pygmalion narrative essay

A Summary and Analysis of the Pygmalion and Galatea Myth

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

The story of Pygmalion and Galatea is well-known: it’s a myth about art, about love, and about the relationship between the artist and his ‘muse’, in some respects. But there are also, as so often with classical myths, a few things we assume we know about this story but, it turns out, don’t really know. Or at any rate, we don’t know the full story.

So let’s delve deeper into the myth of Pygmalion and the statue he sculpted (did he?) and which came alive as the woman named Galatea (was she?) …

Pygmalion and Galatea: plot summary

There are actually two Pygmalions in classical mythology. The first one was a king of Tyre, the son of Mutto and the brother of Elissa. Elissa is better-known to us as Dido, of the Dido and Aeneas love story .

But that Pygmalion is not the famous one. The other Pygmalion was also a king, but a king of Cyprus. Famously, this Pygmalion fell in love with an ivory statue of a woman. In many versions of the myth, Pygmalion was the one who sculpted the statue (though this isn’t always the case in every single account).

Pygmalion went and asked Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, to give him a woman who looked as beautiful as the ivory statue: a real flesh-and-blood woman who looked exactly like the statue he had fallen head over heels for.

When Pygmalion got home, he discovered the statue had come to life. He married the statue-woman and they had a daughter together.

That’s the shorter version of the myth. But such a plot summary can be fleshed out if we turn to Ovid’s Metamorphoses , written much later than the original Greek myths arose, during the heyday of ancient Rome.

In Book 10 of the Metamorphoses , Ovid fleshes out the backstory for Pygmalion: in his account, the king – who was also the sculptor of the statue – was a raging misogynist. But when he sculpted the perfect woman, his misogyny was quickly forgotten and he longed for his creation to become a living, breathing woman.

As in the summary above, Pygmalion went to make offerings to Aphrodite and asked for a woman just like his perfect statue, and when he went back and kissed the statue, it came alive, and the two of them have a child together, a daughter whom Ovid names as Paphos.

Pygmalion and Galatea: analysis

You’ll notice that at no point in the above summary is the name of the statue mentioned. This is because Ovid doesn’t give Pygmalion’s statue a name, nor does the informative and comprehensive The Penguin Dictionary of Classical Mythology (Penguin Dictionary) .

And yet in the popular imagination, Pygmalion gives the statue a name: Galatea. The name of Galatea is found in the earlier Greek myths, given to several different women, but none of them is the statue from the Pygmalion legend. One of them is a maiden who was loved by Polyphemus, the Cyclops from the stories of Odysseus; she didn’t return Polyphemus’ love and when the Cyclops saw Galatea with Acis, her lover, he threw a boulder which killed the hapless man. Galatea turned Acis into a stream which contained sparkling water.

Indeed, according to the twentieth-century classical scholar Meyer Reinhold, it was only in the eighteenth century when Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote a play about the Pygmalion myth that the name Galatea began to be associated with the sculpture. The name is, however, entirely fitting for the ivory statue in the story, because it means ‘she who is milky white’ in ancient Greek (it’s related to words like lactic and galaxy and even, ultimately, latte , all of which mean ‘milk’).

And the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea (if we choose to call her that) is one that is laden with meaning and significance. Quite what that meaning and significance might be, however, is less easy to answer: we somehow feel that the story conveys something truthful about art, about inspiration, about masculine attitudes to femininity and womanhood (and, indeed, to their own desire for women), but reducing the various strands of the Pygmalion myth to a single line – as Aesop-like ‘moral’, if you will – is not at all straightforward.

Does the myth represent the triumph of love over hate, of male desire over male hatred of women? Does erotic desire and love trump misogyny in the case of Pygmalion, perhaps with a bit of help from Aphrodite? Perhaps love does conquer all here.

And yet it’s hardly representative of all male attitudes, given Pygmalion’s special status as a sculptor (at least in many retellings of the myth). Is the story, then, not about love but about art? Pygmalion hates women and can only love one that is, in a sense, a reflection of his own self: a ‘woman’ who is his own creation, and thus speaks, on some level, to his own inward-looking narcissism.

This is obviously a less positive interpretation of the Pygmalion myth, because it suggests that men can only like or love women who are made in the man’s own image, like ordering a bespoke tailor-made suit. Galatea (as she has become known, albeit only relatively recently) isn’t given any agency in the story, and is instead first a dumb statue and then, so far as the narrative goes, an equally dumb flesh-and-blood woman, voiceless and passive.

