"… you have no idea how frightfully interesting it is to take a human being and change her into a quite different human being by creating a new speech for her. It's filling up the deepest gulf that separates class from class and soul from soul."
“HIGGINS
I find that the moment I let a woman make friends with me, she becomes jealous, exacting, suspicious, and a damned nuisance. I find that the moment I let myself make friends with a woman, I become selfish and tyrannical. Women upset everything. When you let them into your life, you find that the woman is driving at one thing and you're driving at another.
PICKERING
At what, for example?
HIGGINS
Oh, Lord knows! I suppose the woman wants to live her own life; and the man wants to live his; and each tries to drag the other on to the wrong track. One wants to go north and the other south; and the result is that both have to go east, though they both hate the east wind.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion
That was my favourite quote from the book, besides many inspiring quotes found in GoodReads.
Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw. A small part of the play was published in Solid Gold book in the classics chapter page 26. The text genre is classics/fiction. It is a mixture of opinion, Informative and argumentative dialogues because the story is based on a play from 1912. Although I can not judge the whole play/book by this short extracted text. However, this story succeeded in giving me glims of women's social conditions and limitations at that time.
The core of the story is about gender roles and class. A linguist makes a bet that he can turn anyone into a successful person and highlights the importance of education and proper language. The author uses classic English. Yet the language of the linguist character has a rude tone, with an insensitive sense of humour that reveals perhaps a character of a typical upper-class conceited male at that time.
The story assumptions that anyone can change into a better version of themselves if given the right tools, education, and under good supervision. Which I agree with except without generalization because people's inner will differs.
To summarize, the text shows the superiority and male domination of the upper class back in 1912.
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