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Feminist Roles In Pygmalion

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Pygmalion (…through a Feminist Lens) “Pygmalion was written to challenge the class system, traditional stereotypes and the audience’s own views.” Pygmalion is a play which is written as a Romance in Five acts by an Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw. The name of this play is taken from a Greek story named ‘Pygmalion’ where the main character Pygmalion sculpts a woman figure and falls in love with her and later staring her statue becomes his only motto of life when the Greek Goddess Aphrodite impressed by Pygmalion’s devotion to that woman figure, magically transforms the sculpture into a living being naming her ‘Galatea’. In this play, the role of Pygmalion is played by Higgins (someone who is the creator, the God, the father) and that of Galatea by the flower girl- Eliza (who is child, the weak and the one being corrected.) (The play was first presented to the public in the year 1912. This play consists of a lot many themes. To cite a few: Rewriting the tale of Cinderella and Sleeping beauty, Class, language and phonetics and Independence. But in this paper, I would like to work on the feminist aspect of this play for this aspect, is the one which impressed me more. As this paper is based on Gender analysis I am restricting my analysis to the theme of Feminism in this play. To begin with, George Bernard Shaw was an early and outspoken advocate for the rights of women, and as a playwright he created some of the most distinctive women characters of his day. He was deeply

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