In this connection, it’s hardly surprising that Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale is one of Shakespeare’s most powerful explorations of misogyny. It’s a play in which Leontes’ wronged wife Hermione returns as a statue (the real Hermione being thought dead by Leontes) only to ‘come alive’ when it’s revealed this is the real Hermione who is not dead at all. The reconciliation of Leontes and the wife he had falsely accused can leave a bitter taste in many readers’ and spectators’ mouths.

Shaw’s play Pygmalion (1913) obviously takes its title from the myth, but Shaw inverts this love story: in Shaw’s Pygmalion a real woman is turned into a statue, a ‘mechanical doll who resembles a duchess’ in the words of the theatre critic Michael Billington. As Shaw makes clear in the epilogue to the play, Eliza makes a carefully considered decision not to marry Professor Higgins, the Pygmalion of the play.

Numerous poets have written about the Pygmalion myth: Robert Graves, who believed strongly in the idea of the female muse inspiring the male artist, wrote two poems about the story. Roy Fuller’s villanelle about Pygmalion and Galatea takes a less happy view: in the poem (not available online, sadly, but Fuller’s New and Collected Poems, 1934-84 is well worth picking up second-hand), Pygmalion voices his regret at making the wish that the statue would come alive.

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Literary analysis of "Pygmalion" by George Bernard Shaw

”George Bernard Shaw was an Irish comic dramatist, literary critic, and socialist propagandist, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925.” Pygmalion is a play by George Bernard Shaw, named after a Greek mythological figure. It was first presented on stage to the public in 1913. The play is considered to be one of the literary pieces of the twentieth century displaying the social condition of British society.

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Shaw, the larger-than-life playwright who called himself “a bit of an actor,” was often preoccupied with role-playing. In “Acting, by One Who Does Not Believe in It,” a paper delivered at a Fabian meeting in 1889, Shaw asserted that acting — often denounced as shamming — can actually be an avenue to “metaphysical self-realization.” Employing a metadramatic approach to Pygmalion, the following article finds connections between Shaw’s career as a dramatist and the mixed outcomes of Henry and Eliza’s journeys into “metaphysical self-realization.”

Scholars International Journal of Linguistics and Literature

George Mathew Nalliveettil

Communicative activities in ESL/EFL classroom contexts are productive when relevant linguistic devices are applied to literary texts. The literary effectiveness of George Bernard Shaw"s "Pygmalion", an early twentieth-century play has been widely appreciated for its linguistic and literary effectiveness. The dialogic structures composed in the actions of the play reveal the varieties of spoken forms of English present during the Victorian period. After thorough scrutiny of the available research papers related to "Pygmalion" on the web, this study addressed the issues that were given less importance by the earlier studies. Considering the significance of "Pygmalion" as a prescribed coursebook in various universities across the world, this paper analysed the dialogic language of the play from a linguistic perspective. The existing literature on Pygmalion provides insights into thematic analysis from a literary and socio-linguistic perspective, referring to the class struggles and feminism. This paper examined the dialogues from a linguistic perspective. Weigand"s [1] dialogic principles were applied to the utterances of the characters, thereby providing insights into the metalinguistic aspects. The paper also presents the semantic effect of the communicative exchanges that the characters engage in when they meet at different settings in the play. Also, it provides resourceful ideas to the ESL/EFL teachers on various linguistic aspects that need to be focused while teaching a literary text. The findings of the study reveal the dialogic forms in "Pygmalion" can be useful to enhance the verbal, non-verbal and written communication of ESL/EFL students.

Journal of Garmian University

Azad Sharif

Irish University Review

Studies in Literature and Language

Hossein Pirnajmuddin

IJELS Editor , Dilara Arap

Pygmalion, a play which is written by George Bernard Shaw is mainly about the story of a poor girl named Eliza Doolittle who is transforming into an upper-class member by the help of two professors, named Higgins and Pickering. The primary purpose of this paper is to analyze the theme of transformation in the play by focusing on the subjects of identity and self-identity, the importance of appearance, language and communication issues. The story has a mythological background and got known by Ovid's poem, "Metamorphoses." The mythological story is reflected in many poems, drama plays and short stories written by authors globally. Intertextual references to the myth in Rumi's Dīvān-e Šams-e Tabrīzī, Nader Naderpour's poetry "Bot-Taraash," and Gholām-Hossein Sā'edi's play, "Pygmalion." Some short stories with references to the myth such as; "The Birth-Mark," by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Sadegh Hedayat's "The Doll Behind the Curtain" are other texts that their similarities with Ovid's poem are analyzed in this study.

