Discussion #2 Conflict~

Conflict

For the initial incident, we both agreed that it was the event of when Henry Higgins took down the words of what Eliza had been saying. The quarreling between Eliza and Henry about why he had been writing those words and the man boosts of how he could teach her how to be a lady put the idea in Eliza’s mind that she could act and speak like a lady under his teachings. This starts the events of the story and we believed it was a man vs. man type of conflict. However it could also have been a man vs. society because of how much the social issues affect the plot and themes of the play. When we spoke and discussed about the resolution of that conflict, we talked about the iffyness behind it. We discussed about how in some ways the conflict was solved but in other ways, the conflict was not solved. This was true in the fact that Eliza’s choices were slimmed even more compared to when she was and talked poorly. Now she only has three choices, marry, the only thing Eliza says that she can now be good for as a proper speaking lady, stay with controlling Mr. Higgins or go off and teach phonetics like Henry taught her. But these choices were not ones that Eliza wanted or even thought about in the beginning therefore the resolution isn’t satisfactory in that specific aspect. But she is turned into a lady like she wanted and it could be said that be careful of what you wish for because although she got what she wanted, it only put her in a more limited situation than being poor and un-lady like.

Discussion #1 Setting~

Setting

In our group for discussion we talked about how the fact the set of circumstances involved the social issues of the class system creates the entire story the beginning and that the theme rich vs poor is shown right off the bat with the way Eliza is treated because of her poor and lower class-like language. We talked about how the settings and social issues were accurate to the real life because the author lived in the time period the play had been set in and the two distinct classes and two distinct places from either sides of the class system were very accurate to what was really going on in the time period of the play’s setting. We also looked upon the idea of modernizing the book but agreed that it simply could not be done without destroying the whole themes and the messages on the social issues that Bernard Shaw was trying to show in his play. There was no doubt about it that the author can create a realistic image of the different scenes in the play because he describes the scenes with about a page of text and he went into detail about things like the leather of a chair and where it had been positioned.