The thirty-second book that I’ve finished reading this year is Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion”. In his witty play, Shaw illustrates the transfiguration of Eliza Doolittle, a commoner flower girl, to a fraud duchess, under the arts of phonetics zealot Professor Higgins and his accomplice Colonel Pickering. The allusion to the original Greek Pygmalion mythology ends here, however, as Higgins does not develop amorous love towards his masterpiece. What will become of Eliza after she has been moulded into a woman of a higher class, and cannot bear to return to the gutters? For someone who has studied social linguistics, the subject of this play no doubt amuses me; can a change in dialect and diction really transform one’s social standing? There is the example of Beckham, whose Cockney accent is now much more of a Received Pronunciation. Suddenly I’m brought back to all these memories of listening to different British accents in the lab and rating them on scales of friendliness and reliability. I am certainly not as talented as Higgins, who is able to pinpoint the specific region of one’s origin just by hearing a few wisps of one’s talk. In fact, I was struck dumb by Eliza’s transcribed Cockney accent on merely the third page and had to rely on the aid of an audiobook to decipher its contents. To think that I’ve lived in London for many years! Reading this play sure did allow me to reminisce my time there as all these familiar place names came to view. Nonetheless, I never acquired a full British accent; I only try to pronounce the glottal ‘t’s (i.e. the ‘t’ in water) when I talk to people with British accents.? Though the surface of the story may be about accent acquisition, the deeper discussion surrounds feminist matters. Eliza is casually taken in by Higgins, a man at least twice her age, who seems to treat her transfiguration as a game to win bets on. She certainly has the right to feel disrespected, and in a way, objectified; hence her violent remonstrance towards him on the night after she’s perfectly performed her duty and fooled the aristocracy of her birth. It is rather irresponsible to mould her then leave her be. It is also, however, irrational to assume that Higgins should marry Eliza and conclude the play with the ultimate happy ending; as Shaw explains in his sequel, Eliza clearly knows that Higgins is beyond her grip, but she is also unwilling to yield. As a result, she chose a rather ‘weak’ man to marry (I will not disclose who; I have already been spoiled in the introduction and wouldn’t want others to suffer the same fate). This act somehow hints at the autonomy that Shaw believes women should acquire over their lives, possibly contributing to the awakening of feminism. Overall, this play has been an enjoyable read as it is rather short and quite humorous. I certainly look forward to seeing it being played on stage.