Alice O' Niszczyk

CLASS CONFLICTS IN JAMES SHIRLEY’S THE LADY OF PLEASURE AND BERNARD SHAW’S PYGMALION IŞIK, Serap M.A. Thesis in English Literature Supervisor: Assoc. Prof. Dr. Mehmet Ali Çelikel February, 2016 81 Pages James Shirley’s The Lady of Pleasure and George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion are significant plays of English Literature to analyze class struggles. In The Lady of Pleasure, Shirley tells a story of an oppressor upper class couple who soon realize the importance of human values. There are also people from different social classes through which Shirley exemplifies class conflicts in the society. On the other hand, in Pygmalion, Shaw tells a story of a flower girl, Liza and her transformation into an upper class woman with the help of Prof. Higgins and Pickering. As there are also people from different social classes, class struggles are also reflected in this play. In this dissertation, class struggles, the gap between the social classes, complexities in society and women identity will be...

Hoàng Tố Trinh Nguyễn

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by George Bernard Shaw

Pygmalion essay questions.

How does the play deal with the issue of social class? Does Shaw ultimately uphold it or not--is there enough evidence in the play to demonstrate Shaw's point of view? Consider Pickering, for example, who is very much a product of the British hierarchy, and who is one of the most sympathetic characters.

Does the play suggest that true love is possible and good? On the basis of evidence in the text, what are the feelings that Liza has for Higgins and Freddy, and why does Liza marry Freddy?

Does language itself have transformative power, or does its power come entirely through the people who use it? In what sense is Eliza a new person after she learns to speak differently?

The subtitle of the play is "A Romance in Five Acts." Discuss the ways that the play is a romance--or might it more properly be called a tragedy or a comedy?

Is Freddy the perfect match for Eliza? If the story is a romance, is Freddy or Higgins a romantic hero?

How does the knowledge that Shaw was a socialist color one's reading of this play? Consider, for instance, Doolittle's speech on the undeserving poor. Does Shaw sympathize with this "class" of people, or should we view his presentation of each character uniquely?

How does the movement from the public space of Covent Garden to the private spaces of Wimpole Street and Mrs. Higgins's home affect the behavior of the characters? What is the safest space for Eliza?

How does the audience appreciate dramatic irony in the play? For instance, What does it mean when Clara swears using the term "bloody"?

Shaw gives one of the reasons that a marriage between Eliza and Higgins would never work out as that Eliza would have been unable to come between Higgins and his mother, suggesting that such a dynamic is necessary in marriage. Given the events of the last act, does this reason seem accurate?

How does the quotation from Nietzsche that Shaw quotes at the end of the play, "when you go to women, take your whip with you," relate to Eliza's relationship with Higgins? With Pickering? With Freddy?

Pygmalion Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Pygmalion is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

What tensions already show in the relations between the Mother (later named as Mrs. Eynsford Hill), the Daughter (later named as Clara), and the son, Freddy?

It is raining in Covent Garden at 11:15 p.m. Clara complains that Freddy has not found a cab yet. Freddy returns to his mother and sister and explains that there are no cabs to be found. They chide him, and as he runs off to try again to find a...

What does Higgins mean when he says, “teaching would be impossible unless pupils were sacred”?

Higgins is answering Pickering's charge that he cannot be involved in an experiment where the girl (Eliza) is not treated with the utmost respect. Higgins replies that his pupils are sacred, which means regarded with reverence and respect.

explain the myth of pygmalion in what significant ways and with what effect.has shaw transformed that myth into his plav?

This story is about a sculptor who sculpts the most beautiful woman in stone ever and then falls in love with her. The sculptor's name is Pygmalion; the goddess in the myth transforms the stone into a real woman and they live happily ever...

Study Guide for Pygmalion

Pygmalion study guide contains a biography of George Bernard Shaw, literature essays, a complete e-text, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Pygmalion
• Pygmalion Summary
• Character List

Essays for Pygmalion

Pygmalion essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw.

