The Realistic Implication in Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion

Abstract

George Bernard Shaw is a prolific writer in the west who wins the Nobel Prize in 1925. As an Irish outsider in English society initially, he fights his way into the literary centre in England. His work Pygmalion is, somehow, an indirect representation of his personal growth and reflects his understanding of his time, especially his concern for the reality of the lower class. Pygmalion is about the transformation of a flower girl in the underclass. Higgins, a linguist, runs across Liza, a flower girl, and Pickering in the street. He boasts he can transform the “ragamuffin” of a flower girl into an exquisite duchess. The two men are later engaged in the bet that Higgins can live up to his brag. Higgins wins the wager, but not the respect of Liza. The New Liza, being independent of Higgins, declares that she will leave Higgins and maintain her present social status by teaching phonetics. Since its publication, Pygmalion has been adapted to the film and the musical version. The two adapted versions boost the popularity of Pygmalion, but they disappoint Bernard Shaw, who thinks that both the film and the musical miss his realistic implication. Shaw’s original play is more insightful than the film and the musical and conveys far-reaching significance. Shaw is never a sentimental playwright. The play’s attention in the myth Pygmalion shows the writer’s strong desire for social reforms. That’s why Shaw is a famous member of the English Fabian Society, which endeavours to carry forward social reform. With the realistic ending, Shaw does not intend Pygmalion to arouse the audience’s strong emotion as much as to be didactic, to inspire the audience to meditate over the fact that the economy has the highest say in social life in this economic society. However, he does not agree with the decay of morality. With this in his heart, Shaw, along with Ibsen, initiates a revolution in drama: they use drama to represent social reality, to broadcast their social ideas, and to inspire the audience to realise these ideas.