Pygmalion as Narrative Bridge Between the Centuries

Abstract

From My Fair Lady and Educating Rita to the critical theorizing of J. M. Miller and John Fowles, the tale of Pygmalion, with some re-visioning, has permeated much of the twentieth-century narrative scene. Perhaps the best-known version of Ovid's tale is Shaw's Pygmalion,1 which deals most overtly with the shaping of a self in relationship to social constructions and expectations. Shaw's version of the original tale merges internal and external aspects of identity formation, a move that places Shaw solidly in the center of the transition from nineteenthto twentieth-century understandings of identity and its creation. Shaw's Higgins and Eliza set the stage, so to speak, for later narrative writers such as John Fowles, Muriel Spark, and Ian McEwan to explicate and eventually to problematize the construction by a Pygmalion, such as Higgins, of the identity of a Galatea, such as Eliza. At the core of Shaw's play is the tension between the fiction of reality and the fiction of the fictive that later writers examine.