Pygmalion's title harkened from its predecessor, Ovid's Pygmalion which accounted a woman-hating sculptor falling in love with his own sculpture of his desired image. Wide Sargasso Sea referred to the sea surrounding Dominica, the setting of Jean Rhys's

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Lek Susan

SIM-OUC PI No.: K0503345                                             12th August 2005

TMA 07

        George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion was about Higgins, a phonetics expert, who, as a kind of social experiment, attempts to make a duchess out of an uneducated Cockney flower-girl, Eliza. Pygmalion followed some traditional rules. First, the play was based on Eliza’s transformation as the main theme. Higgins claimed he could pass Eliza off as a duchess in three months. (Block 5, page 14) Secondly, the virtual sixth act, the ball, was inserted in the book but was absent from the stage version. Shaw understood the essence of traditional convention by excluding the ball which was extravagant and technically taxing. (Block 5, page 11) Lastly, Pygmalion also conformed to the traditional five-act structure which allowed breakdown of actions into five balanced sections: beginning (first act), development (second act), climax (third act), turning-point (fourth act) and denouement (fifth act). (Block 5, page 12)

        The adage said, “Familiarity breeds contempt.” Shaw avoided the familiar ‘Cinderella’ and ‘wedding-bells’ ending for Higgins and Eliza. Shaw included the fairy-tale formula but excluded the romantic ending as he hated to be predictable. (Block 5, page 32) Shaw’s play was realistic and economical. Firstly, he chose to rise the curtain on an empty stage thrice to achieve an elaborated, unusual and real-looking sets. (Block 5, page 14-15) Secondly, Shaw reflected on serious moral issues in Pygmalion. He likened Eliza’s physical uncleanliness to Higgin’s personal uncleanliness to exhibit his distinctive Shavian paradox. Then he introduced a more unwashed character, the cockney dustman, to embody another Shavian paradox (Block 5, page 27) to mock the audience’s association with only the same class and social status. The third realism was that of dialogue. Though heightened and poetical language was one of the most durable and pervasive legacies of the classical tradition, Shaw challenged the tradition with characters speaking in recognizable everyday speech to relate to audience’s familiar language. (Block 5, page 15)

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Pygmalion resembled its dramatic ancestors. One of Ovid’s Metamorphoses “Pygmalion in Love with a Statue” concerned individual transformation like Shaw’s Pygmalion. Shaw’s and Ovid’s Pygmalion were equally appealing to both artists as they explored the relation between creator and creation. Eliza was behaving just like the statue in the Ovidian myth. Higgins, like Pygmalion, had no time for women and Eliza was Higgins’s equivalent of Pygmalion’s statue. The difference between Shaw’s version and Ovid’s was the ending of the stories. Unlike Pygmalion in Ovid’s, Higgins did not fall in love with his creation.

Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea recreated the true ...

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