Power, Language, and Identity in Shaw's 'Pygmalion'
Remaking the Human: Power, Language, and Identity in Shaw's 'Pygmalion'
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 education operates as disciplinary power, how language serves as instrument of class domination, and how gender structures constrain women's autonomy even or especially within narratives of liberation. Through the relationship between Higgins and Eliza, Shaw stages fundamental conflicts that remain unresolved: Can education emancipate without dominating? Can social mobility occur without cultural erasure? Can transformation be ethical when power is profoundly unequal?
This analysis approaches Pygmalion through contemporary theoretical lenses Foucauldian power analysis, postcolonial critique, feminist theory, and postmodern conceptions of identity that illuminate dimensions Shaw intuited but could not fully articulate in 1913. What emerges is a play far more radical than its surface comedy suggests: a sustained interrogation of the very possibility of benevolent transformation in contexts structured by inequality. Shaw's genius lies in refusing resolution. The play's ambiguous ending mirrors the irresolvable tensions it exposes, leaving audiences to confront questions they cannot comfortably answer.
The following analysis examines four interconnected dimensions of this complex work: how education functions as power/knowledge apparatus; how linguistic imperialism maintains class hierarchy; how gender and economic structures constrain autonomy; and how identity itself becomes unstable under the pressures of transformation. Throughout, I argue that Pygmalion anticipates crucial insights of postmodern and postcolonial theory while remaining deeply engaged with material realities of class and gender oppression. Shaw's play doesn't merely depict transformation it dissects the power relations that make transformation simultaneously necessary, violent, and ethically compromised.
About the Author: George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) stands as one of the most provocative and influential dramatists in the English literary tradition, whose works continue to challenge audiences with their wit, social critique, and intellectual rigor. Born in Dublin, Ireland, Shaw moved to London in 1876, where he would spend most of his life as playwright, critic, polemicist, and public intellectual. Over a career spanning more than six decades, Shaw produced over sixty plays, revolutionized British theatre, and became the only person ever to win both a Nobel Prize in Literature (1925) and an Academy Award (1938, for the screenplay of Pygmalion).
Shaw's early life shaped his later preoccupations. Coming from a genteel but impoverished Protestant family in Dublin, he experienced firsthand the anxieties of social class and economic precarity. His mother, a talented singer, and his father, an unsuccessful grain merchant, offered contrasting models: artistic aspiration and economic failure. This background instilled in Shaw a lifelong fascination with the relationship between talent and opportunity, merit and circumstance themes that would dominate Pygmalion.
Unlike Shakespeare, who emerged from the collaborative world of Elizabethan public theatre, Shaw developed as a writer in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, an era marked by intense social reform movements, scientific advancement, and challenges to established orthodoxies. Shaw aligned himself with Fabian Socialism, advocating gradual social transformation through education and legislative reform rather than revolution. His political convictions deeply informed his dramatic work: Shaw believed theatre should be a forum for ideas, not merely entertainment, and his plays consistently interrogate social institutions marriage, capitalism, education, religion, war with unsentimental clarity.
Shaw's dramatic philosophy broke with Victorian theatrical conventions. Rejecting the melodramatic plots and sentimental characterizations that dominated nineteenth-century stages, Shaw championed what he called the "drama of ideas." Influenced by Henrik Ibsen's social problem plays, Shaw created works that prioritized intellectual debate, moral complexity, and social critique over romantic plots and emotional catharsis. His characters speak in lengthy, articulate speeches that reveal their ideological positions; his stage directions function almost as novelistic commentary; his plays refuse conventional happy endings in favor of ambiguous, thought-provoking conclusions.
What distinguishes Shaw's artistry is his unique combination of comic brilliance and serious purpose. His plays sparkle with wit, paradox, and verbal dexterity qualities that make them endlessly quotable and eminently performable. Yet beneath the surface humor lies rigorous intellectual engagement with pressing social questions. Shaw described himself as a "specialist in immoral and heretical plays," and indeed his works systematically challenge conventional morality, gender roles, class hierarchies, and nationalist sentiment. He delighted in inverting expectations, making villains sympathetic and heroes flawed, exposing respectable society as hypocritical and outcasts as honest.
Shaw's prefaces to his published plays constitute significant works of criticism in their own right, often running to essay length. In these prefaces, Shaw elaborated the social and philosophical arguments animating his dramas, positioning himself as public educator as much as entertainer. This pedagogical impulse reflects Shaw's fundamental belief in human improvability through reason and education a belief that Pygmalion both embodies and interrogates.
His major works demonstrate remarkable thematic range while maintaining consistent intellectual concerns. Mrs. Warren's Profession (1893) exposes the economic roots of prostitution; Arms and the Man (1894) satirizes romantic militarism; Man and Superman (1903) reimagines the Don Juan myth through evolutionary philosophy; Major Barbara (1905) explores the relationship between capitalism, morality, and social salvation; Saint Joan (1923) reconsiders historical heroism and martyrdom. Each play combines entertainment with provocation, asking audiences to reconsider received wisdom.
Pygmalion (1913) represents Shaw at the height of his powers a play that achieves popular success while advancing serious critique of class society, linguistic snobbery, and gender relations. The work demonstrates Shaw's mastery of dramatic structure: what appears as romantic comedy gradually reveals itself as sustained interrogation of education, autonomy, and social mobility. Shaw's subtitle, "A Romance in Five Acts," signals both the generic expectations he invokes and the conventions he ultimately subverts.
