Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion: themes and analysis

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 himself finally has no power over his creation, once the process of creation had been begun within the psychology and language of another human being's speech.

This is true of the spiraling and infinitely creative nature of language, which is constantly under revision in the street, and the fact that Higgins cannot control the fate of Eliza, although ironically and unsuccessfully Shaw attempted to do so, in his conclusion to the play. (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 master and changes that person's sense of their own self and place in the world. And by creating Eliza Dolittle's transformation and her dual persona, as well as overseeing Henry Higgins struggle to transform the cockney-accented rather crass flower girl into a mellifluous and well-dressed duchess through the media of performance and costume, Shaw was able to engage in a reinvention of himself as a popular author, one who was entertaining as well as educational, a sensational writer as well as a socialist author of wordy, sprawling plays.

And thus long before Derrida penned his deconstruction, Shaw through the medium of drama deployed Karl Marx's ideas about language in performance art in a radical fashion through populist art. In "Pygmalion," Shaw questioned through satire the binary oppositions of class and language, and as Derrida was later to calls them, the terms that uniquely characterize Western thought of essence vs. appearance, speech vs. writing, authenticity vs. performance. Change Eliza's way of speaking, change Eliza -- for one changes the way people relate to the girl, and also the way the girl moves through the world in a linguistic as well as a physical and social way.