Shomurodova yusufova baxtigul yusuf qizi 05 –O‘zbek theme: a new era in english drama. B. Shaw's literary activity plan: introduction

3.3 Literary analysis of the play Pygmalion

George Bernard Shaw was a Fabian Socialist who editorialized and lectured on the need for uprooting obsolete notions of a rigid English class-structure in order for individuals to realize their full potential. He wrote the play Pygmalion in 1912 and 1913 as part-social protest, part-satire, part-comic farce. Of all of Shaw's plays, Pygmalion is without the doubt the most beloved and popularly received, if not the most significant in literary terms. Several film versions have been made of the play, and it has even been adapted into a musical. In fact, writing the screenplay for the film version of 1938 helped Shaw to become the first and only man ever to win the much coveted Double: the Nobel Prize for literature and an Academy Award. Shaw wrote the part of Eliza in Pygmalion for the famous actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell, with whom Shaw was having a prominent affair at the time that had set all of London abuzz. The aborted romance between Professor Higgins and Eliza Doolittle reflects Shaw's own love life, which was always peppered with enamored and beautiful women, with whom he flirted outrageously but with whom he almost never had any further relations.

The characters of Pygmalion are unique and fascinating including the common favorite, Eliza Doolittle. Her background and mannerisms not only provide comedy, but a major aspect of the overall conflict. She is the primary protagonist that arrests the audience’s attention and sympathy. Her character is portrayed as diligent, hard-working, and inherently intelligent. She is a young woman thrust out into the working world by her equally unwealthy father. Although Eliza’s appearance and actions are quite rough at the beginning she does improve and allow her own natural beauty to shine through. This is evidenced when her father says after Higgins has taken her in, “I never thought she would clean up as good looking as that (Act II). Apparently, Eliza impressed the other characters with her transformations.
Eliza’s spirit is as much a part of her as her outward appearance. Instead of cowering under Higgins biting comments and fiery temper she matches his with one equally as caustic. Her intelligence also helps her survive in the world, both the aristocracy and the slums. She shows a true perseverance and loyalty to both her lessons and her teacher. Eliza most likely gains most of her emotional appeal by her unfailing innocence and thirst for knowledge.
In 1912, George Bernard Shaw wrote a five-act play called Pygmalion. It was both a critique of English society at the time, which was organized into separate social classes, and a plea for the proper use of the English language. But this play, which inspired the American musical comedy My Fair Lady, is above all the origin of a very important concept for anyone who educates, trains, coaches, mentors or directs others: the Pygmalion effect.
In an ancient legend, Pygmalion is a Cypriot sculptor who shapes an ivory statue of a woman, Galatea, and falls in love with her. The goddess Aphrodite then gives life to the statue, which Pygmalion marries¹.
George Bernard Shaw's play, meanwhile, features a real young woman, Eliza Doolittle, who is selling flowers in the street in Covent Garden. Eliza is uneducated, neglected, speaks with a dreadful cockney accent, and is easily irritated. Taking shelter from the rain, she meets two gentlemen, the linguist Henry Higgins and Colonel Pickering, back from India. Higgins boasts to Pickering that he is able to turn the flower girl into a duchess within six months, teaching her the distinguished use of the English language and its pronunciation. Eliza cleverly seizes this opportunity and convinces the two men to educate her.
Higgins considers himself a scientist. To him Eliza is a subject of experimentation. He is extremely rational, quick to get carried away and to swear; he attaches little importance to human relations and to the young florist herself. Pickering, on the other hand, studies Indian dialects as an amateur. He is not an expert, but he shows more empathy than his fellow.
Eliza progresses quickly and the two men can finally take her to the good London society where she seduces her interlocutors with her outspokenness. However, Higgins and Pickering have grown weary of the experience and do not even think to congratulate her. Eliza, who has become another person, with elegant manners, decides to leave them. She even tells Higgins that she, in turn, could pass on to others what he has taught her with his methods. Higgins, bitter, declares: "I tell you that I created this thing from the crushed cabbage leaves of Covent Garden; and now she pretends to play the lady with me. »
So Eliza says to Pickering, “... it was from you that I learnt really nice manners; and that is what makes one a lady, isn't it? You see it was so very difficult for me with the example of Professor Higgins always before me. I was brought up to be just like him, unable to control myself, and using bad language on the slightest provocation. And I should never have known that ladies and gentlemen didn't behave like that if you hadn't been there.”
The first lesson of this story, therefore, is that the professionalism of linguist Henry Higgins was not enough. Eliza could not become a lady simply by learning to speak refined English. She also had to learn, following Pickering's example, how to control her attitude towards other people. In today's dialect, we would say that Higgins taught Eliza "hard skills" and Pickering "soft skills"!
Eliza also says: "[...] Do you know what began my real education? Your calling me Miss Doolittle
that day when I first came.... That was the beginning of self-respect for me. And there were a hundred little things you never noticed, because they came naturally to you. Things about standing up and taking off your hat and opening doors... "
To Pickering's astonishment, she added: "You see (...) the difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she’s treated. I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins because he always treats me as a flower girl and always will; but I know I can be a lady to you, because you always treat me like a lady, and always will.
And this is the famous "Pygmalion effect": believing in a person's ability to succeed in what they have undertaken increases their probability of success!
