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M.P.

Ossa, College Professor


Written January 5, 2012
Critical Review of Pygmalion
The play Pygmalion, by George Bernard Shaw is primarily a social satire that belongs to
the genre of Romanticism and most specifically, to the form of Comedy of Manners.
Within this genre, society is often mocked particularly by the way that the upper classes
act and think.
One must keep into consideration that George Bernard Shaw is an Irish playwright who
produces pieces for a very complex British Victorian audience. Victorian society is
notorious for its classicist nature, for its hypocritical values, and for its 'holier than thou'
attitudes. When we take this into consideration, we can safely argue that Shaw literally
laughed at the English Victorian audience right in its face by pointing out the shallow
nature of their judgment of other people.
You see this creature with her kerbstone English: the English that will keep her in
the gutter to the end of her days. Well, sir, in three months I could pass that girl
off as a duchess at an ambassador's garden party. I could even get her a place as
lady's maid or shop assistant, which requires better English. That's the sort of
thing I do for commercial millionaires. And on the profits of it I do genuine
scientific work in phonetics, and a little as a poet on Miltonic lines.
The central theme of the play revolves around making a peasant girl look and portray a
Duchess in an upcoming fashionable event. In the process of transforming Eliza, Shaw
irreverently points at the coarse and terrible image that the lower classes have of the
upper classes by making jokes at the way Eliza should pronounce words and use specific
mannerisms. These words are exaggerated and made to look ridiculous. The mannerisms
are meant to mock the aristocrats. The language used by Eliza and her peers throughout
the transformation process just adds salt to the wound: It brings the upper classes
spiraling down from their self-made pedestals.
Therefore, far from portraying the English as tolerant, kind, and intelligent people, Shaw
shows us how easily to deceive they can be if only you make someone look and sound
the way an aristocrat is meant to look and sound. Because of this clear attack to a society
that accepts no criticism, Shaw obtained mixed reviews about the play. It is not so much
because of its form, but because of its central message: Shaw seems to have been quite
interested in pointing out social flaws, and this is obviously something that, in a shallow
society, will not transform into a vote of approval.

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