伊莱莎.杜利特尔：萧伯纳《卖花女》中觉醒的“葛拉蒂娅”

Introduction
George Bernard Shaw (1850--1950), the most significant British playwright since the 17th century, was more than merely the best comic dramatist of his time. Some of his greatest works for the stage--Caesar and Cleopatra, Man and Superman, Major Barbara, Heartbreak House, Saint Joan, Pygmalion--were unmatched by his stage contemporaries for their high seriousness and prose beauty. His development of a drama of moral passion and of intellectual conflict and debate, his revivifying the comedy of manners, his ventures into symbolic farce and into a theatre of disbelief helped shape the theatre of his time and after. A visionary and mystic whose philosophy of moral passion permeates his plays, Shaw was also the most trenchant pamphleteer since Swift; the most readable music critic in English; the best theatre critic of his generation; a prodigious lecturer and essayist on politics, economics, and sociological subjects; and one of the most prolific letter writers in literature. By bringing a bold critical intelligence to his many other areas of interest, he helped mold the political, economic, and sociological ideas of his days.                    
Among Shaw’s masterpieces, Pygmalion is the most famous and perhaps most beloved of his plays. Published in 1914, Pygmalion is an enchanting play concerned with Shaw’s ideas about class disparity and women’s rights. The title comes from the Greek myth of Pygmalion in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, about a sculptor who creates a statue of surpassing beauty. Granting his request, the goddess animates the statue as Galatea. In his play Shaw updates and substantively alters the myth. Galatea becomes Eliza Doolittle, a Covent Garden flower seller whose accent immediately describes her class, background and social standing. Pygmalion, in Shaw’s vision, is the irresistable Henry Higgins, an expert linguist and skillful articulator. Higgins is a self-professed bachelor and a fascinating character for he is totally disinterested in people but totally fascinated by their accents. He undertakes to personally transform Eliza’s poor pronunciation so as to sculpt her into a duchess, fit to attend any societal party. Of course, Eliza isn’t a statue in Shaw’s version because she is endowed with feminist spirit. Henry assumes that because he has made a duchess, he has ownership of her. Eliza, however, has a will of her own. Despite expectations, these two do not fall in love. Instead, the pupil’s feminism has awakened, she leaves her former teacher at last.
This play is also the basis for the musical play and film My Fair Lady which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture.