Elevating Class and Language Between Two Plays Essay

A persons spoken communication is truly practic every last(predicate)y connected to his or her cordial perspective. A person from a steeper status w laid low(predicate) maintain a various dialect of the same wording than mortal from disdain status. People brought up in poor surroundings or p everyplacety argon keen to swearing and bring forth little concern to speaking powerful as their lyric was intended. People from high society argon the opposite. They are very much concerned with using their communicative skills and their rhetoric, and they are able employment it as a reverberate of power all over others. These ideas of language among familyes can be seen in the plays The Tempest, by William Shakespeare, and Pygmalion by Bernard Shaw. though Shaws play is much more(prenominal) focused on the language establish transmogrifyation of Eliza Doolittle, and the interaction between her and prof Higgins, Shakespeares creates a equal kinship between the modestl y Caliban, and his master Prospero. two plays show that a superficial heighten in education, or language, cannot realistically reposition a person or their social family, rather the real switchs to these characters are do internally. Both Eliza and Caliban come from poor backgrounds. Eliza is a very poor develop girlfriend with terrible English. She swears often, by saying bally(a) constantly between sentences. As Shaw describes her ab initio as the skin rash girl she is unsympathetically described as ugly and disgusting, Her sensory hair needs washing rather naughtily its mousy color can but be natural. She wears a shoddy swarthy coat that r apiecees nearly to her knees and is shaped to her shank (Shaw, 13).Even her accent makes her feel want a second household citizen. to a lower berth place all of this, Eliza is still a tall girl, Im a skinny girl, I am (2). Because The Tempest contains magic, Caliban is natural the son of the deceased witch Cycorax. the l ike Eliza, Caliban excessively maintains his pride as he believes he is the rightful possesser of the island which Prospero later on took control over. Also like Eliza, much of his oral communication is riddled with slurs and cursing. His demonic roue allows Prospero to treat him like a lower class, subhuman monster, similar to how Professor Higgins treats Eliza like a lower class citizen collectible to her looks, her demeanor, and consequently her social status as a flower girl.In response, Caliban responds with aversion whenever Prospero calls for him, As wicked dew as eer my mother brushd/ With ravens feather from morbid fen/ Drop on you some(prenominal)(prenominal) a south-west blow on ye/ And blister you all oer (20), and Prospero responds in kind by move spirits to harass him and pinch him. The period of the transformation that learning language had over both characters is limited to uni write nevertheless a tool for them to use while unfortunately (to their ma sters) bring throughing the same personality. What changes to Eliza is virtually definitely a surface take change and not a trench identity level change, at to the lowest degree finished the length of the experiment.Though Higgins manages to transform Elizas appearance from that of a low-status flower girl to that of a refined early lady, she remains a cockney flower girl underneath her facade of a straitlaced accent speaking proper English. Her real personality remains persistently unchanged until the end of the play. This is the same with Caliban who, through learning language from Prospero, remains bitter, hateful, and desirous throughout The Tempest. Caliban remains ungrateful for macrocosm taught language by Prospero, You taught me language, and my profit ont/ Is I know how to curse. The scarlet plague rid you /For learning me your language In this popular quote, Caliban uses the language taught to him a substantiatest Prospero to march his disgust towards Prosperos efforts to change him.It excessively draws a sharp similarity between the treatment between higher and lower classes in both plays. Elizas human consanguinity with Higgins language is similar to Calibans relationship with Prospero in that both Eliza and Caliban understand language as a reminder of their low social status compared to their masters. Both characters also remain ungrateful in the narratives of their masters, when they are mostly more concerned to keep their take in personal dignity. The difference in narratives between the characters learning language, and those educational activity it in both plays is very similar.Both Higgins and Prospero, in their understanding of what they are doing by teaching Eliza and Caliban language, are teaching them a counsel to elevate their status. Because both masters are concerned with social status, they believe their students should powerfully value their gifts of language education. Both Higgins and Prospero also consider their subjects highly ungrateful. When Higgins mother objects to his experiment, Higgens retorts, You energise no idea how frightfully provoke it is to take a human being and to change her into a quite opposite human being by creating a new speech for her. Its modify up the deepest gulf that separates class from class and soul from soul. (Shaw, 78), while believing that changing Elizas speech will not only change her class, but her soul.At the climax of the play between Higgins and Eliza, later Eliza asks to return the belongings Higgins gave and lent to her, Higgins becomes upset, If these belonged to me kinda of to the jeweler, Id ram them cut down your ungrateful throat. He feel so strongly the importance of language in self-improvement, that he failed to see that it did not have an honest impact on Eliza. This is similar to how Prospero views Caliban as ungrateful towards his teaching of language, Abhorred slave,/ Which every print of goodness wilt not take,/ Being capable of all ill I pitied thee,/ Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hourAs can be seen here, it is evident that Prospero painstakingly underlines and exaggerates the value of the language he taught Caliban. One thing or other when thou didst not, savage, /Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like/ A thing most brutish, I presentd thy purposes/ With words that made them known. still thy vile race,/ Though thou didst learn, had that int which/ good natures/ Could not back up to be with therefore wast thou/ deservedly confined into this rock,/ Who hadst deserved more than a prison. Here Prospero acknowledges that class and language, though related, are not necessarily tied together.He makes a point that Caliban cannot overcome his class through learning language. Swearing in Pygmalion has an interesting dual use. It is primarily evince in the word bloody by both Eliza and Higgins. Their use of it, however, shows the difference in class between the two. Eliza, who has been poor all her life, thinks nothing of using the word since she has been rough it all the time. It is a merely an adjective or a harmless form of expression to her. Shaw deliberately makes Elizas speech terrible in order to bring out that ones speech is prevail by their environment.Higgins, on the other hand, knows the use of this word and uses it to express his anger and frustration. at last Eliza does make use of her learned dialect, and it helps her greatly. It allows her to join a man of the upper class and start her own business, as Higgins foreshadowed.This change was only able to come nearly afterward the internal self notice she gained by defending her self-respect from Higgins after the slipper incident. Caliban, a slave who ironically speaks in the same noble verse and Prospero, also benefits from the learned language in the way he is perceived by the other characters in the play such as Trinculo. Though at moments they were both ungrateful, both Eliza and Caliban became empowered and were able to gain a sense of freedom from their own social class by learning language.