¶ … 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 twentieth century literature, Victorian culture was frequently lampooned or criticized by creating ivory-maiden characters that broke or flouted the stereotype in various ways in order to deal with the insane male dominated reality.
Like the statue in the original Pygmalion, women have to deal with the stereotypical images dictated by the male society. In all three of our works Riders to the Sea by J.M. Synge (Maurya), Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw (Eliza) and Trifles by Susan Glaspell (Minnie), the three female characters have to deal with male domination and push the envelopes of their femininity to deal with the male-dominated world of Victorian sensibilities. The male figures are shown to be short sighted and blinded by their prejudice concerning women. These male figures look only at the superficial aspects of the females in their lives and fail to perceive the sophistication of these women. They try to mold the women instead into their ideal female likeness.
George Bernard Shaw's work has spawned a genre within sociology and its effect is often cited with regards to education and social class. The Pygmalion effect "teacher-expectancy effect" refers to situations where perform better than their peers simply because they were expected to do so. The effect requires a student to...
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