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Pygmalion
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What is Pygmalion?

Pygmalion refers primarily to Bernard Shaw's celebrated play, in which the characters Eliza and Higgins drive a story of class, language, and social transformation. The work appears across disciplines including literature, theater studies, and gender studies, making it a recurring subject in humanities courses. Students are drawn to it because it raises enduring questions about power, identity, and what it means to reshape another person's life. Its connections to broader themes — education, femininity, and the tension between love and control — give it a richness that rewards close academic analysis.

The archived papers approach Pygmalion from several distinct angles. Some situate Shaw's play within the context of his other work, such as Major Barbara, treating it as part of a larger dramatic project. Others pursue gender-focused readings, examining how strong female figures like Eliza are depicted alongside comparable characters from plays such as Riders to the Sea. Comparative frameworks also appear, linking Shaw's themes to the aesthetics of Oscar Wilde or to broader currents in mass media and popular culture. A smaller cluster of papers connects the Pygmalion dynamic to real-world contexts like teaching, leadership, and self-esteem, treating the transformation narrative as a lens for understanding mentorship and influence.

A strong essay on Pygmalion builds a focused thesis around one of its core tensions — transformation versus autonomy, class versus identity, or care versus control. Close reading of dialogue and character development carries the most weight as evidence. The most common pitfall is summarizing the plot rather than analyzing what Shaw's choices reveal about his social and philosophical arguments.

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Paper Doctorate

Masculinity and spectacle in the documentary Pumping Iron

Pumping Iron: Displays of masculinity and femininity in the bodybuilding world

Paper Undergraduate

Symbolism in nineteenth-century art, poetry, and philosophy

Symbolism is an important thought movement that occurred in the nineteenth century as a reaction against naturalism and realism which focused on accepting reality and praising it just as it is, in its harshest aspects.

Paper Undergraduate

The teachable point-of-view in educational leadership

Leadership in education is a multifaceted concept that involves not only good business and negotiation skills but also a talent for insight into needs of this generation's students as well as the next.

Paper Doctorate

Oscar Wilde's "The Decay of Lying": Art, Life, and Imitation

In Oscar Wilde's the Decay of Lying, one character, Vivian, claims that life and nature imitate art far more than art imitates either life or nature. This is of course dubious to the extreme, so much so that it is very…

Research Paper Doctorate

Capitalism and Socialism in Shaw's Pygmalion and Major Barbara

Capitalism in Pygmalion and Major Barbara -- Even a socialist Shaw must bend his ideological will to real-world demands

Paper Undergraduate

Gentility and Class in Fielding's Joseph Andrews

The protagonists of Henry Fielding's novels would appear to be marked by their extreme social mobility: Shamela will manage to marry her master, Booby, and the "foundling" Tom Jones is revealed as the bastard child of a…

Paper Doctorate

Auteur Theory Challenged: Allen, Mamet, and Postmodern Film

A postmodern film studies critique of Woody Allen's 1994 film Bullets Over Broadway and David Mamet's 2004 film Spartan. The paper seeks to approach each film in terms of the auteur theory, by noting that each has a writer-director who has scripted a film with a single protagonist. The nature of Allen's identification with his playwright protagonist, and Mamet's identification with his Special Forces op protagonist, is questioned in terms of how each film examines questions of violence and duty. Postmodernism is invoked in the conclusion to show that the modernist desire to insist upon stable meaning can easily be deconstructed: David Mamet's film could be taken as an invitation for military men to place conscience over duty, leading Mamet to a conclusion where his story could be used to justify the actions of someone like Bradley Manning.

Paper Doctorate

Hubris in Hawthorne: "The Minister's Black Veil" and "The Birth-mark"

¶ … Minister's Black Veil" and "The Birth-mark:" Hubris

Paper Undergraduate

The Stepford Wives, Feminism, and the Pygmalion Myth

¶ … 1960, the world of women (especially American women) was limited in very many aspects, from the workplace to family life. American women who were employed in 1960 were largely restricted to jobs such as being…

Thesis Doctorate

Self-esteem and academic achievement gaps among ethnic groups

The research on the relationship between self-esteem and intellectual performance places a lot of emphases on the gap of achievement and is generally concerned with clearly identifying the factors which bring about differential intellectual results among the categories of ethnic. According to research work, much focus is given to eradicating the gap in the intellectual achievement in the academic life of various male and female students across the world. Research based on both Male and Female students has been able to show that, the expected rate of graduating from school for students with African origin studying in the US is around 53% on average (Antonio 1999). This is in comparison to a percentage of around 78% for students in the US with origin. American students African origin in several colleges complete their studies, which normally takes a period of four years, at about 25% rate below their counterparts having the European origin but studying in the US. This is seen as one of the slowest rate of completion compared with the other ethnic categories (Rosenthal, & Jacobson 2006).

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