George Bernard Shaw based his 1913 play ‘Pygmalion’ on the Greek legend of the sculptor, Pygmalion. According to the classic tale, Pygmalion despised women but fell in love with his own sculpture of the goddess Aphrodite. He appeals to Aphrodite to give his statue life. She answers his prayer, and Pygmalion marries his creation.
Shaw’s play takes place in Victorian London, where Henry Higgins, a phonetician, accepts a bet that simply by changing the speech of a Cockney flower seller he will be able, in six months, to pass her off as a duchess. Eliza undergoes grueling training. When she successfully “passes” in high society—having in the process become a lovely young woman of sensitivity and taste—Higgins dismisses her abruptly as a successfully completed experiment. Eliza, who now belongs neither to the upper class, whose mannerisms and speech she has learned, nor to the lower class, from which she came, rejects his dehumanizing attitude.