Shaw's influence on twentieth-century drama cannot be overstated. He legitimized intellectual content in popular theatre, proved that ideas could be dramatically compelling, and demonstrated that social critique need not sacrifice entertainment value. His advocacy for simplified spelling, phonetic alphabet reform, and language rationalization obsessions that inform Pygmalion reflected his belief that systematic social improvement required attention to fundamental structures like language itself.
Contemporary readers and audiences continue to find Shaw relevant because his fundamental questions remain unresolved: How can society become more just? What is the relationship between individual merit and social opportunity? Can education liberate without dominating? How should we balance equality with excellence? Shaw's plays don't provide answers so much as insist we keep asking these questions. His works endure not despite their didactic elements but because of them Shaw reminds us that theatre can make us think as well as feel, that entertainment and enlightenment need not be opposed.
About the Play: Key Facts
Title and Genre
Full Title: Pygmalion: A Romance in Five Acts
Genre: Comedy of manners, social problem play, comedy of ideas
Ironic Subtitle: Shaw labels it a "romance" while systematically subverting romantic conventions
Focus: Language, class, education, social mobility, gender relations, and transformation
Date of Composition and First Performance
Written: 1912
First Performance: October 16, 1913, at the Hofburg Theatre in Vienna (in German translation)
English Premiere: April 11, 1914, at His Majesty's Theatre, London
Notable: The play premiered in German before English, reflecting Shaw's international reputation
Publication History
Published: 1916, with Shaw's characteristically lengthy preface
Shaw's Epilogue: Added later to clarify Eliza's fate she marries Freddy and opens a flower shop, definitively rejecting romantic reunion with Higgins
Why the epilogue matters: Shaw fought against theatrical tradition and audience expectation of romantic ending
Source and Inspiration
Classical Myth: Ovid's Metamorphoses Pygmalion, a sculptor who falls in love with his statue, which Venus brings to life
Shaw's Inversion: Higgins doesn't fall in love with his creation; Eliza claims independence from her creator
Victorian Pygmalion variants: Multiple retellings in 19th century, usually emphasizing romantic transformation
Shaw's innovation: Treating transformation as problem rather than solution
Setting
Time Period: 1912–1913, contemporary Edwardian England
Places:
Covent Garden (flower market, working-class space)
Higgins's laboratory/home in Wimpole Street (upper-middle-class professional space)
Mrs. Higgins's drawing room (upper-class social space)
Central Characters
Eliza Doolittle: Working-class flower seller, approximately 18–20 years old, intelligent and dignified despite poverty
Henry Higgins: Phonetics professor, approximately 40, brilliant but emotionally stunted, treating humans as experimental subjects
Colonel Pickering: Retired military officer, gentleman, represents old-fashioned courtesy
Alfred Doolittle: Eliza's father, dustman, philosopher of the "undeserving poor," Shaw's mouthpiece for critique of middle-class morality
Mrs. Higgins: Henry's mother, represents refined upper-class values, sees clearly what her son cannot
Freddy Eynsford Hill: Impoverished upper-class young man, romantically devoted to Eliza
Major Themes
Language as Class Marker: Accent determines social position more than character or ability
Education and Transformation: The ethics and violence of remaking human beings
Social Mobility: Possibility and costs of crossing class boundaries
Gender and Autonomy: Women's economic dependence and struggle for independence
Cultural Capital: How manners, speech, and taste maintain class hierarchy
The Creator-Creation Relationship: Power dynamics in education and improvement
Structure
Five-Act Structure:
Act I: Meeting at Covent Garden Higgins's bet established
Act II: Eliza arrives at Wimpole Street transformation begins
Act III: The "at home" scene Eliza's partial success
Act IV: After the ambassador's reception Eliza's rebellion begins
Act V: Final confrontation Eliza claims independence
Literary and Cultural Significance
One of Shaw's most performed and adapted works
Foundation text for discussions of linguistic discrimination
Inspired the musical My Fair Lady (1956), which Shaw would have hated for its romantic ending
"Pygmalion Effect" in educational psychology named after this play
Enduring Relevance
Linguistic discrimination remains pressing issue
Questions of cultural assimilation vs. preservation
Debates over educational intervention and autonomy
The ethics of "improvement" and social engineering
Historical and Social Context: Edwardian England's Class System
Pygmalion was written and set during the Edwardian period (1901–1914), a time of profound social transition in Britain. Understanding this context is essential for grasping the play's radical critique and contemporary resonance.
The Rigid Class System
Edwardian England maintained one of the most stratified class systems in Europe, despite the period's reputation for elegance and prosperity. Society divided sharply into distinct classes with limited mobility between them. The upper class consisted of hereditary aristocracy and landed gentry, living on inherited wealth. The upper-middle class included successful professionals like Higgins doctors, lawyers, professors who aspired to upper-class refinement while earning income through profession. The lower-middle class comprised clerks, shopkeepers, and skilled tradesmen, economically precarious but desperately clinging to "respectability." The working class formed the majority factory workers, domestic servants, laborers, street vendors like Eliza living in poverty with virtually no prospect of upward mobility.
Language as Class Boundary
Perhaps no society has been more obsessed with linguistic markers of class than Edwardian England. Within seconds of hearing someone speak, Edwardians could identify class origin, education, and social position. The upper and upper-middle classes spoke "Received Pronunciation" a standardized, non-regional accent associated with elite education. Cockney, the working-class dialect of London's East End which Eliza speaks, was considered barely comprehensible by middle-class listeners and marked speakers as irredeemably vulgar.
