Reflections, Analytics and Interpretation of Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw
The sculptor creates a statue.
The professor creates a lady.
The algorithm creates a profile.
The tools change. The temptation remains the same.
When the mythical Pygmalion fell in love with his own statue, the story told of an artist who had created his ideal. The woman he loved was, at first, nothing more than an image of his imagination. She did not argue. She asked no questions. She possessed no will of her own. She was perfect because she was exactly what her creator wanted her to be.
One might say that Pygmalion loved not a human being, but his own idea of one.
More than two thousand years later, George Bernard Shaw takes this ancient story and turns it upside down. His Professor Higgins is a sculptor as well, though he works not with marble but with language.
The simple flower girl Eliza Doolittle is to be transformed into a lady of high society. Higgins corrects her pronunciation, smooths away her accent, and replaces the marks of her social background with the manners accepted by polite society. A person becomes a project. A woman becomes a wager.
Yet Shaw allows his statue one fatal flaw:
She begins to think.
She develops a will of her own.
She argues back.
And suddenly it becomes clear that a human being is something quite different from the image others create of them.
This is the true strength of the play. It is not primarily the story of social advancement. It is the story of liberation.
Eliza does not triumph because she learns to speak like the upper class.
She triumphs because she realizes that her worth does not depend on Higgins.
The professor can change her pronunciation. He cannot determine who she is.
Higgins, however, is not merely a figure of the early twentieth century. His successors are everywhere.
They can be found in schools, government offices, businesses, and universities.
They decide how people ought to speak, behave, and think.
They believe they know what others should become.
Often they act with the best intentions.
Very few people exercise power while openly seeking to harm others. Power usually appears in the guise of care. Of support. Of education. Of guidance.
That is precisely why it is so difficult to recognize.
An unexpected commentary on this idea can be found in Bertolt Brecht. In one of his stories, Mr. Keuner is asked what he does when he loves a person.
His answer is:
„I make a sketch of him and see that he becomes like it.“
The sentence seems harmless at first glance. In reality, it contains the very same problem found in Pygmalion and in Higgins.
The person is not seen as they are.
They are seen as they ought to be.
The sketch is not adjusted to fit the person.
The person is adjusted to fit the sketch.
Perhaps this is one of the oldest forms of power human beings have ever exercised over one another.
We create images of each other.
The good student.
The model employee.
The responsible mother.
The respectable scientist.
The successful citizen.
And the moment a real human being fails to fit the image, the pressure to conform begins.
Language has always played a special role in this process.
Shaw knew it. Higgins knew it. Generations of dialect speakers know it as well.
For a long time, dialects were not regarded as cultural treasures but as shortcomings. Anyone wishing to climb the social ladder was expected to leave them behind. The language of one’s origins became the language of those who supposedly had not succeeded.
Yet a dialect reveals only one thing:
Where a person comes from.
Not what they can do.
Not what they know.
Not what they think.
And still, judgments continue to be drawn from such markers.
Sometimes a surname is enough.
Sometimes an address.
Sometimes a type of school.
Sometimes an accent.
Modern society likes to claim that it evaluates people according to their abilities. In reality, it often evaluates the packaging.
The accent of Victorian London has been replaced by the postal code.
The mechanism remains unchanged.
And now we have found a new sculptor.
The algorithm.
It knows neither marble nor phonetics. It knows data.
It creates profiles.
Calculates probabilities.
Sorts people into categories.
It decides which advertisements we see, which information reaches us, and sometimes even which opportunities are available to us.
The ancient Pygmalion created a statue.
Higgins created a lady.
Mr. Keuner created a sketch.
The algorithm creates digital shadows of ourselves.
The question has remained the same:
Who gets to decide what a person may become?
Perhaps Eliza Doolittle’s greatest achievement is her answer to that question.
Not the sculptor.
Not the professor.
Not the sketch.
Not even the algorithm.
But the human being themselves.
A simple answer.
And perhaps the most revolutionary one of all.