while those who sneer at him for it exhibit bad manners. The distinction between manners and etiquette is central to the play.

While Eliza is taking a bath in act 2, Mrs. Pearce returns to warn Higgins that he will have to alter his own behavior if he is to set a good example for his new pupil. Higgins is prone to cursing at the slightest provocation, and his personal habits, such as wiping his fingers on his dressing gown, leave much to be desired.

Higgins has been well brought-up. His mother is a lady who has elegance, good taste, and irreproachable manners. However, though Higgins knows the correct way to behave, he is often too impatient and preoccupied with other matters to pay attention to his conduct or to the effect that he creates in polite society. Both his manners and his etiquette are at fault, but he is aware of the latter when he makes the effort to remember it. His manners are bad because he is self-centered. This is why Eliza says that if she had only had the example of Higgins before her, she would never have learned to be a lady. Higgins retorts that it is not important how one treats people as long as one treats them all the same. He tells Eliza,

The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls: in short, behaving as if you were in Heaven, where there are no third-class carriages, and one soul is as good as another.

Eliza, however, dismisses this as preaching.

The debate about what it means to have good manners and the connection between manners and etiquette are both important themes in the play. Higgins teaches Eliza etiquette, which is correct form, but he cannot teach her manners, since good manners involve caring about the feelings of others, as Colonel Pickering and Mrs. Higgins do. It is only when Eliza has learned to speak like a lady that Higgins shows any interest in her as a human being, which suggests that his claim to treat everyone equally is not well-founded. The etiquette of others has an effect on him, whether he admits it or not.

Subversion of Conventional Romance

Higgins and Eliza are clearly the two major figures in the play, which explores their feelings for each other in some depth. These are not conventionally romantic feelings, however, and the play does not not have a conventional happy ending—or even a conclusive one. Shaw objected to plots where the hero marries the heroine and tended to avoid them in all his plays. He wrote a long epilogue or “sequel” to Pygmalion at least partly to make it clear that Eliza will not marry or have a conventional romantic relationship with Higgins. In the last paragraph, he says that she sometimes longs to “drag him off his pedestal and see him making love like any common man,” but she will never do so. She finds Higgins immensely interesting. There is a sense in which she loves him, but she does not like him as she likes Freddy, for “his relation to her is too godlike to be altogether agreeable.”

Shaw states it as a simple fact that in real life, Eliza would marry Freddy, a man close to her own age whom she likes and who makes her feel comfortable, rather than have a passionate but probably dysfunctional relationship with Higgins. In addition, he regards Eliza’s choice as perfectly sensible. Her strong personality is more compatible with Freddy’s weak one than it is with Higgins’s equally strong character. It is for the best that Eliza’s fantasies about Higgins should remain fantasies. Higgins himself certainly has feelings for Eliza, but he is too devoted to his work—and perhaps to his mother—to make a good husband. The complexities of Higgins and Eliza’s feelings for one another do not allow a simple solution, such as marriage or even a love affair. They are not shoehorned into any type of conventional arrangement but remain complex and difficult to define. The “sequel” describes Eliza and Freddy’s marriage in realistic terms: not unhappy, but far from a fairy tale or even a traditional comedy.

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George Bernard Shaw

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Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

Pygmalion: Introduction

Pygmalion: plot summary, pygmalion: detailed summary & analysis, pygmalion: themes, pygmalion: quotes, pygmalion: characters, pygmalion: symbols, pygmalion: literary devices, pygmalion: quizzes, pygmalion: theme wheel, brief biography of george bernard shaw.

Historical Context of Pygmalion

Other books related to pygmalion.

• Full Title: Pygmalion
• When Written: 1912
• Where Written: London
• When Published: 1912
• Literary Period: Victorian period
• Genre: Drama, comedy, comedy of manners
• Setting: London
• Climax: In act four, after winning the bet concerning Eliza, Higgins says he has been bored with his experiment, and treats Eliza poorly. Infuriated, Eliza throws Higgins' slippers at him and argues and fights with him.
• Antagonist: While Eliza and Higgins argue with each other, they both cooperate in order to fool London's high society. The rigid hierarchy of social classes in Victorian England can be seen as the antagonist against which all the characters struggle, as they deal with issues of class and wealth.

