Please comment on the following quote from Act 5 of Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw. In Act 5 Higgins states: "The great secret, Eliza, is not having...

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answer above. Higgins, in many ways, resembles Shaw himself. He represents the tradition of
science, which sees all people as equal, as against conventional society, in which people are
distinguished by money and inherited position. Higgins is concerned with the science of
linguistics, and can train Eliza to speak in the accent of a duchess, but cannot actually help
her understand the nuances of social relationships, to which he himself is utterly oblivious.
Higgins' analysis of language and social class functions satirically to skewer the pretensions
of British society, in which people were judged to a great degree by whether they had the
"right accent." "" also addresses nineteenth-century theories of
Indo-European philology in which the character of people was assumed to be determined to a
certain degree by racial characteristics attributed to linguistic groups. In showing that
Pickering transforms Eliza more than Higgins, Shaw is supporting a theory of cultural and
environment influence on character against the racial theories of "folk" character.
Shaw himself was quite interested in linguistic questions, and for many years was very involved
in an unsuccessful crusade to simplify and rationalize English spelling.