GEORGE BERNARD SHAW’UN PYGMALION: A ROMANCE IN FIVE ACTS’ OYUNUNUN POLİTİK AJANDASI

George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (1912) is a play written at the onset of modernism, when the majority consensus declared didacticism obsolete. Shaw, as well as being productive in a variety of literary genre, was also an active socialist, vocal in political theory who chose to focus on perennial issues of class, women’s emancipation and working class autonomy; all of which, in Pygmalion, pivoted around the premice of individuality and a perverse didacticism. For Shaw didacticism was neither outdated nor inappropriate as a technique: the theater, he believed, need not be a place of mere entertainment, but could rise to the challenge of generating political awareness and altering even deeply entrenched dogmatism. Hence, in Pygmalion, one of his most intensely didactic plays, Shaw entices a middle-class audience with the promice of “Romance” but subsequently entraps them within a contentious socialist debate. The play is inspired by an ancient Greek myth: Pygmalion, is a sculptor devoted to his art and the pursuit of perfection, to the extent of rendering him incompatible with women. One day he sculpts a female form so lovely that he falls hopelessly in love with it. The Goddess sees Pygmalion’s devotion and taking pity on him breathes life into the creation he has named Galatea, so that eventually they are united in marriage. Shaw takes this romantic tale and uses it to depict female and lower class enslavement by a capitalist/patriarchal society, arriving at the blatant deduction that the the class system is both arbitrary and wholly redundent. In practice, however, the prospect of a ‘love story’, inspite of the seriously political content, proved to be a pull too great so that audiences, much to Shaw’s dismay, were swept along by a clichéd anticipation of romantic attachment rather than intellectual speculation as to the nature of liberté and égalité. Hence inciting an imagined marriage between patriarch and underdog and thereby putting pay to any hope of burgeoning individuality and social autonomy.