Pygmalion Essay

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Eliza Doolittle is a pitiable flower girl, who unfortunately becomes an experimental object of two linguistic gentlemen in Pygmalion. Higgins and Pickering, who are extremely interested in phonetics, share a mutual belief that changing someone’s speech manner and accent is the gist of a life-changing, social transformation. Their criticism of the girl’s dreadful accent generally reflects the inevitable reality of social hierarchy in Britain, where the wrongful partiality of language, social graces and class is utilized as the measure of a person’s worth. Surprisingly, the flower girl offers to pay . for speaking lessons. Nonetheless, her seriousness and sincerity are soon faded as Higgins thoughtlessly taunts her. His impolite insult promptly …show more content…
Despite the protestations of Mrs, Pearce, Higgins’ housekeeper, he cunningly rekindles Eliza’s intention to learn proper English when he tempts her with thoughts of taxis, diamonds, golds, a prosperous future and potential marriage. After some more insistence by Mrs. Pearce and Pickering, they proceed to a compromised commitment: Eliza will live with Higgins for six months, learning impeccable speech, in exchange, she will need to pass for a duchess at an ambassador’s garden party and will be given money, however, she will be executed if the king discovers that she is not a noble lady. In order to prevent Higgins from creating a bad model role, Mrs. Pearce, also warns Higgins of several prohibitive actions such as swearing or using his dressing-gown as a napkin in Eliza’s presence. Throughout the lessons, Pickering and Higgins soon realize that nature endows Eliza with a latent talent in phonetics. Nevertheless, Eliza's first practice at the meeting with the Hill family becomes disastrous due to her prattle of her aunt's abnormal death. Although Higgins is an experienced purist and makes a great contribution to Eliza's improvement in speech pattern, he fails to adjust Eliza’s lower-class identity with her current upper-class

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