Arts Studies and Criticism

The study explores how the inner transformation is being presented in the portrayal heroine Eliza in the drama Pygmalion. It also mentions how the heroine Eliza interacts with other characters. Based on the multi-modal discourse analysis framework proposed by Professor Zhang Delu, some situational dialogues have been taken to analyze character images in the study. We explore that Eliza is poor, rude and illiterate in earlier stage, but she becomes polite, elegant and literate after phonetic learning. Contrary to other women in this era, Eliza had strong courage and passion for life without femininity. Different from the novel, Drama Pygmalion has realized the transformation from stative state to dynamic state, especially in the process of characters’ interaction on the stage, which has created a vivid character to audiences. In order to understand the psychological change of character, hence, the study will show the process of Eliza’s self-consciousness respectively from 4D — cultural dimension, contextual dimension, content dimension and expression dimension.