Shaw recognized that linguistic discrimination functioned as class enforcement mechanism. No matter how intelligent, moral, or capable a working-class person might be, their accent excluded them from middle-class employment, social circles, and opportunities. The rigidity of this linguistic barrier maintained class boundaries more effectively than legal restrictions.
The late Victorian and Edwardian periods saw the emergence of phonetics as scientific discipline. Scholars like Henry Sweet (Shaw's model for Higgins) systematically analyzed speech sounds, developed phonetic alphabets, and believed that rational language reform could improve society. Shaw himself campaigned for phonetic spelling reform throughout his life, leaving funds in his will to develop a new alphabet.
The "Woman Question"
The Edwardian period witnessed intense debate over women's roles, rights, and status. Middle-class women were expected to avoid paid employment, remaining economically dependent on fathers, then husbands. Working-class women worked out of necessity but in limited, poorly paid positions: domestic service, factory work, street selling. Eliza's flower-selling represents one of the few "respectable" options for poor women.
The suffrage movement intensified during this period, with suffragettes engaging in militant tactics. Shaw supported women's suffrage and critiqued the systemic inequalities that made women economically and politically subordinate. For middle and upper-class women, marriage represented their primary economic strategy. The "season" of balls and social events functioned as marriage market. Eliza's transformation essentially prepares her for this market but her working-class origin makes her unmarketable to upper-class men.
Poverty and Social Reform
The Edwardian period's apparent prosperity masked desperate poverty. London's slums housed millions in appalling conditions. Victorian and Edwardian social policy distinguished between the "deserving poor" (whose poverty resulted from misfortune) and the "undeserving poor" (considered responsible for their own poverty). Alfred Doolittle's speeches satirize this distinction brilliantly.
Progressive reformers advocated for better working conditions, minimum wage, social insurance, and expanded education. Shaw's Fabian Socialism aligned with these gradualist reform efforts. The settlement movement saw middle-class reformers establishing houses in poor neighborhoods, aiming to "elevate" the working class through education and cultural refinement. This movement embodies the same paternalistic assumptions Higgins displays the belief that the poor need middle-class guidance to improve themselves.
The Myth of Meritocracy
Edwardian society proclaimed meritocratic values while maintaining rigid class barriers. Cultural mythology celebrated self-made men who rose through talent and effort, but actual mobility remained rare. Success required not just skill but accent, manners, dress, social connections markers of class origin that working-class people couldn't acquire easily.
Shaw's critique exposes how meritocracy is myth. Eliza possesses intelligence and determination, but these alone are worthless without the cultural capital Higgins provides. Even with that capital, her working-class origin limits her options. The play reveals that talent doesn't determine success access to cultural codes does.
Plot Summary
Act I: Covent Garden
On a rainy London evening, various social classes seek shelter outside St. Paul's Church in Covent Garden. Eliza Doolittle, a flower girl with thick Cockney accent, tries to sell violets. A bystander notes that a gentleman is writing down everything she says, alarming her she fears he's a police informant. The note-taker reveals himself as Henry Higgins, a professor of phonetics who can identify anyone's origin within two streets based on their accent. Another gentleman, Colonel Pickering, introduces himself he's traveled from India specifically to meet Higgins.
Higgins boasts that he could take Eliza and transform her into a duchess through six months of intensive training in proper speech. He claims he could pass her off at an ambassador's garden party. Eliza overhears this conversation and the address where Higgins lives.
Act II: Higgins's Laboratory
The next morning, Eliza arrives asking Higgins to teach her to "talk more genteel" so she can work in a proper flower shop. She offers to pay a shilling per lesson. Pickering wagers that Higgins cannot accomplish the transformation he claimed, offering to pay all expenses if Higgins succeeds.
Higgins accepts the challenge, treating Eliza purely as an experimental subject. He's indifferent to her as a person she's raw material for demonstrating his phonetic theories. Mrs. Pearce, the housekeeper, raises practical concerns: what will happen to Eliza after the experiment ends? Higgins dismisses these questions as irrelevant.
Alfred Doolittle, Eliza's father, arrives demanding compensation for his daughter. A dustman and philosopher, Doolittle positions himself as one of the "undeserving poor" who admits his vices honestly rather than hypocritically claiming virtue. Higgins is charmed by Doolittle's shameless honesty and gives him five pounds.
The transformation begins: endless drills of pronunciation, recorded exercises, repeated correction of every sound Eliza produces. Pickering treats her with consistent courtesy, while Higgins treats her as a mechanism to be adjusted.
Act III: Mrs. Higgins's Drawing Room
Several months later, Higgins brings Eliza to his mother's "at home" day to show off her progress. Eliza's appearance is perfect, but her speech reveals incomplete training. She maintains formal correctness when discussing neutral topics but lapses into revealing content when discussing her family. She describes her aunt's death in shocking terms and uses the expression "not bloody likely."
The Eynsford Hills, unfamiliar with real working-class speech, interpret Eliza's lapses as fashionable slang. Freddy is instantly infatuated. After the guests leave, Mrs. Higgins confronts her son: "What is to become of this girl?" Higgins has no answer he hasn't considered Eliza's future beyond his experiment.
Act IV: After the Triumph
Eliza, Higgins, and Pickering return from the ambassador's garden party where the experiment has succeeded triumphantly. Eliza passed perfectly as a duchess. But for Higgins and Pickering, the experiment is now over. They discuss the evening's success while completely ignoring Eliza, who has become invisible to them now that she's no longer useful.
