Discuss the plot of the play in relation to the Pygmalion myth.

In the
ancient Greekmyth, Pygmalion is a sculptor who falls in love with a statue he carves out of
ivory. Pygmalion makes the statue in honor of Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love. He secretly
wishes that he could have a bride in the exact likeness of the statue. Aphrodite grants him his
wish, and when he returns home, he finds that the statue has been turned into his ideal
woman.

In Shaw's reinterpretation of the myth, Henry Higgins, a professor of
phonetics, sets out to transform a lower-class London flower girl by the name of Eliza Dolittle
into his ideal of a high society lady. As well as being a frightful snob, Higgins also does not
have much time for the intellectual capacity of women. To him, Eliza is little more than an
object, a guinea pig in a scientific experiment that is inherently exploitative and
manipulative.

However, this "statue" also comes to life, though not
in the same way as in the Greek myth. Over the course of the play, Eliza develops a great deal
of confidence, poise, and self-assurance. By the end, she is a lady, and, at the same time, she
has also broken free from Higgins's overbearing tutelage. In this sense, Shaw's
Pygmalion can be seen as a feminist twist on the Greek myth. Eliza may
look, talk, and behave exactly like Higgins's ideal of what a lady should be, but, crucially,
she is an independent woman, a human being in her own right, with the ability to make her own
decisions in life.