, Shaw's
play about an impoverished East End flower seller who passes as an aristocrat after she is
coached by the rich and highly insensitive Henry Higgins, find its roots in Shaw's socialism.
Shaw grew up in poverty and embraced a form of socialism called Fabianism. Fabians, unlike
Marxists, believed in gradual reform of society rather than revolution.
Shaw's interest in the suffering and plight of the working class informed his writing
of Pygmalion. He doesn't romanticize or prettify Eliza's situation before Higgins takes her
under his wing. She is cold, hungry and very dirty. Shaw hoped to show middle class audiences
that the working class lived brutally hard lives.
The play critiques the
callousness with which the upper classes used and discarded working class people. Higgins'
interest in Eliza extends only so far as to being able to pass her off as an aristocrat to other
members of the upper class. Once he does this, he callously throws her out, feeling he owes her
nothing. Shaw is highly critical of this attitude, expressing that Higgins now has a
responsibility to Eliza as a human being, having unfitted her for her prior, working class
life.
Shaw also critiques the idea that the upper classes are naturally
superior on the basis of birth. Though he believed in eugenics or a gradual improvement of the
human race through selective breeding, he hardly located all the best genes in the aristocracy.
Eliza is exhibit A in his quest to show that the intelligence and talent to move in the highest
circles is available even to a person from the lowest rung of the economic ladder, if she is
given the proper education and training.
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