Eliza's silent anguish builds. When Higgins casually asks where his slippers are, she explodes. She throws the slippers at him and confronts him: she's been treated as an object, not a person. She has no idea what will become of her now she can't return to selling flowers, but she has no prospects as a lady.
Higgins is bewildered by her anger. He protests that he's treated her well. Eliza recognizes that he's treated her like a pet: well-fed and housed but never respected as an autonomous human being.
Act V: The Final Confrontation
Higgins arrives at his mother's house, complaining that Eliza has left. Alfred Doolittle arrives, transformed and miserable. Higgins had mentioned Doolittle to an American millionaire, who left Doolittle a substantial income. Doolittle has been forced into middle-class respectability and lost his freedom.
Eliza enters, maintaining cold dignity. She articulates the difference in how the two men treated her: Pickering's respect enabled her transformation as much as Higgins's phonetics. Higgins attempts to charm Eliza into returning, but he cannot offer what she needs: recognition of her autonomy or any plan for her independent future.
Eliza announces she'll marry Freddy, though he has no money. Higgins scoffs, but Eliza recognizes that Freddy sees her as a person to love, not an experiment to complete. The play ends ambiguously. Higgins confidently asserts that Eliza will come back. Eliza leaves, presumably to marry Freddy.
Shaw's Epilogue: Shaw wrote a prose epilogue to eliminate ambiguity. Eliza does marry Freddy; they eventually open a successful flower shop. Eliza and Higgins remain friends but never become romantic partners. Higgins remains a bachelor, incapable of emotional growth. Shaw insisted on this ending against theatrical tradition.
Critical Analysis: Dissecting the Politics of Transformation
I. Education as Power/Knowledge: The Foucauldian Classroom
When Henry Higgins first encounters Eliza Doolittle in Covent Garden, he doesn't see a human being he sees a specimen. His phonetic transcription of her speech represents the first act of what Michel Foucault would later theorize as the power/knowledge apparatus: the transformation of living human experience into objects of scientific study and systematic control. Shaw, writing decades before Foucault's Discipline and Punish, dramatizes with uncanny precision how education functions not merely as skill transmission but as disciplinary mechanism that produces docile, socially useful subjects.
Higgins's laboratory embodies the Foucauldian concept of disciplinary space. Here, Eliza undergoes constant surveillance, her every utterance recorded on phonograph cylinders for analysis and correction. The technology itself is significant Higgins uses scientific instruments to fragment Eliza's speech into measurable units, abstract sounds divorced from human meaning. This process of fragmentation and reconstruction mirrors what Foucault describes as the creation of "docile bodies" through institutional discipline. Eliza must be broken down her gestures, posture, voice, even her breathing systematically dismantled before she can be reassembled according to middle-class specifications.
The power dynamic here is absolute and unidirectional. Higgins possesses total authority to define what constitutes "correct" speech, "proper" behavior, "refined" sensibility. His knowledge of phonetics grants him power over Eliza's social existence he can elevate or condemn her with a word. Yet this isn't merely personal tyranny; it's structural. Higgins represents an entire system of class-based linguistic hierarchy that predates him and will survive him. His "science" of phonetics naturalizes what is actually arbitrary class convention, transforming social prejudice into seemingly objective fact.
What makes this analysis particularly urgent is recognizing how Higgins embodies what Foucault calls "pastoral power" the form of authority that claims to care for subjects' welfare while actually normalizing them into compliant social roles. Higgins genuinely believes he's helping Eliza. He provides her food, shelter, education all the material conditions of improvement. Yet he never questions whether he has the right to remake her, never considers that his "help" might constitute violence. This is the insidious nature of disciplinary power: it operates through beneficence, making resistance appear as ingratitude.
The play's educational scenes reveal what Foucault termed the "micro-physics of power" how domination operates through seemingly benign daily practices. The pronunciation drills, the posture corrections, the constant repetition until proper forms become automatic these aren't neutral pedagogical techniques but mechanisms that inscribe class discipline directly onto Eliza's body. She must learn not just new words but new ways of moving, breathing, existing in space. Her working-class habitus must be entirely erased and replaced with middle-class embodiment.
Eliza's famous outburst in Act IV "I sold flowers. I didn't sell myself" represents her dawning recognition of what has been done to her. She understands, perhaps more clearly than Higgins ever will, that education in this context means colonization of the self. The knowledge Higgins has imparted comes at the cost of her autonomy, her original identity, her connection to her community. She has been made into what the system requires, not what she might have chosen to become.
This brings us to the most troubling question the play poses: Can education ever be emancipatory within structures of profound inequality? Rosenthal and Jacobson's famous study "Pygmalion in the Classroom" demonstrated that teacher expectations become self-fulfilling prophecies students perform according to what teachers believe about them. But their study, like the play that inspired its title, reveals a darker truth: those expectations are never neutral. They reflect and reproduce existing hierarchies of race, class, and gender. When Higgins believes Eliza can become a duchess, she does but only by ceasing to be Eliza Doolittle, flower girl.
The contemporary relevance of this analysis cannot be overstated. Educational institutions continue to function as sites where working-class, immigrant, and minority students are "improved" which means made to conform to middle-class, often white, cultural norms. The language of "achievement gaps" and "raising standards" masks the same process Shaw dramatizes: the systematic devaluation of non-dominant cultures and the forced assimilation to dominant codes. Students succeed by learning to code-switch, to perform the cultural identity that institutions reward, often at the cost of connections to their own communities.
