Pygmalion - Additional Material

Pygmalion by Bernard Shaw

Play - first published in 1916

'Pygmalion' tells the story of Eliza Doolittle, a poor young girl who earns her living selling flowers from a basket on the street. A man named Henry Higgins discovers her and her atrocious English and he makes a bet with a gentleman, Colonel Pickering, that he can make her speak like a duchess in six months. This play is a witty reworking on the classic tale of the sculptor who falls in love with his perfect female statue. A musical 'My Fair Lady' is a reworking of this classic.

'The Outsider' is shown in 'Pygmalion' through the use of characters, themes and techniques. 'The Outsider' is mainly portrayed through the characters of Eliza Doolittle and Freddy Eynsford Hill; Eliza being the most obvious. Eliza Doolittle is a poor girl with a thick cockney accent. She earns her way selling flowers on the street. She is transformed from a smart-mouthed flower girl with terrible English to a beautiful woman with perfect English fit to mingle with nobility. In spite of this great transformation, the real re-making of Eliza is when she speaks out against Henry Higgins' treatment and becomes an independent woman. This is the first time Higgins sees Eliza as an actual person with feelings. In the process of her transformation, Eliza constantly repeats how she wished she'd never left the gutter. We need to note that she wishes to never have left, not to go back. This shows how she knows that, now that she's changed so much, she can't go back. She feels like she doesn't fit in anywhere. She doesn't fit in with the upper classes because she knows that she's not one of them, even though no one else can tell the difference between her and them. Similarly, she cannot go back to her old life because of how much she's changed.

Freddy Eynsford Hill is part of a family of superficial social climbers living in poverty. He is a spineless pawn to his mother and sister and is seen as a fool by Higgins. Freddy can't stand on his own two feet and he can't get a job, so there isn't any income for his family. Despite this, the Eynsford Hills manage to keep the appearance of any other middle class family. Freddy and his family know they don't belong in this social class, but they're set on not becoming visibly poor. Freddy is an outsider because of the way he is seen and treated by others. His family treats him as if he were their personal servant, and most other people see him as a fool. If we look hard enough, we can find examples of 'the Outsider' in every character.

There are three themes used in Pygmalion that stand out to me. The first is the idea of language. Shaw uses the way Eliza speaks to set her apart from everyone. While we do hear one or two other people with similar accents to her at the beginning of the story, most of the characters speak 'proper English.' This is used to show that she is completely different and that she doesn't really belong. When Eliza goes back to Covent Garden near the end of the story, she stands out, again, because of her accent, only now it is because she speaks proper English and everyone else is speaking with cockney accents.

The second theme that I have seen is that of location. Location is a very big determining factor in people's lives. For example; in Covent Garden it is dirty and filled with the poor trying to earn their living. Eliza starts off here, as a flower girl because it's the only place she can get money. In Wimpole Street, on the other hand, it is clean and the houses would be large because rich people can afford to live there. Location tells a lot about a person, e.g., if you live in a dirty area with other poor people, the chances are you're going to be poor too; living in a tiny one-room house or on the streets. You would most probably be dirty and life would be terrible. But if you lived in a large, clean house on a street with lots of rich people, you're probably going to be quite clean and quite well looked after.

The third theme that stands out to me is the idea of wealth and social class. If you're