Pygmalion

I read this - I'm not calling this post a review, because GBS does not need any reviews from me. Just noting that I felt a very odd mixture of admiration and loathing in response to Shaw's narrative about class. On the one hand he recognises that speech is a class marker, and that it helps members of the dominant class identify each other and people who are other - and he recognises too that teaching someone to 'speak posh' does not really give them admittance to the dominant class. Some of the discourse about class is very acute.

And he satirises Professor Higgins's callousness towards Eliza - he doesn't care about her as a person, only as an experimental subject. Except that's about him, not his class - his mother Mrs Higgins is much kinder, as is Colonel Pickering, who show kind fellow-feeling towards Eliza, because...well why? Because they are a lady and a gentleman?

And the 'social comedy' of Eliza using her new posh voice to ignorantly speak of things that good manners require that she shouldn't?  And the humorous spectacle of Eliza's father elevated to wealth despite himself? Who is laughing at this, and what do they find funny?

And the fact that the two representatives of the working class are a flower girl and a dustman...more like servants than proletarians?