Gender and Class in George Bernard Shaw\u27s Pygmalion

George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion depicts a young flower girl’s linguistic and sartorial transformation into a fake duchess under the tutelage of a well-off phonetician. Eliza Doolittle’s and Henry Higgins’s clashing personalities and humorous misunderstandings however point to wider societal forces – that of gender and class. The circumstances of their meeting and their initial interactions serve as clear illustrations of their disparate levels of education, sophistication and social capital. Eliza Doolittle’s position as a young working-class woman makes her uniquely vulnerable to exploitation at the hands of middle-class men, and while Shaw does not frame Higgins as predatory, he nevertheless emphasizes Eliza’s anxieties and worries. Even though Higgins’s clear lack of interest or ill-intent enables the readers to laugh at Eliza’s fear for her virtue, as her transformation progresses, the untenability of her new social position becomes glaringly obvious. Higgins may have corrected Eliza’s speech and provided her with fashionable clothes, but he has no interest in concerning himself with her future, now that she is too genteel to work as a flower girl, but too poor to truly ascend to a higher class. This lack of consideration for Eliza’s prospects can be interpreted as a sign of Higgins’s uncaring character, but is also a symptom of wider societal obstacles facing women trying to find their place in the world. Eliza manages to triumph and carve a space for herself by integrating her two identities, in the end thriving as an amalgam of the duchess Higgins presented her as and the flower girl she once was