Gender Ibjectification Of Women In Pygmalion By George Bernard Shaw

The play Pygmalion was written by George Bernard Shaw in 1912. The title of the play is based upon a character in Greek Mythology of the same name. The Greek character Pygmalion carved a woman out of ivory, as he could not find an adequate real woman. He later fell in love with the statue he carved, causing it to come to life. Shaw’s play Pygmalion focuses on a poor young flower girl living in London named Eliza Doolittle. She meets a Professor Henry Higgins who teachers her how to speak and act like a lady. However, in teaching Eliza how to fit in as a lady in high society, Higgins forgets to treat Eliza as a person. Throughout the play, Higgins treats Eliza and majority of women, as if they were objects, which the negative gender identification …show more content…
Unfortunately, during high school when I studied this play, it was taught in such a way that it reinforced gender bias against women. My teacher taught Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Pygmalion simultaneously in an effort to compare Frankenstein’s monster and Eliza Doolittle. The class glossed over the objectification of women in the play, which implies to the class that it was not important enough to study. Eliza, who is a strong independent female character at the beginning of the play and becomes wholly dependent on men due to their objectification of her, is related to a monster created by men and made of decaying flesh. The implication of this comparison is lost on most students however; the damaging nature of this comparison is still present. Even if many of my peers did not look at the comparison between Eliza and the monster critically, the way that my teacher overlooked the objectification of women in the book is wrong. Teaching pieces of literature with strong themes of sexism and the identification of women and not properly displaying why these ways of thinking is harmful, normalizes the objectification of women in modern