¶ … female characters in the two books 'Pygmalion' by George Bernard Shaw and 'Sexing the Cherry' by Jeanette Winterson. The two authors have assigned different attributed to their female leading characters but if studied carefully we would notice that purpose of creating such figures is identical in both cases.
ELIZA AND DOG WOMAN
The two books Pygmalion and Sexing the Cherry are starkly different in their storyline and narrative techniques, yet the only connecting link is the dominance of female characters in both stories. For example in the Pygmalion, it is Eliza Dolittle who is the most important female character while Dog Woman plays the leading role in 'Sexing the Cherry'. We notice that these two women have been presented in a contrasting light, as one happens to be a self-conscious young woman who is beautiful and sophisticated while the other is an ugly-looking person and has been repeatedly described as a monstrous creature. This is because Dog Woman who happens to have no other name in the book is grotesque character with nothing lady-like about her. Her mannerisms, her language, her dialect and her tone are all rather crude and the woman is an epitome of unsophisticated characteristics. Her personality is different from that of Eliza but it is interesting to notice that these two shared something similar before Eliza was turned into a polished beautiful woman of high society. Eliza who was originally a flower girl was unsophisticated and spoke the way an ordinary uneducated illiterate girl would. She was extremely loud at times and her voice was not pleasant to hear. M. Higgins, who was a Professor of Phonetics' undertake the task of her transformation and ultimately changes Eliza's personality so much so that she ceases to resemble the girl she used to be. It is important to mention here that Eliza's transformation was not exactly a pleasant experience because she later realizes how she lost herself...
Myths and Fables in "Pygmalion" and "Sexing the Cherry" This paper discusses the use of myths and fables in the two books, 'Pygmalion' and 'Sexing the cherry' written by George Bernard Shaw and Jeanette Winterson respectively. While Shaw's play is inspired by the Greek myth of a talented sculptor Pygmalion, Winterson has used the famous fable of twelve dancing princesses as just one part of her novel and hasn't based her
Pygmalion Effect and the Strong Women Who Prove it Wrong Make this fair statue mine…Give me the likeness of my iv'ry maid (Ovid). In Metamorphoses X, Ovid's Pygmalion prays that his idealized statue will become real. Strong female characters were a threat to Victorian sensibilities. Like the Pygmalion character in Ovid's Metamorphoses X, males in the Victorian age created ivory-like stereotypes of the ideal woman. In late nineteenth and in early
1960, the world of women (especially American women) was limited in very many aspects, from the workplace to family life. American women who were employed in 1960 were largely restricted to jobs such as being nurses, teachers or secretaries. Women were in general not welcome in professional fields. Friedan's work, The Feminine Mystique, captured and detailed the lives of quite a number of housewives from across the United States
Shaw's primary purposes in writing Pygmalion, the story of a phonetics professor who, on a bet, transforms a guttersnipe of a flower girl into a lady, was to educate. The title of the play comes from the Greek myth of Pygmalion, a sculptor who created a statue of surpassing beauty; at his request, the gods animated the statue as Galatea. The myth is updated, and substantially altered, by Shaw;
Austere diets are also common, and after winning his final title and announcing his retirement from bodybuilding, Schwarzenegger celebrates with a meal of 'real food' for the first time in many months. The ascetic as well as aesthetic nature of the sport is also underlined in the way that Butler's subjects, Schwarzenegger in particular, also embody femininity, however unconsciously in their physical obsessions and movements. Schwarzenegger even takes ballet
Ovid, Metamorphoses Ovid's Metamorphoses begins by promising to describe the way in which bodies change into new forms, but immediately follows into a primal myth of the creation of the world. Indeed, the poem as a whole is seemingly obsessed with myths of creation, human and divine. I would like to examine three particular episodes in Ovid's epic -- the myths of Arachne and Daedalus in Books VI and VIII, and
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