Shaw's
socialism is also relevant here. In the figure of Eliza Dolittle, he wants us to see how the
working classes are so often cynically exploited by the social elite, as exemplified by the
manipulative Sir Henry Higgins. The likes of Higgins don't see the lower orders as real people
in their own right. They're little more than objects, who, if they're not being exploited
economically, are used as guinea pigs in social science experiments.
However,
Eliza is able to break free from this cycle of exploitation and assert herself as the dignified
human being she always was, which she was never given the chance to do by a society in which
wealth and appearance are everything. Indeed, it says a lot about this society, which Shaw so
witheringly critiques in , that it can only...
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