Tuesday, November 1, 2011
Pygmalion Acts 3 & 4
Despite the time that Higgins and Pickering begin to spend with Eliza during their experiment the two still seem to treat her like she's barely a person. It's suprising because originally I had thought that there would be some sort of epiphany on one (or possibliy both) of their parts and they would learn that language is not as important as they had originally believed. However, it seems like the opposite ends up happening during these two acts. They continue to speak about her like she isn't in the room, and act like she doesn't understand when they're rude to her and treat her like trash. It's something that I found ironic because from the moment that they met Higgins and Pickering wanted Eliza to change everything she knew about how to behave and speak, yet Higgins and Pickering can stay completely set in their ways just because their language is considered better than hers.
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That's the same thing I thought about, although Pickering and Higgins are on opposite sides of the spectrum when it comes to tempers, humility, and politness, they both act in ways that demean her. I expected Pickering to fall in love with her or something, but I guess the age difference was simply too much. Honestly, I could see this book through a feminist lens as things to avoid, and historically feminine in the fact that, again on both sides of the spectrum, both Higgins and Pickering treats her as an object. Higgins is just much more brutish under that fact.
ReplyDeleteThe action in Pygmalion, as in most satires, is character-driven, and because these characters are all caricatures of their classes, the major force of change in the play—Eliza’s transformation—is thus a change in society. Because the ultimate goal of the action in the play is to change Eliza, and Eliza’s change represents social upheaval, Pygmalion can be considered a social satire. It trades on the absurdity of convention, and ultimately creates a reformed society that, while patently ridiculous, is far happier than the original.
ReplyDeleteI agree that it is somewhat hypocritical that Higgins and Pickering expect Eliza to change, yet refuse to change themselves any. However, that was not the point of the experiment. They did with Eliza what they said they would from the beginning.
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