Shaw's brilliance lies in refusing to romanticize either education or ignorance. The play doesn't suggest Eliza was better off selling flowers in poverty that would be sentimental nonsense. But neither does it celebrate her transformation uncritically. Instead, it insists we confront the tragic bind: In an unjust society, individuals need the tools of the dominant class to survive, yet acquiring those tools requires a form of self-erasure that is itself a kind of violence. Education promises liberation but delivers discipline. Knowledge becomes power, but power over whom, and to what end?
II. Linguistic Imperialism: The Violence of "Proper" English
Language in Pygmalion is never merely communicative it's the primary mechanism through which class hierarchy is maintained and naturalized. Shaw exposes what postcolonial theorists would later term "linguistic imperialism": the process by which dominant groups impose their language norms on subordinate populations, framing this imposition as civilizing mission rather than cultural violence. Higgins's phonetic project parallels exactly the colonial education systems that forced "proper English" on colonized subjects from India to Ireland, Shaw's own birthplace.
The play's opening scene establishes language as technology of social surveillance and control. Higgins can place any speaker within "two miles" of their birthplace simply by analyzing their accent. This isn't presented as parlor trick but as scientific achievement yet what it really demonstrates is how thoroughly language polices class boundaries. Eliza's Cockney marks her as irredeemably lower-class regardless of her intelligence, morality, or capability. Her accent functions like a brand, a mark of class origin she cannot escape without systematic intervention.
What Shaw brilliantly satirizes is the arbitrariness of linguistic hierarchy. There is nothing inherently superior about Received Pronunciation it's simply the dialect of the powerful. Higgins himself admits that the class distinctions he perpetuates are "artificial," yet he enforces them anyway with scientific rigor. The violence here is double: first, in devaluing working-class speech as inferior; second, in naturalizing this devaluation as objective linguistic fact rather than class prejudice.
The process of "correcting" Eliza's accent represents what Bourdieu theorized as "symbolic violence" domination that is misrecognized as legitimate by both dominator and dominated. Eliza must internalize the judgment that her natural speech is "wrong," that her linguistic identity is something shameful to be eradicated. The famous scene where she practices "The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain" isn't comic but tragic we're watching the systematic destruction of a linguistic heritage, the forced abandonment of a cultural identity.
Consider what Eliza must abandon: the Cockney "Aaaoow" that so disgusts Higgins represents not merely incorrect pronunciation but an entire worldview, a community's way of experiencing and expressing reality. Working-class London possessed rich linguistic traditions specialized vocabulary, creative metaphors, expressive intonation patterns that conveyed meanings unavailable in standard English. All of this must be destroyed for Eliza to be "improved." Shaw shows us cultural genocide conducted in the name of education.
The contemporary resonance of this critique is profound. Linguistic discrimination remains one of the most acceptable forms of prejudice in modern society. Speakers of African American Vernacular English, various regional dialects, and non-native accents face systematic disadvantage lower hiring rates, reduced credibility, social exclusion based purely on how they speak. The ideology Higgins articulates persists: the belief that "proper English" reflects intelligence rather than class position, that accent reveals character rather than origin.
Postcolonial theorist Ngugi wa Thiong'o has written powerfully about how colonial education used language to "control people's wealth" and "control people's entire self-perception." The same process operates in Pygmalion. When Eliza abandons Cockney for Received Pronunciation, she doesn't simply acquire new sounds she acquires new ways of thinking, feeling, and relating to the world. The middle-class language she learns carries embedded within it middle-class assumptions, values, and ideologies. She cannot speak like a lady without, to some degree, thinking like a lady which means thinking of her former self and community with the same contempt Higgins displays.
Shaw's Irish background deeply informs this critique. He witnessed firsthand how the English educational system in Ireland functioned as mechanism of cultural erasure, teaching Irish children that their native language and cultural practices were inferior to English civilization. The phonetic imperialism Higgins practices on Eliza parallels the linguistic imperialism Britain practiced on its colonies and Shaw, with characteristic subversiveness, relocates this dynamic within England itself, showing how class operates through mechanisms similar to colonial domination.
The ethical question the play raises remains urgent: Who has the right to determine "correctness" in language? When we label certain speech "proper" and other speech "improper," we're not making linguistic judgments but political ones. We're deciding whose culture will be valued, whose intelligence will be recognized, whose voices will be heard. Every grammar rule enforced in schools, every accent modification recommended in speech therapy, every "unprofessional" speech pattern flagged in job interviews all participate in the system Shaw anatomizes.
Yet Shaw also recognizes the cruel practical reality: In a society organized around linguistic hierarchy, those who lack dominant linguistic capital will be excluded from opportunities regardless of their actual capabilities. Eliza cannot escape poverty without changing her speech. This creates an impossible bind: Speakers must either accept exclusion or accept assimilation, must choose between economic survival and cultural authenticity. Shaw offers no resolution to this dilemma because, under current conditions, none exists.
The play's most radical gesture may be Alfred Doolittle's. Unlike Eliza, he doesn't want to rise socially, doesn't accept that middle-class speech represents improvement. His philosophical defense of the "undeserving poor" represents refusal of the entire value system that judges working-class culture as inferior. Yet even Doolittle cannot escape wealth forces him into "middle-class morality," demonstrating that the system ultimately permits no refusal. You will be improved whether you wish it or not.
