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Jean Reynolds, "A New Speech," from Pygmalion's Wordplay
It is difficult to fully appreciate the radical use of dialect and language for a modern American, when reading Shaw's play "Pygmalion." However, Sally Reynolds' essay upon "A New Speech," from her longer text on Shaw entitled Pygmalion's Wordplay provides a window of insight into what she calls not simply a play, but a creation myth for British English, for the author in question, and the characters of the play. Reynolds stresses that Shaw not only did Shaw introduce mutability and flexibility into the seemingly insurmountable and impregnable British structure of class and language. By highlighting the importance of language in the creation of the human social self, he became an early postmodernist. Shaw brought Marxist class theory to language in a way that Marx never envisioned.
Through this process, Shaw created his first, truly popular and populist play and thus reinvented himself, in essence assuming in postmodern celebrity fashion the guise of Henry Higgins, deconstructing genius, gadfly, philosopher, social scientist, and teacher extraordinaire. But this creator, much like Shaw the creator...
(And even more ironically, in the musical guise of Pygmalion, "My Fair Lady," the personas of his greatest creations underwent further revisions in their fates.)
Thus, "Pygmalion's" embodiment of the Shavian creation myth functions in more ways than one -- through language one transforms class, identity and the self. Through changing a person's speech patterns, one assumes the role of the creator and puppet…
Capitalism in Pygmalion and Major Barbara -- Even a socialist Shaw must bend his ideological will to real-world demands George Bernard Shaw called himself a socialist and both his plays "Pygmalion" and "Major Barbara" criticize middle class aspirations and social pretensions. The author's socialist philosophy can be seen when it expressed with a certain irony, by Henry Higgins in "Pygmalion," where Higgins comments, that Eliza's offer to pay him in shillings
Pygmalion Effect and the Strong Women Who Prove it Wrong Make this fair statue mine…Give me the likeness of my iv'ry maid (Ovid). In Metamorphoses X, Ovid's Pygmalion prays that his idealized statue will become real. Strong female characters were a threat to Victorian sensibilities. Like the Pygmalion character in Ovid's Metamorphoses X, males in the Victorian age created ivory-like stereotypes of the ideal woman. In late nineteenth and in early
Shaw's primary purposes in writing Pygmalion, the story of a phonetics professor who, on a bet, transforms a guttersnipe of a flower girl into a lady, was to educate. The title of the play comes from the Greek myth of Pygmalion, a sculptor who created a statue of surpassing beauty; at his request, the gods animated the statue as Galatea. The myth is updated, and substantially altered, by Shaw;
This includes pretty much every human being everywhere, in any time and place. 4) One consistent theme in this play is the oddity that is the English language. Some have even argued that Shaw, like the early British Broadcasting System (BBC), wanted to standardize English pronunciation. Do you agree? or, can we read Eliza's dialect in some positive rather than critical way? Eliza's dialect is viewed with a certain negativity
Myths and Fables in "Pygmalion" and "Sexing the Cherry" This paper discusses the use of myths and fables in the two books, 'Pygmalion' and 'Sexing the cherry' written by George Bernard Shaw and Jeanette Winterson respectively. While Shaw's play is inspired by the Greek myth of a talented sculptor Pygmalion, Winterson has used the famous fable of twelve dancing princesses as just one part of her novel and hasn't based her
female characters in the two books 'Pygmalion' by George Bernard Shaw and 'Sexing the Cherry' by Jeanette Winterson. The two authors have assigned different attributed to their female leading characters but if studied carefully we would notice that purpose of creating such figures is identical in both cases. ELIZA AND DOG WOMAN The two books Pygmalion and Sexing the Cherry are starkly different in their storyline and narrative techniques, yet the