Pygmalion the Myth from www.loggia.com and www.pygmalion.ws
Pygmalion was a gifted sculptor from Cyprus who had no interest in the local women because he found them immoral and frivolous. Instead, Pygmalion concentrated on his art until one day he ran across a large, flawless piece of ivory and decided to carve a beautiful woman from it. When he had finished the statue, Pygmalion found it so lovely and thought it was the image of his ideal woman, so he clothed the figure and adorned her in jewels. He gave the statue a name: Galatea, sleeping love. He found himself obsessed with his ideal woman so he went to the temple of Aphrodite to beg for a wife who would be as perfect as his statue. Pygmalion stood before the altar and timidly said, "Ye gods, who can do all things, give me, I pray you, for my wife" - he dared not say "my ivory virgin," but said instead - "one like my ivory virgin." As an omen of her favor, Aphrodite caused the flame on the altar to shoot up thrice in a fiery point into the air. When Pygmalion returned home, he went to see his statue, and leaning over the couch, gave a kiss to the mouth. It seemed to be warm. He pressed its lips gain, he laid his hand upon the limbs; the ivory felt soft to his touch and yielded to his fingers like the wax of Hymettus. While he stands astonished and glad, though doubting, and fears he may be mistaken, again and again with a lover's ardor he touches the object of his hopes. It was indeed alive! The veins when pressed yielded to the finger and again resumed their roundness. Then at last the votary of Aphrodite found words to thank the goddess, and pressed his lips upon lips as real as his own. The virgin felt the kisses and blushed, and opening her timid eyes to the light, fixed them at the same moment on her lover. Aphrodite blessed the nuptials she had formed, and from this union Paphos was born, from whom the city, sacred to Aphrodite, received its name.
Introduction to Pygmalion (1916) by George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
Pygmalion is a criticism of the class system in Europe during the early 1900s, and it is a comment on the traditional love story. The plot revolves around a bet between a phonetics professor, Henry Higgins, and a fellow linguist, Colonel Pickering. Higgins bets that he can convert a low-class, unrefined girl (Eliza Doolittle) into a lady—a duchess, in fact—in just six months. At the beginning, Eliza has the accent and grammar of a poor girl, and she’s also very “unladylike” and uncultured. We get to see whether he succeeds and his philosophy that humans can be molded into what one wants (like in the myth of Pygmalion), or if he learns a lesson that he wasn’t expecting… The musical My Fair Lady was based on this Bernard Shaw play.
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Characters from www.sparknotes.com
Professor Henry Higgins is a professor of phonetics who plays Pygmalion to Eliza Doolittle's Galatea. He is the author of Higgins' Universal Alphabet. He is an unconventional man, who goes in the opposite direction from the rest of society in most matters. Indeed, he is impatient with high society, forgetful in his public graces, and poorly considerate of normal social niceties—the only reason the world has not turned against him is because he is at heart a good and harmless man. His biggest fault is that he can be a bully. Eliza Doolittle - "She is not at all a romantic figure." So is she introduced in Act I. Everything about Eliza Doolittle seems to defy any conventional notions we might have about the romantic heroine. She begins the story as a sassy, smart-mouthed curbstone flower girl with deplorable English, [and we’ll see what, if any, transformation she makes. Her character is meant to be an instrument for] the fairy-tale aspect of the transformation myth itself. Colonel Pickering, the author of Spoken Sanskrit, is a match for Higgins (although somewhat less obsessive) in his passion for phonetics. But where Higgins is a boorish, careless bully, Pickering is always considerate and a genuine gentleman. He says little of note in the play, and appears most of all to be a civilized foil to Higgins' barefoot, absentminded crazy professor. Alfred Doolittle is Eliza's father, an elderly but vigorous dustman who has had at least six wives and who "seems equally free from fear and conscience." When he learns that his daughter has entered the home of Henry Higgins, he immediately pursues to see if he can get some money out of the circumstance. His unique brand of rhetoric, his unembarrassed, unhypocritical advocation of drink and pleasure (at other people's expense), is amusing to Higgins. Though scandalous, his speeches are honest. At points, it even seems that he might be Shaw's voice piece of social criticism. Mrs. Higgins - Professor Higgins' mother, Mrs. Higgins is a stately lady in her sixties who sees the Eliza Doolittle experiment as idiocy, and Higgins and Pickering as senseless children. She is the first and only character to have any qualms about the whole affair. Freddy Eynsford Hill - Higgins' surmise that Freddy is a fool is probably accurate. In the opening scene he is a spineless and resourceless lackey to his mother and sister. Later, he is comically bowled over by Eliza, the half-baked duchess who still speaks cockney. He becomes lovesick for Eliza, and courts her with letters.
Shaw’s Beliefs on Economic Systems by Rhoda Hellman
In 1884 George Bernard Shaw joined the Fabian Society – a group dedicated to bringing about socialism in Great Britain – and for the rest of his life took a keen interest in socialism. His concern with economic affairs was born two years earlier. Before that it had simply not occurred to him that economics had any relevance to the kind of human problems that fascinated him. The event that suddenly made him aware of the connection was a lecture by the visiting American economist [Karl Marx].