Before actually reading the first two acts of the play, I realized that I had no idea what the title of the play meant. I did a quick search in Google and according to thefreedictionary.com, Pygmalion is a king in Greek mythology who fell in love with a statue of a woman he created. Eventually, the goddess Aphrodite brought the statue to life as Galatea. After the little research I have done, I feel that I can give an educated guess as to the story of the play.
After reading the first two acts, I believe that Higgins represents King Pygmalion and Liza is essentially the ball of clay Higgins sculpts her from. Since Higgins is determined to show that he can turn a poor, street vender into a classy woman, this transformation is likely to lead to a romance (in my opinion/educated guess). I have never read this play before or seen the movie My Fair Lady, so I am interested to see if in the process of “sculpting” Liza into a refined, young woman, does Higgins eventually fall for her? How does that pan out in the end? I guess I will find out tonight after I finish reading the play J
I did a little background research as well to found out what Pygmalion meant. I found out pretty much the same thing as you did, that Pygmalion was a sculptor who created a statue of a woman that came to life by the Greek goddess Aphrodite, and that Pygmalion ended up falling in love with it. I also tried to make the connection between this myth and Shaw’s play. I can see how Higgins is Pygmalion and that Eliza the flower girl is, figuratively speaking, the sculpture. Higgins tries to make Eliza into a proper duchess by teaching her the phonetics of a high class lady. I think you may be right that Higgins will end up falling in love with Eliza in the process of transforming her into a classy lady. Although he made fun of Eliza at the onset of his experiment, Higgins will start to respect her refined appearance and speech and will fall in love with her. I also look forward to finding out whether this love affair pans out or not.
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