G B Shaw's Pygmalion : A Social Commentary

Authors(1) :-Rafaquat Raja

G B Shaw is a versatile dramatist after Shakespeare. He seems to be committed for social upliftment in his plays. He dominated English theatre nearly for sixty year through his skills and concerns towards society by making his plays on serious note with gaiety of wit and humor. His plays are loaded with inner conviction and a universal relevance. For him art for art’s sake is not an acceptable pursuit, instead he seems to make a contribution in terms of betterment of the society through his plays. Pygmalion is a romance in five acts based on Greek and Roman Mythology of the sculptor Pygmalion. Pygmalion (Prof. Higgins) in the play is not a sculptor like that in mythology, but a phonetician. He transforms an illiterate and uncivilized flower girl into a duchess. This transformation took Pygmalion six months and Shaw offers a strong critique of social parameters of class division. It deals with the dynamics of relationships based on varied discourses. Shaw was not satisfied with educational system of his time and in this plays we find that he wants a system of education where students shouldn’t have to be made slave, instead to empower them to raise in social and moral status. The paper will focus on the discourse of education and how Shaw deconstructs the social hierarchy. It will also undertake to highlight the role of language in transformation and how social status attained can create problems for a person too.

Authors and Affiliations

Rafaquat Raja
Research Scholar, Department of English, Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh, India

Pygmalion, Education, Discourse, Wit, Civilized, Transformation, Hierarchy.

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Publication Details

Published in : Volume 2 | Issue 2 | March-April 2016
Date of Publication : 2016-04-30
License:  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Page(s) : 366-369
Manuscript Number : IJSRST1622175
Publisher : Technoscience Academy

Print ISSN : 2395-6011, Online ISSN : 2395-602X

Cite This Article :

Rafaquat Raja, " G B Shaw's Pygmalion : A Social Commentary", International Journal of Scientific Research in Science and Technology(IJSRST), Print ISSN : 2395-6011, Online ISSN : 2395-602X, Volume 2, Issue 2, pp.366-369, March-April-2016.
Journal URL : https://ijsrst.com/IJSRST1622175
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