The persistence of Pygmalion: Inscribed selves in twentieth-century British narrative

Vicki Renee Munro Kennell, Purdue University

Abstract

Narrative has long concerned itself with issues of selfhood and identity, examining the individual life in its relation to others or to society. For much nineteenth-century literature, identity was ontological and sociological; an individual's self was a real, knowable entity, describable in terms of the social milieu in which the individual lived. This focus formed a "fiction of reality" in contrast to the twentieth-century's "fiction of the fictive." This latter fiction resulted from a literary shift to an emphasis on epistemology, concerned more with how reality is known and thus how it is constructed or inscribed. George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion offers a prime example of both types of narrative; thus, Shaw's understanding of identity-construction bridges the gap between the two types of fiction for later narrativists, who, although not literally retelling Ovid's tale, examine the formation of a Galatea-like identity by a Pygmalion figure. In transforming Ovid's tale of physical creation into the story of linguistic creation, Shaw--and those authors who follow him--examines an abundance of issues related to identity creation. The sociological category of issues includes the inscription of one character by another, in particular with respect to group identity. The aesthetic category examines identity-creation as a theatrical or role-playing situation, in which a character's true self may be forced incognito. The philosophical category questions the role that the perceptions of others play in the formation of reality and of a real self. This dissertation examines the framework of the Pygmalion Project as exemplified in the works of Shaw, considers its transformation at the hands of novelist Ford Madox Ford, and then demonstrates how it persists in the later British narratives of Muriel Spark, John Fowles, and Iris Murdoch. For narratives concerned with identity and selfhood, Shaw's examination of the Pygmalion nature in his dramas proves central to understanding the issues involved with identity creation.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Rowe, Purdue University.

Subject Area

British and Irish literature|Literature|Theater

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