Professional paper
Gender and Class in George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion
Iva Kurtović
orcid.org/0000-0002-4369-7560
; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion depicts a young flower girl’s
linguistic and sartorial transformation into a fake duchess under the tutelage of a
well-off phonetician. Eliza Doolittle’s and Henry Higgins’s clashing personalities
and humorous misunderstandings however point to wider societal forces – that of
gender and class. The circumstances of their meeting and their initial interactions
serve as clear illustrations of their disparate levels of education, sophistication and
social capital. Eliza Doolittle’s position as a young working-class woman makes her
uniquely vulnerable to exploitation at the hands of middle-class men, and while
Shaw does not frame Higgins as predatory, he nevertheless emphasizes Eliza’s
anxieties and worries. Even though Higgins’s clear lack of interest or ill-intent
enables the readers to laugh at Eliza’s fear for her virtue, as her transformation
progresses, the untenability of her new social position becomes glaringly obvious.
Higgins may have corrected Eliza’s speech and provided her with fashionable
clothes, but he has no interest in concerning himself with her future, now that
she is too genteel to work as a flower girl, but too poor to truly ascend to a higher
class. This lack of consideration for Eliza’s prospects can be interpreted as a sign
of Higgins’s uncaring character, but is also a symptom of wider societal obstacles
facing women trying to find their place in the world. Eliza manages to triumph
and carve a space for herself by integrating her two identities, in the end thriving
as an amalgam of the duchess Higgins presented her as and the flower girl she
once was.
Keywords
Pygmalion, G. B. Shaw, gender, class
Hrčak ID:
264984
URI
Publication date:
29.10.2021.
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