Pygmalion And The Importance Of Being Earnest

Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw, The Razors Edge by Edmund Goulding, and The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde all portray an example of Corruption Trivializing the Rich. Each one of these movies has characters that are corrupted or doing the corrupting due to their wealth. Whether they are corrupt and wealthy due to their upbringings or are recently becoming corrupt, all these movies portray the life of the rich and their behaviors to find who they really are. The story of Pygmalion is based on Metamorphoses, which is about a sculptor, Pygmalion, who falls in love with the statue he created. In the myth, Aphrodite brings the statue to life, but Pygmalion quickly forgets that as the statue is now human and has a mind and feelings of her own. George Bernard Shaw has incorporated the myth into his play, Pygmalion, where Professor Higgins is set out to fix Eliza’s dialect and grammar so that she can speak English the way it is supposed to be spoken. His goal is to …show more content…
Cecily and Eliza are both of lower and middle class. They both are involved with men of the upper class who look down upon them and objectify them. Cecily, in The Importance of being Earnest, is wanted by Algernon because of her beauty and youth. He wants to make her as wealthy as he is because of her poor upbringing. Being his wife would make her more of an accessory piece than his wife. Eliza, in Pygmalion, is used as an experimental “guinea pig” for two upper-class men who frivolously made a bet. Unlike these two stories, Razors Edge presents a different idea. Isabel comes from a very wealthy upbringing and has the power to choose between two men that are just as wealthy as she is. Looking at all three of these stories, it is evident that class ranking stands with much authority and power in society. This goes to show that people can be corrupted by this ranking as