Bernard Shaw Pygmalion Term Paper

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Jean Reynolds, "A New Speech," from Pygmalion's Wordplay

It is difficult to fully appreciate the radical use of dialect and language for a modern American, when reading Shaw's play "Pygmalion." However, Sally Reynolds' essay upon "A New Speech," from her longer text on Shaw entitled Pygmalion's Wordplay provides a window of insight into what she calls not simply a play, but a creation myth for British English, for the author in question, and the characters of the play. Reynolds stresses that Shaw not only did Shaw introduce mutability and flexibility into the seemingly insurmountable and impregnable British structure of class and language. By highlighting the importance of language in the creation of the human social self, he became an early postmodernist. Shaw brought Marxist class theory to language in a way that Marx never envisioned.

Through this process, Shaw created his first, truly popular and populist play and thus reinvented himself, in essence assuming in postmodern celebrity fashion the guise of Henry Higgins, deconstructing genius, gadfly, philosopher, social scientist, and teacher extraordinaire.

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But this creator, much like Shaw the creator himself finally has no power over his creation, once the process of creation had been begun within the psychology and language of another human being's speech.

This is true of the spiraling and infinitely creative nature of language, which is constantly under revision in the street, and the fact that Higgins cannot control the fate of Eliza, although ironically and unsuccessfully Shaw attempted to do so, in his conclusion to the play. (And even more ironically, in the musical guise of Pygmalion, "My Fair Lady," the personas of his greatest creations underwent further revisions in their fates.)

Thus, "Pygmalion's" embodiment of the Shavian creation myth functions in more ways than one -- through language one transforms class, identity and the self. Through changing a person's speech patterns, one assumes the role of….....

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