Extra Credit for Pygmalion

Double Threat. George Bernard Shaw is the only person to have ever won both the Nobel Prize in Literature and an Oscar. He won the Oscar for his work on a film adaptation of Pygmalion .

Thanks But No Thanks. At first, Shaw declined to accept the Nobel Prize. He later changed his mind, but still refused the prize money, wanting it instead to fund translations of Swedish literature into English.

• Quizzes, saving guides, requests, plus so much more.

by George Bernard Shaw

Pygmalion study guide.

Pygmalion has become by far Shaw's most famous play, mostly through its film adaptation in 1938. Shaw was intimately involved with the making of the film. He wrote the screenplay and was the first man to win both a Nobel Prize and an Academy Award.

Shaw wrote the part of Eliza Doolittle for a beautiful actress named Mrs. Patrick Campbell, with whom it was rumored that he was having an affair. This rumor later turned out not to be true, and some critics read the disappointed love affair between Higgins and Eliza as reflecting Shaw's own romantic frustrations including a long, celibate marriage.

Shaw once proclaimed: "The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it. They spell it so abominably that no man can teach himself what it sounds like." Much of Pygmalion is wrapped up with the class identification that comes with having an accent in British society. As a socialist with strong convictions, Shaw used the stage to expose hypocrisies surrounding marriage, language, and convention. Shaw's preoccupation with language in this play may also have had something to do with the fact that the most frequent criticism of his earlier plays was that his characters engaged in witty banter that lacked depth. By making language the center of this play, Shaw highlights the significance of something that his critics, despite their criticisms, were tending to downplay.

Pygmalion Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Pygmalion is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

What tensions already show in the relations between the Mother (later named as Mrs. Eynsford Hill), the Daughter (later named as Clara), and the son, Freddy?

It is raining in Covent Garden at 11:15 p.m. Clara complains that Freddy has not found a cab yet. Freddy returns to his mother and sister and explains that there are no cabs to be found. They chide him, and as he runs off to try again to find a...

What does Higgins mean when he says, “teaching would be impossible unless pupils were sacred”?

Higgins is answering Pickering's charge that he cannot be involved in an experiment where the girl (Eliza) is not treated with the utmost respect. Higgins replies that his pupils are sacred, which means regarded with reverence and respect.

explain the myth of pygmalion in what significant ways and with what effect.has shaw transformed that myth into his plav?

This story is about a sculptor who sculpts the most beautiful woman in stone ever and then falls in love with her. The sculptor's name is Pygmalion; the goddess in the myth transforms the stone into a real woman and they live happily ever...

Study Guide for Pygmalion

Pygmalion study guide contains a biography of George Bernard Shaw, literature essays, a complete e-text, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Pygmalion
• Pygmalion Summary
• Character List

Essays for Pygmalion

Pygmalion essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw.

• An Atypical Romance in Five Acts
• Nurture or Nature: The Gentleman Versus the Guttersnipe
• Pygmalion and Pretty Woman
• The Extent Contextual Attitudes and Values Regarding Gender and Class are Maintained or Altered in Pygmalion and Pretty Women
• The didactic purpose of Shaw's 'Pygmalion'

Lesson Plan for Pygmalion

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to Pygmalion
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• Pygmalion Bibliography

E-Text of Pygmalion

The Pygmalion e-text contains the full text of Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw.

• Preface to Pygmalion

Wikipedia Entries for Pygmalion

• Introduction

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A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.

Act Summaries & Analyses

Character Analysis

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

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Discussion Questions

Formal Education and Multiple Intelligences

Shaw differentiates between formal education and multiple forms of natural intelligence throughout the play. He associates formal education with the upper classes. Both Higgins and Pickering are academics who have studied linguistics and phonetics. Higgins displays his academic brilliance in the first act when he accurately identifies the dialects of those around him. For example, based on his training in dialectology, he “promptly” (Act I, Page 19) pinpoints a sarcastic bystander as coming from Hoxton. Pickering is star-struck upon meeting him, revealing that Higgins is a recognized and esteemed scholar. Higgins approaches the bet that Pickering proposes with the precision of a scientist conducting an experiment, coldly regarding Eliza as if she were another laboratory tool rather than a human being whose life will be impacted by his reworking of her speech and image. He successfully taught Nepommuck and others proper English and views this as evidence of his skill and worth.

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