Discrimination Factors In George Bernard Shaw's Play Pygmalion

Pygmalion is the story of a flower-girl that was able to be transformed into a duchess by taking phonetic lessons and some change in her appearance. Through this transformation, Shaw tries to reflect, through his character, the society of the Victorian age. In fact, the presence of different social classes is an issue that was obvious in Pygmalion. In order to classify a character to belong to the higher society, three major factors were observed. Appearance, socio-economic status, and especially, language and accent determine a person’s social status. However, these three factors make the distinction between classes based on artificial factors. Although the transformation into a duchess succeeded because of these factors, a new factor should be taken into consideration and it is how to treat the person.

Pygmalion tries to find his ideal image of a woman, anima, in Galatea, a sculpture he created. After finishing his work which was so perfect, he fell deeply in love with it, which made the statue become alive with the help of Aphrodite, the goddess of love. George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, written in 1912, derives its name from this myth. It is a modern metamorphosis of the myth in which Higgins, Professor of phonetics, succeeded to improve the social class of Eliza Doolittle, the flower girl, through the power of language (Mugglestone, 1993). In other words, Higgins uses Eliza in his sociolinguistic experiment and transforms her into a woman of a high class, an “artificial duchess” (Crompton, 1967). Shaw, throughout the play, shows that external and internal factors lead to a transformation in the identity of the person. He