III. Gender, Economics, and the Limits of Liberation
If Pygmalion critiques class and linguistic hierarchy, it equally interrogates the gendered structures that constrain women's autonomy within patriarchal capitalism. Eliza's transformation cannot be understood solely through class analysis her experience is fundamentally shaped by her position as working-class woman, subject to overlapping systems of gender and class oppression that intersect to produce unique forms of vulnerability and constraint.
The classical Pygmalion myth that Shaw invokes is fundamentally about male power: the sculptor creates his ideal woman, who exists only to fulfill his fantasy. Shaw both reproduces and critiques this dynamic. Higgins treats Eliza as raw material to sculpt according to his specifications, but Shaw exposes the violence and absurdity of this creator-creation relationship. Higgins's scientific detachment masks what is actually a profoundly gendered form of domination the male expert who presumes the right to remake women according to his vision of what they should be.
What distinguishes Shaw's treatment is his attention to the economic dimensions of gender oppression. Eliza's limited options stem not from personal failing but from systematic exclusion. As working-class woman in Edwardian England, her economic choices are constrained to a narrow range of poorly paid, insecure forms of labor: flower-selling, prostitution, domestic service, factory work. Each of these options involves, in different ways, the commodification of her body and labor. Her initial assertion "I'm a good girl, I am!" defends her dignity precisely because she recognizes how fragile that dignity is, how easily working-class women were dismissed as sexually available.
The transformation Higgins offers appears to liberate Eliza from this precarity. She will no longer scramble for pennies in the cold, no longer face the daily humiliations of poverty. Yet Shaw reveals how this "liberation" simply exchanges one form of dependence for another. As flower girl, Eliza was economically precarious but autonomous she controlled her own labor and kept her earnings. As lady, she becomes economically dependent on male patronage, whether through marriage or Higgins's continued support. Her elevation in class status corresponds to a loss of economic independence.
This paradox is crystallized in Mrs. Higgins's crucial question: "What is to become of her?" The men haven't considered this because, fundamentally, they don't see it as their problem. They've conducted their experiment, satisfied their intellectual curiosity, and won their bet. Eliza's future how she will support herself, where she will live, what social position she can occupy never factored into their calculations. The question exposes the casualness with which men can destabilize women's lives while remaining untouched by the consequences.
Shaw's analysis here anticipates feminist economics decades before that field existed. He recognizes that women's "choices" under patriarchy aren't really choices at all but selections among constrained options, each problematic. Eliza can marry Freddy, who offers devotion but no economic security, making her dependent on his inadequate income. She can return to Higgins, accepting perpetual subordination in exchange for material comfort. She can attempt independent business, but as Shaw's epilogue reveals, even this requires male financial backing from Pickering and Colonel Pickering's connections.
The garden party scene, often played for comedy, reveals the disturbing reality of women's objectification within class society. Eliza is displayed, examined, evaluated by others who will determine whether she "passes." Her value is assessed entirely through her performance of class-appropriate femininity her appearance, her manners, her conversational topics. She must perform what Judith Butler would later theorize as gender performativity: femininity as a set of repeated acts and gestures that create the illusion of natural gender identity. Eliza learns that being a "lady" isn't a state of being but a perpetual performance requiring constant vigilance.
What makes this particularly insidious is how it masquerades as improvement. Higgins and Pickering genuinely believe they're elevating Eliza, giving her opportunities she couldn't otherwise access. They cannot see and this is where Shaw's critique cuts deepest how their benevolence functions as another form of control. The bath scene in Act II, where Eliza is forcibly washed despite her protests, literalizes the violence of "civilizing" women. Her body must be disciplined, sanitized, made presentable according to middle-class standards. Her resistance is dismissed as ignorance; her protests are overruled for her own good.
The relationship between Higgins and Pickering reveals how patriarchal power operates through seemingly opposed masculinities. Higgins is overtly domineering, treating Eliza as experimental subject. Pickering is courteous, addressing her as "Miss Doolittle," displaying gentlemanly manners. Yet both participate in her objectification. Pickering's courtesy, while preferable to Higgins's rudeness, still functions within the framework of male ownership he's simply a kinder master. Eliza's recognition that Pickering's respect mattered more than Higgins's instruction shows her understanding that dignity cannot be given; it must be recognized as already existing.
The play's refusal of romantic resolution represents Shaw's most radical feminist gesture. Theatrical convention and audience expectation demanded that Eliza end up with Higgins the transformation narrative requires romantic consummation. Shaw's insistence that Eliza marry Freddy instead, or more precisely, that she claim the right to choose her own future independent of Higgins's desires, challenges the very structure of romantic comedy. Eliza refuses to be the reward for Higgins's successful experiment. She refuses to validate his claim on her through the work he's invested in her transformation.
This brings us to the question of consent, which the play treats with remarkable sophistication for 1913. Did Eliza truly consent to her transformation? She agreed to lessons, yes, but she couldn't have understood what those lessons would require the complete erasure of her original identity, the severing of connections to her community, the psychological violence of being told everything about herself was wrong and must be remade. Her initial goal was modest: earn enough to work in a flower shop. Higgins's goal to make her a duchess was his imposition, his experiment, never genuinely hers.
Contemporary feminist theory recognizes that consent cannot be meaningful when power is profoundly unequal. A desperately poor woman "consenting" to transformation by a wealthy man who holds her future in his hands this isn't freely given consent but acceptance of the only option that offers escape from poverty. Shaw understands this. He doesn't condemn Eliza for accepting Higgins's offer, but neither does he pretend that her acceptance constitutes genuine autonomous choice.
