María Moreno Tuñón LIT 17/11/2019

George Bernard Shaw was born July 26, 1856, in Dublin, Ireland. In 1876 he moved to London,
where he wrote regularly but struggled financially. In 1895, he became a theatre critic for
the Saturday Review and began writing plays of his own. His play Pygmalion was later made
into a film twice, and the screenplay he wrote for the first version of it won an Oscar. During his
lifetime, he wrote more than 60 plays and won many other awards, among them the Nobel Prize
in Literature in 1925.

The fragment we are going to analyze starts when Liza says to Professor Higgins that he is a
cruel tyrant. They are both in Professor Higgins’ mother’s house and they are both prepared to
go to Liza’s father’s wedding. But they start to argue and end up almost fighting. Liza accuses
P. Higgins of being a bully because he always shouts at her and treats her very bad. We can see
the evolution of Liza throughout the whole play but, on the other side we cannot appreciate this
same change on Higgins, who ends the play exactly as proud as he started it. But Liza has
evolved, not just in her way of talking, but also in her way of behaving. She had become an
independent woman, who rejects going back to her poor past. She asks P. Higgins for help and
when she realizes he is not going to help her, she threatens him with marrying Fred. We can, in
fact, highlight the sentence “I’m not going to have my masterpiece thrown away on Freddy”.
Higgins’ pride makes him seeing himself as a superior being, a creator, in which concerns Eliza.
Eliza, as his creation, should marry a man of high position. But she threatened him to marry a
common man who has barely enough money to live. Higgins also shows a despotic behaviour
when he laughs at Eliza’s statement when she says that she will be a teacher.

So, in conclusion, we should remark the fact that Shaw wanted to criticise the British society
based on social classes and language as a distinct mark of those social classes. But also we can
see that, although Eliza had improved her language (thanks to P. Higgins), therefore, somehow,
improved her social level, Higgins still treats her as if she was inferior, so we can deduce that
Shaw also criticises some people’s incapacity to change his mind and the fact that some people
pigeonhole another one forever, in spite of their efforts, hard work or changes.