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4.2 Suitable Action….…..13
4.3 Unbearable Future...15
5 Eliza Transformed into an Independent Women…..17
5.1 Liberation of Body…..….17
5.2 Freedom of Soul..18
6 Conclusion..19
Bibliography….…..…..…20
Introduction
Drama, as a distinct artistic form, has always been fond of by many audiences domestic and overseas. George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), a famed Nobel Prize and Oscar-winning Irish playwright, whose productivity and importance in the history of British drama is considered only next to Shakespeare, is widely reputed for enlightening the western feminist literature and criticism. George Bernard Shaw was born in a lower-middle class family of Scottish-Protestant ancestry in Dublin. His father was George Carr Shaw, a failed corn-merchant with a drinking problem and his mother, Lucinda Elizabeth Shaw, born of a squire family. When he was 15 years old, he had to drop out from school due to his parents’ separation and family difficulties. In 1876, after his parents’ porce, Bernard Shaw went to London with his mother and started to make a living by writing. Yet, it was not successful at first. In 1888, he was interested in Johan Ibsen’s play and traced his passion for creation to the drama. He began his literary career there as a playwright four years later. He truly changed the end of the 19th century lowery British stage drama with his works, which made him the innovator of the theatre and opened a new page of the British theater. Throughout his life, he wrote more than 60 plays, among them Man and Superman, Mrs. Warren’s profession, Major Barbara, Saint Joan, Caesar and Cleopatra, and Pygmalion, the most commonly known works and brought huge fame to Bernard Shaw.
He is up till now the only British author to have been awarded both a Nobel Prize (Literature, 1925) and an Academy Award (Best Adapted Screenplay, 1938), the first for his contributions to literature and the second for his most appealing drama Pygmalion, which tells a story that a pedantic professor of British phonetics Henry Higgins makes a bet with his friend Colonel Pickering that he can train Eliza Doolittle who was selling flowers in a food market and originally speaks thick cockney dialect to be an elegant noble lady who can speak standard English through changing her appearance, manners, pronunciation and he succeeds and finally falls in love with her in the end.源:自*751~·论,文'网·www.751com.cn/
George Bernard Shaw takes his title from an ancient Greek mythology: Pygmalion, which portrays a character with the same name who is known to be the king of Cyprus, a famous sculptor, falls in love with the statue of a woman called Galatea he created. Then he prays to the goddess of love
Aphrodite for a wife just as the statue he has created. Aphrodite brings the statue to life and Pygmalion eventually marries her. Shaw’s drama Pygmalion vividly displayed how Eliza, a flower girl, got trapped in ethical predicament and identity crisis in that process, which was immortalized after Shaw’s death in the 1953 Broadway musical My Fair Lady. Through this story, Bernard Shaw revealed the contradictions between inpidual class identity and ethical complaints in British society at that time which was difficult to reconcile, and paid attention to the possibilities of inpiduals seeking self realization in the society, thus conveying the profound ethical implications. The play, which shows a deep theme—exposing the ugly faces of the exploiting class and revealing some contemporary social problems shadowed by the Victorian Times, is of great critical value.文献综述
Since its publication in 1912, Pygmalion has attracted much academic attention, but the research can continue to develop in different angle. Most studies have already focused on the themes and style reflected in Shaw’s works. Encyclopedia Britannia, which is considered to be the most famous and authoritative encyclopedia all around the world, reviews “George Bernard Shaw is the most important playwright in Britain since the 17th century and some of his most outstanding drama and prose has so extraordinarily aesthetic content and highly serious that the contemporary living theater can’t compare with.” (1999:201) As the most excellent representatives of British critical realistic literary writer during the last years of the 19th century and first years of 20th century，George Bernard Shaw has widely attracted critical evaluation of his literary works and his writing career from various perspectives. St. John Greer Ervine (1956), who is not only a famous Irish playwright, but also a friend and biographer of Shaw, speaks highly of the entertainment value of the play. In his opinion, Pygmalion is an amusing and well-organized comedy. Archibald Henderson (1956), who is considered to be the most authoritative biographer of Shaw and also a crucial critic of his works, thinks that Shaw’s Pygmalion is apparently a statement of the idea that barriers between different classes are artificial and must be broken down. People should live equally in a society without any class barrier.