The slippers scene in Act IV crystallizes these dynamics. Higgins casually asks where his slippers are, and Eliza, who has just successfully performed as duchess at the ambassador's reception, is expected to immediately revert to serving him. The message is clear: regardless of her social performance elsewhere, in Higgins's home she remains subordinate. When she throws the slippers at him, she's rejecting not just this particular demand but the entire structure of gendered servitude it represents.
Eliza's final speech to Higgins articulates what feminist theorists would later call "the personal is political." She explains that the difference between a lady and a flower girl isn't how she behaves but how she's treated. Higgins will always treat her as flower girl as subordinate, as servant, as creature of his making regardless of her accomplishments. Pickering treated her as lady from the beginning, which enabled her to become one. The transformation wasn't produced by Higgins's phonetics but by being treated as fully human, as deserving of respect and dignity.
Shaw's epilogue, often dismissed as awkward appendix, is actually essential to his feminist argument. He needed to definitively close the possibility of Higgins-Eliza romance because that possibility undermines the entire critique. If Eliza returns to Higgins, the play becomes another iteration of the Pygmalion myth woman existing to fulfill male fantasy. By marrying Freddy and opening a business, Eliza claims economic independence (however precarious) and chooses partnership based on mutual affection rather than subordination. Shaw insists: Women deserve better than to be experiments, better than to be creations, better than to be grateful for their own oppression.
IV. The Postmodern Self: Identity as Performance and the Death of Authenticity
Perhaps Pygmalion's most philosophically radical dimension is its treatment of identity itself. Shaw anticipates by decades postmodern theories that understand identity not as essential, stable core but as constructed performance, continuously produced through social interaction and power relations. The play asks: If Eliza can be transformed from flower girl to duchess through training in speech and manners, what does this reveal about identity? Is there an authentic Eliza beneath the roles, or is identity nothing more than the accumulation of performed behaviors?
The transformation plot requires us to believe in two distinct Elizas: the "real" working-class Eliza and the artificially created lady Eliza. Yet Shaw systematically undermines this binary. The garden party demonstrates that class identity is pure performance there's no essential difference between Eliza and the duchess she impersonates. Both are performing learned behaviors that signal class position. The duchess's "natural" refinement is as constructed as Eliza's acquired gentility; she simply learned it earlier and more thoroughly, in contexts that made the learning invisible.
This insight aligns with poststructuralist theories of language and identity. Saussure's insight that signs are arbitrary that there's no natural connection between signifier and signified applies equally to social identity. The sounds Eliza produces have no inherent meaning; they signify class position only within a specific social system that assigns those meanings. Change the sounds, change the signification. Eliza isn't revealing a hidden true self when she speaks "properly"; she's producing a different self through different linguistic performance.
Yet Shaw doesn't celebrate this fluidity. The play reveals identity construction as profoundly constrained by power. Eliza cannot freely choose which identity to perform her choices are limited by poverty, gender, and the class system's policing mechanisms. She can transform, but only in the direction of upward mobility, only by abandoning her working-class identity, only by submitting to Higgins's control. The postmodern promise of fluid, self-fashioned identity founders on the material reality of structural inequality.
This creates what I would argue is the play's central tragedy: Eliza exists in a state of permanent inauthenticity, belonging fully to neither world. She cannot return to her working-class origins her education has alienated her from that community, given her tastes and aspirations incompatible with poverty. Yet she cannot fully inhabit upper-class identity either her origins would be discovered, her performance would eventually fail, the artificiality of her position would be exposed. She exists in what postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha calls the "Third Space" neither colonizer nor colonized, neither lady nor flower girl, but something in between that has no recognized social position.
Alfred Doolittle's parallel transformation reinforces this analysis. His forced ascent into middle class demonstrates that identity change isn't liberation but loss. The Doolittle who arrives in Act V, dressed in wedding clothes and complaining about "middle-class morality," has lost his autonomy, his spontaneity, his philosophical freedom. He's gained money but lost himself or rather, he's been remade into someone he doesn't recognize and doesn't wish to be. His lament that he's now subject to obligations and expectations he never chose expresses the violence of being made respectable against one's will.
Shaw's treatment of the ending the notorious ambiguity about whether Eliza will return to Higgins functions as refusal of narrative closure that postmodern theory celebrates. The play doesn't resolve because the contradictions it exposes cannot be resolved within existing social structures. Eliza cannot have both economic security and autonomy, both class mobility and authentic connection to her origins, both transformation and self-determination. The open ending mirrors these irresolvable tensions, refusing the consolation of false resolution.
The multiple endings the play has spawned Shaw's epilogue, the stage tradition of Eliza returning, the musical My Fair Lady's romantic reconciliation demonstrate how deeply audiences resist this ambiguity. We want transformation narratives to end with integration and happiness. Shaw insists on discomfort instead, forcing us to sit with the recognition that in unjust societies, individual solutions are impossible. Eliza's predicament isn't personal but structural changing her individual circumstances doesn't change the system that created her predicament.
Modern identity politics struggles with similar questions. How do we honor authentic cultural identity when identity itself is constructed? How do we critique assimilation without romanticizing marginalization? Can people from oppressed groups access dominant cultural capital without betraying their communities? Pygmalion offers no answers but insists we confront these questions honestly, without sentimentality.
