About the Movie "My Fair Lady"
1. The origin of My Fair Lady
My Fair Lady is based very closely on Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion。
Pygmalion, in Greek mythology, was a sculptor who created a very beautiful ivory statue called Galatea, with him he fell in love, the goddess Aphrodite brought Galatea to life, and Pygmalion married her.
Bernard Shaw wrote his play Pygmalion basis of the Greek myth. Henry Higgins is the new Pygmalion figure, who “moulds”, almost like a sculptor, a cockney flower girl into his “Galatea”, making her the most desirable. But there is something different between the Greek myth of the god Pygmalion and Bernard's play Pygmalion.
2. Perspectives of viewing
It's definitely that we can review as a romantic story in which how a gentleman who belongs to English up-class makes a genteel lady from a rude girl, things happens during this is really interesting and inspiring.
However, since we are students who are majoring in Sociolinguistics, and we should look deeply and try to find something on academic level which is related to this course, that how social factors have effect on language, such as region, gender, social status and so on.
3. See sociolinguistics in My Fair Lady
(1) About the factors that affect one’s language: region, social status, education, gender and so on.
(2) About social classes: England has a strict social-class system, and there is an obvious social stratification. The film My Fair Lady represents the conflicts, especially the conflicts on language, between different classes in England. There are differences in the styles, the choice of words, the intonation and even loudness of voice between different classes.( One interesting scene in the film is that when Eliza shouts for the horse at the hall, one mid-aged lady is so unbelievable that she faint.) And it seems that the higher of one’s social status is, the more standardly he/she is likely to speak, the more attention he/she pays to his/her address, the more...