Women and Eccentricity in Shaw
Eliza Doolittle and the Dog-woman project almost opposite images of British womanhood. Eliza has been turned out by her father into the slums of London and she longs to live in comfort and security. She thinks her dreams can come true if she can speak proper English. The Dog-woman, on the other hand, unlike the Cockney flower girl, is practically a misfit, but not quite. She wears her size and oddness as though they were inevitable.
The title of W.'s Sexing the Cherry is obviously a provocative one. Yet the image actually comes from the sexing of hybrid cherries.
The Dog-Woman is the perfect image of that old joke about the 800-pound gorilla who can sit on the bus wherever he likes. She is a giantess, can hold normal-sized Jordan in her palm, and plows her way through life in a way that tells everyone that if she can't join 'em, she'll beat'em at their own games. For example, she loves to shock Puritans:
sweated for fear that they would make me stand up and thus see my size. Since my battle with the guards, Tradescant had told me there was a warrant for my arrest.
You may go in,' said one of the soldiers.
Then, please,' said I, rolling my eyes winningly, 'please, clear a path for us, for I will have to stagger up the steps into the gallery while my daughter catches any fluids that may flow from me.
It is the stench of a three days' dead dog, and not for the noses of the tender' (Winterson, 73)
Winterson graces Dog-Woman with the kind of sense of humor that would make most of us groan "Ewww!" And giggle uneasily. On the other hand Shaw graces his heroine with spunk, grit and the speech of her class. Eliza Doolittle is an eccentricity to Henry Higgins, a scholar of dialects, and she becomes his pet project. Her Cockney English of the lower classes is full of yowls and shrill ways of speaking her mind that selling flowers on the...
Winslet will appear ambitious and independent while also soft enough to fall in love with a man such as Higgins. Eliza becomes increasingly emotional as the story progresses. Because the producers want to build the on-screen chemistry, Act Four is crucial. Eliza loses her temper with Higgins, who reacts with his characteristic coldness. Their mutual anger reveals an underlying tension that can only be resolved by suggesting that the
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
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
Capitalism in Pygmalion and Major Barbara -- Even a socialist Shaw must bend his ideological will to real-world demands George Bernard Shaw called himself a socialist and both his plays "Pygmalion" and "Major Barbara" criticize middle class aspirations and social pretensions. The author's socialist philosophy can be seen when it expressed with a certain irony, by Henry Higgins in "Pygmalion," where Higgins comments, that Eliza's offer to pay him in shillings
This includes pretty much every human being everywhere, in any time and place. 4) One consistent theme in this play is the oddity that is the English language. Some have even argued that Shaw, like the early British Broadcasting System (BBC), wanted to standardize English pronunciation. Do you agree? or, can we read Eliza's dialect in some positive rather than critical way? Eliza's dialect is viewed with a certain negativity
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
Our semester plans gives you unlimited, unrestricted access to our entire library of resources —writing tools, guides, example essays, tutorials, class notes, and more.
Get Started Now