¶ … 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 twentieth century literature, Victorian culture was frequently lampooned or criticized by creating ivory-maiden characters that broke or flouted the stereotype in various ways in order to deal with the insane male dominated reality.
Like the statue in the original Pygmalion, women have to deal with the stereotypical images dictated by the male society. In all three of our works Riders to the Sea by J.M. Synge (Maurya), Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw (Eliza) and Trifles by Susan Glaspell (Minnie), the three female characters have to deal with male domination and push the envelopes of their femininity to deal with the male-dominated world of Victorian sensibilities. The male figures are shown to be short sighted and blinded by their prejudice concerning women. These male figures look only at the superficial aspects of the females in their lives and fail to perceive the sophistication of these women. They try to mold the women instead into their ideal female likeness.
George Bernard Shaw's work has spawned a genre within sociology and its effect is often cited with regards to education and social class. The Pygmalion effect "teacher-expectancy effect" refers to situations where perform better than their peers simply because they were expected to do so. The effect requires a student to...
In effect, it is a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. In Pygmalion, Professor Henry Higgins makes a bet that he can teach a poor flower girl to speak and act like an upper-class lady, and is successful.
In all three plays the women's characters are shown to be much deeper and sophisticated than the men make them out to be. Like the statue of the beautiful woman in Ovid's Metamorphoses, there is more to meet the eye than the surface material indicates. There is a beautiful woman underneath. In all three of our modern plays, the women are like ivory-hard, yet pliable and workable, adapting to the conditions at hand. While they might not do successfully, the female characters are lionized anyway for the efforts at navigating in the straight jacket forced upon them by the Victorian world. Their pragmatism allowed them to thrive in the limited ways in which they did. Liza Doolittle put it this way when she talked about the double-entendre of Victorian when she quipped "I could have been a bad girl if I'd liked…Girls like me can drag gentlemen down to make love to them easy enough. And they wish each other dead the next minute (Shaw 117)." Liza realizes her power as a woman. She is being empowered by the process.
Truly, there is more than meets the eye beneath the submissive female exterior.
Even in a defeated character like Maurya, she realizes her lamentable fate when she muses "Isn't it a hard and cruel man won't hear a word from an old woman, and she holding him from the sea (Synge 26)?" Maurya realizes that it is the matriarch whose strength holds the household together and that sustains the men in her life.
Even Minnie in Trifles may have reached her limit when her…
