PYGMALION: A ROMANCE IN FIVE ACTS

Pygmalion is one of the plays that I am supposed to study for this semester. Pygmalion, which is written by Bernard Shaw is a comedy about a phonetics expert who, as a kind of social experiment, attempts to make a lady out of an uneducated flower girl. Pygmalion probes important questions about social class and mobility, education, human behavior, and relations between the sexes.

I am interested in the theme of social class and education, being illustrated by the playwright in Pygmalion. Previously, I thought that social class also resembles our own education. The higher our level of education is, the higher our social class would be. Moreover, supposedly, the more knowledgeable we are, the better our ethics will be. But, this does not entirely rhyme with what have been portrayed in Pygmalion. In my opinion, what Shaw is trying to depict is that, one with knowledge and a good social status in his life may not have the ethics and morals being demanded out of them. For example, though Mr. Higgins is an educated and professional phonetic expert, he has no desired ethics, required from people of upper class and good educational background. He treats other people, either low class or upper class with the same, rude manner that does not at all suit his position.
Besides that, Eliza who is initially an uneducated woman has been portrayed to have better manner than Mr. Higgins. The knowledge and education that she gains obviously makes her a better person. She has accumulated ethics and knows how to interact intelligently with people of upper class. But, in the story, though Eliza has changed in her appearance and has accumulated ethics, suits a lady, she somehow has not really changed in her inner self. She stills a flower girl who always makes an irritating sounds when she is angry. Hmm...an old habit is really hard to leave.