You will tell me that all this is just a nice, old-fashioned play, and that there is no scientific basis for it. In the 1960s, two social psychology researchers, Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson, came to a school in an underprivileged area of San Francisco, claiming to be doing a study for Harvard University. They gave pupils an intelligence quotient (IQ) test and then made it look like a mail misdirection so that teachers would see the test results. In the meantime, however, they had falsified the results. For 20% of the children, the test result was overestimated, suggesting that they were gifted. A year later, Rosenthal and Jacobson tested the children again for IQ. And there they found that the 20% who were falsely over-rated had improved their test performance by 5 to 25%! It was actually the teachers' more encouraging attitude toward these pupils that caused this result. The Pygmalion effect is therefore a self-fulfilling prophecy.²
This experiment has since been repeated many times and the conditions for the appearance of the Pygmalion effect in teaching have been studied; this effect is more pronounced among the youngest pupils, or those who have just arrived in a new school. Why is this? Simply because they do not yet have a clear picture of their academic level in this new environment, and they will therefore be sensitive to the evaluation made by their entourage. Of course, real-life situations are always complex, but the fact remains that when teachers' expectations of pupils are based on erroneous criteria or if they are too rigid, they can lead to inequalities between pupils.³
And what about management in all this? Working adults are not children. Well, here too, the Pygmalion effect exists⁴. Some managers treat their employees in a way that leads them to perform well, while others lead their employees to remain below their potential. This is not necessarily because they are tinkering, micro-managing or authoritarian. It can be more subtle.
Indeed, every manager or supervisor forms a representation of the people he or she is supervising. This representation contains the hopes he places in these people, as well as his opinions or prejudices about them. By his attitude, the manager can communicate, consciously or unconsciously, these representations to his employees.
The employees also consciously or unconsciously feel the representations of their manager. Little by little, they will adapt to them by behaving consistently with them. People in whom high expectations are placed will be encouraged to succeed, will have at heart to satisfy these expectations, and will succeed in doing so, while people who are considered as low performers will be left behind and will end up effectively failing.
The story of the Broadway musical My Fair Lady is familiar to people with knowledge of musical theater. And some savvy theatergoers know that it was based on the play Pygmalion, by George Bernard Shaw.
But few people know this story: When the play first opened, it was not performed as Shaw intended. For years, the ending of the play was misinterpreted and altered in a way Shaw loathed. And when it was turned into a musical ... well, by then, Shaw was likely spinning in his grave.
When Pygmalion premiered in April, 1914 — just months before the start of World War I — women still did not have the right to vote. Shaw intended his play to change people’s minds about that.
He borrowed from the myth of Pygmalion. In the story, told by the Roman poet Ovid, a sculptor falls in love with his sculpture, Galatea, and prays for her to come to life. With the help of Aphrodite, his wish comes true.
But Shaw didn’t set out to write a frothy, romantic confection. He wanted to advocate for women’s suffrage and the end of Britain’s class system. In the play, stuffy professor Henry Higgins sets himself a challenge: to pass off Eliza Doolittle, a Cockney flower seller, as a duchess.
“The play is really about language, and the idea that, through language, one can raise one’s social status, which is something really important for that era,” says Ellen Dolgin, vice-president of the International Shaw Society. Dolgin says Shaw wanted to get rid of the whole class system and thought the play would prove his point. “What [they thought] of as absolutely innate — social placement — is not," Dolgin says. "It can be learned — and it can be fudged.”
This is where the play gets interesting. Once Higgins wins his bet and completes Eliza’s transformation, she is stuck between two worlds. She can’t to go back to selling flowers and she doesn’t want to be Higgins’ secretary — or worse, his wife. At the end of the play, after an enormous battle of wills, Eliza decides to strike out on her own. “If I can’t have kindness, I’ll have independence,” she declares.
Then, according to Shaw’s final stage directions, Eliza "sweeps out."
Leonard Conolly, who taught Shaw at Trent University in Ontario, sees this as “sweeping clean her relationship with Higgins and heading off to a better, brighter future.” Shaw purposely left unclear what happens next. Higgins hasn’t changed — he is still a pompous ass. The ending is unresolved, and that's just how George Bernard Shaw wanted it.
But when the play debuted, Shaw was in for a shock. At the end of the play, after Eliza "sweeps out," the actor playing Henry Higgins created a moment for himself — a moment Shaw never wrote and clearly didn’t want. As Eliza was leaving, Higgins watched her go, and then gave her a look. He didn’t change any lines, but he gave the audience exactly what they wanted to see: that Eliza and Higgins had been in love all along and that after the curtain fell, they’d be together.
“Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!” Leonard Connoly exclaims. “That is the absolute antithesis of what Shaw had in mind.”
Apparently, there was nothing Shaw could do to rein this actor in. By the hundredth performance, the actor was throwing flowers after Eliza.
When the play came to the United States, a critic wrote: "If you're looking for a happy ending with the hero and heroine joined joyfully together, you will get it in Pygmalion — if you use your imagination a little."
It kept getting worse. Shaw wrote the screenplay for a movie version in 1938, but the producer secretly filmed his own happy ending. Shaw won an Oscar for a movie he hated.
Not surprisingly, Shaw refused to grant the rights for a musical version. But after he died, in came Julie Andrews.
At the end of My Fair Lady, Higgins repents and Eliza returns. Now the final stage directions read: "There are tears in Eliza's eyes. She understands."
And that is how Pygmalion went from feminist manifesto to "chick flick."
In a postscript, Shaw wrote about what really happened to Eliza. After leaving Higgins, she opened a flower shop. She married a nice man. They struggled some, but ultimately did all right. She even dropped in on Higgins from time to time, but she never, ever loved him.
Shaw wrote: "Galatea, the woman who comes to life in the myth, never does quite like Pygmalion. His relation to her is too God-like to be altogether agreeable."