• An Atypical Romance in Five Acts
• Nurture or Nature: The Gentleman Versus the Guttersnipe
• Pygmalion and Pretty Woman
• The Extent Contextual Attitudes and Values Regarding Gender and Class are Maintained or Altered in Pygmalion and Pretty Women
• The didactic purpose of Shaw's 'Pygmalion'

Lesson Plan for Pygmalion

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to Pygmalion
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• Pygmalion Bibliography

E-Text of Pygmalion

The Pygmalion e-text contains the full text of Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw.

• Preface to Pygmalion

Wikipedia Entries for Pygmalion

• Introduction
• Inspiration
• First productions
• Critical reception

George Bernard Shaw

Ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

Shaw creates extended dramatic irony by including the audience in the process of Eliza’s transformation. Three central characters—Eliza, Mr. Higgins, and Pickering—are allied in their attempt to trick members of high class society and help Eliza pass as one of them. Therefore, in multiple scenes, Eliza’s transformation, while clear to the audience, is being performed to other characters. Including the audience in this trickery has the effect of further investing them in Eliza. They watch her pretend to be high class, painstakingly adjusting her language and mannerisms in order to seem natural in a new environment. The audience’s perception of her is therefore informed by their knowledge of Pickering’s and Higgins’s involvement. 

When Eliza fumbles, the extended dramatic irony creates humor as the characters around her are mystified by her mistakes. One example of this is a dinner scene with the Eynsford Hills. When Eliza enters the scene, she is exquisitely dressed, and she greets each person in the room in turn, saying "how do you do" over and over again. The audience understands her greetings as a memorized phrase, and watches her employ it over and over. The targets of her greetings lack context, however, and are therefore not as clued into her mannerisms. These moments of interaction set the stage for the scene to come, where Eliza’s eccentricities will have to be continually covered up and smoothed over. The audience is painfully aware of the moments of awkwardness, and witness the reactions of other characters with knowledge of the source of Eliza’s strangeness.

In a scene in Act 2, Higgins’s lack of self-reflection creates a moment of dramatic irony. The audience’s perception of Higgins’s behavior does not match how he refers to himself. Mrs. Pearce tries to encourage Higgins to clean up his behavior around the house in order to set a better example for his new pupil Eliza, but Higgins is baffled by the implication that his behavior needs reigning in. After Mrs. Pearce exits, he communicates his confusion to Pickering, saying: 

You know, Pickering, that woman has the most extraordinary ideas about me. Here I am, a shy diffident sort of man.  Cite this Quote

Higgins responds to Mrs. Pearce’s criticism by characterizing himself as shy and modest, someone who doesn’t need the suggested character improvements. His perception of himself is that of a man without need for improvement, someone who keeps to himself and doesn’t put on airs. However, the audience has a very different impression of him. So far in the  play, they have witnessed his boastful intellectualism and snobbery, his cruelty toward Eliza because of her class status, and his bad manners. His response to Mrs. Pearce is a further example of the disconnect between his actions and his perception of himself. His ego allows him to believe that her criticism is unnecessary, even as he describes himself as a modest person. The irony of his statement is further exacerbated by his position of power within the play. Higgins is the supposed teacher of good manners and classiness, and his profession as a linguist has primed him to help Eliza. Despite this, he fails to exhibit those behaviors himself, a failure that becomes increasingly ironic as he boasts of his intellectual prowess.

Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Pygmalion — Pygmalion Eliza’s Character Analysis

Pygmalion Eliza’s Character Analysis

• Categories: Pygmalion

About this sample

Words: 614 |

Published: Jan 30, 2024

Words: 614 | Page: 1 | 4 min read

Table of contents

Eliza's appearance and social status in the beginning, eliza's motivation for change, eliza's transformation through education and training, eliza's struggles and resilience during the transformation, eliza's gradual assertiveness and self-confidence, eliza's ultimate empowerment and independence, references:.

• Shaw, George Bernard. Pygmalion. Penguin Books, 2003.
• Hornby, Richard. The Social and Economic Context of Shaw's Pygmalion. The Modern Language Review, vol. 60, no. 2, 2015, pp. 215-230.
• SparkNotes. Pygmalion Study Guide. Spark Publishing, 2019.

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