The play's contemporary resonance lies partly in how it speaks to our current moment of performed identity. Social media has made identity construction explicit we curate personas, perform versions of ourselves, inhabit multiple identities across different platforms. Like Eliza, we're always code-switching, always adjusting our performance to context and audience. The difference is that Eliza's performance was forced by material necessity, while ours is often presented as free choice. Shaw would likely see through this ideology of free self-fashioning to recognize the power structures that still constrain which identities are valued, which performances succeed, which selves are permitted.
Conclusion: The Persistence of Pygmalion
Pygmalion endures because it refuses the consolations of resolution. Shaw crafted a play that appears as romantic comedy while functioning as sustained critique of the very possibility of benevolent transformation under conditions of structural inequality. The work's brilliance lies not in providing answers but in forcing questions that cannot be comfortably dismissed: Can education emancipate without dominating? Can language be anything other than instrument of class control? Can women achieve autonomy within economic systems that demand their dependence? Can identity be chosen when power determines which choices are available?
These questions remain urgent because the conditions that generate them persist. We still live in societies where accent determines opportunity, where education often means assimilation, where transformation requires erasure of origin, where women's economic options remain constrained by gendered structures of labor and care. The mechanisms Shaw anatomizes linguistic imperialism, cultural capital, symbolic violence, disciplinary power continue to operate, perhaps more effectively for being less visible than in Edwardian England's overt class system.
What makes Shaw's analysis valuable isn't merely that he identified these problems but that he understood their complexity. The play doesn't romanticize working-class poverty Eliza's life as flower girl was materially desperate, and her desire for improvement was legitimate. Neither does it celebrate her transformation uncritically improvement extracted through domination and cultural erasure is ethically compromised regardless of material benefits. Shaw holds both truths simultaneously: individuals need tools to navigate unjust systems, yet acquiring those tools perpetuates the systems themselves.
The character of Eliza Doolittle represents this tragic bind embodied. She achieves social mobility but loses community. She gains refinement but loses authenticity. She acquires cultural capital but forfeits autonomous identity. Her final assertion of independence refusing to return to Higgins, claiming the right to choose her own future is heroic yet incomplete. She can refuse Higgins's dominance, but she cannot escape the economic structures that make all her options problematic. Even in Shaw's epilogue, where she marries Freddy and opens a flower shop, her independence requires male financial backing and remains economically precarious.
This is where contemporary theoretical frameworks Foucauldian analysis, postcolonial critique, feminist economics, postmodern identity theory illuminate what Shaw intuited but couldn't fully articulate. Power operates not just through overt domination but through discourses that define normality, through institutions that produce subjects, through languages that structure thought itself. Transformation under these conditions can never be simply liberatory because the tools of transformation education, language, cultural knowledge are themselves shaped by and infused with the very power relations they purport to transcend.
Yet Shaw's play also models resistance. Eliza's final confrontation with Higgins, where she articulates how his treatment differed from Pickering's, demonstrates critical consciousness the ability to name and analyze one's own oppression. Her refusal to return, her choice to claim autonomy despite its costs, represents what agency looks like under constraint. She cannot escape the system, but she can refuse complicity in her own subordination. This is the most agency the play imagines, and Shaw suggests it may be all that's possible until the systems themselves change.
The play's relevance to contemporary debates about education, immigration, assimilation, and identity is profound. When we discuss "achievement gaps" and "educational intervention," are we offering liberation or demanding assimilation? When we correct students' "non-standard" English, are we providing opportunity or enforcing linguistic imperialism? When we celebrate "self-made" individuals who've risen from poverty, do we acknowledge the cultural erasure and community betrayal that mobility often requires? Pygmalion insists we examine these questions without comfortable evasions.
Shaw's refusal of romantic resolution his insistence that Eliza and Higgins cannot end up together, that transformation cannot resolve in satisfaction, that improvement always carries costs remains his most radical gesture. Against audience expectation, theatrical convention, and commercial pressure, Shaw insisted on ambiguity and discomfort. The play doesn't end happily because happy endings falsify the reality of systemic injustice. Individual solutions cannot resolve structural problems.
This is why Pygmalion matters now. We live in an era that celebrates transformation narratives education as salvation, personal development as liberation, identity as free choice. Shaw's play performs necessary corrective, revealing transformation's dark underside without dismissing its necessity. We need education, but education under inequality reproduces inequality. We need linguistic competence, but linguistic competence often means cultural betrayal. We need social mobility, but mobility that requires abandoning one's community is ethically compromised.
Perhaps the deepest question Pygmalion poses is this: What would education, language, and transformation look like in a just society? The play cannot answer because it cannot imagine beyond existing structures. But it insists we must imagine, must work toward conditions where people can develop their capacities without being forced to erase their identities, where linguistic difference is valued rather than punished, where transformation doesn't require submission to domination. Until those conditions exist, Eliza's predicament remains our own caught between impossible choices, performing identities we haven't freely chosen, negotiating systems of power we cannot escape but must not accept.
Shaw described Pygmalion as a romance, and perhaps it is not romance of Higgins and Eliza but of the human capacity for dignity under oppression, of resistance within constraint, of claiming autonomy against all odds. Eliza's final exit, leaving Higgins behind to build her own life however precariously, represents romance of a different kind: the promise that transformation need not mean subordination, that we can become without being owned, that liberation remains possible even when freedom is constrained. This promise may be fragile, but Shaw suggests it's all we have and that might be enough.
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