The Dramatization of Habitus: A Bourdieun Reading of Pygmalion

Based on the Greek myth of Pygmalion and the fairy tale of Cinderella, Shaw's Pygmalion demonstrates a masterful coalescence of these two narrative motifs into a coherent plot scheme. Even more significant is his keen insight into the conflicts created at the tripartite intersection of human activity concerning language/class/culture, which, as the leitmotif, revolves around lessons in language learning. This play basically deals with human transformation and by its very nature, Higgins's experimentation with transforming Eliza cannot stop at language alone. Her cultural transformation ripples over into the realms of gesture and even a unique way of living (modus vivendi) intimately associated with taste and manners, which Bourdieu terms as habitus. By acquiring a new fashion and language, Eliza is reborn as a new lady aspiring to be filled with a newly acquired habitus. While separating her from her old Cockney style, Higgins inculcates Queen's English in Eliza, in which process her changed speech styles gradually transforms and restructures her deportment and manners, finally generating new practices, perceptions and attitudes. The gist of Pygmalion is however less Eliza's ascent into the middle class than her battle for symbolic capital waged at the level of language. By problematizing his contemporary practice of habitus conventionalized and warped by class distinctions based on economic, social and cultural capitals, Shaw creates a new humanist model of man founded on spiritual and rational virtues. In conclusion, Eliza is not a frigid Galatea but a dynamic character that goes through a brilliant transformation of three stages: 1) linguistic; 2) cultural, and 3) humanist. Finally she is built into a "consort battleship" on an equal standing with her sculptor. The process of her character-building cannot be illuminated without resorting to the dynamic notion of habitus, which highlights the process of inculcation, structuring, generation and transposing. Given the overwhelming weight of the heroine's role and the dynamic process of her transformation as the major plot scheme, this play should be christened Galatea in lieu of Pygmalion.