Power, Language, and Identity in Shaw's 'Pygmalion'
Remaking the Human: Power, Language, and Identity in Shaw's ' Pygmalion' Visual storytelling of the play generated with Gemini 2.5 Flash Introduction What does it mean to transform a human being? In George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion (1913), this question moves from philosophical abstraction to dramatic urgency as we watch Professor Henry Higgins systematically remake Eliza Doolittle from Cockney flower girl into polished duchess. The play presents itself as romantic comedy the subtitle promises "A Romance in Five Acts" yet delivers something far more unsettling: a meditation on the violence inherent in "improvement," the politics embedded in language, and the ethical abyss that opens when human beings become experiments. Pygmalion endures not despite its intellectual density but because of it. Shaw crafted a work that functions simultaneously as entertainment and critique, using the accessible framework of transformation narrative to expose how educa...