초록 열기/닫기 버튼
One of the most controversial issues in the initial response to Bernard Shaw’s 1913 play, Pygmalion: A Romance in Five Acts, is the playwright’s persistent refusal to provide his audience with a romantic union between Higgins and Eliza. Unlike the classical myth about Pygmalion and Galatea, whose destiny, including love and marriage, was entirely controlled by the god Aphrodite, the twentieth-century version of Shaw’s retelling of the story boldly breaks away from the magical, sentimental notion of a “happy ending.” As a professor of phonetics, Higgins represents the problematic signs of modernity, particularly his preoccupation with a mechanical system of enlightenment to educate the lower class out of ignorance and irrationality. Shaw uses the term “romance” with a sense of irony to point out that the magical, supernatural and idealistic transformation is no longer possible, nor even probable, in the twentieth century. Instead, Pygmalion espouses the message that society needs counter-modernity, with a re-established awareness of ethics and social responsibilities encompassing the rigid class binaries. Eliza, as an embodiment of counter-modernity, is a character through whom Shaw advocates emergence of a new social class that is morally healthy, self-reliant and economically and culturally independent.
키워드열기/닫기 버튼
Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion, modernity, romance, myth of Pygmalion and Galatea, middle class morality, a new social class
