• class
• social experiment
• climbing
• language game

Eliza Doolittle is at the very bottom of the social hierarchy: She has neither money nor education, but she struggles through with all the ready wit of her street jargon, selling flowers to passers-by. But then she meets the linguist Henry Higgins. Eliza sees him as her chance for social advancement and asks him for speech lessons. Higgins hesitates at first, but then he agrees – in fact, he sees this as an opportunity for a social and linguistic experiment. He and his colleague Pickering make a bet: With all his expertise, Higgins is confident that he will be able to introduce Eliza into the higher echelons of English upper-class society within only a few months.

George Bernard Shaw wrote his ironically satirical play – based on the eponymous Ovidian myth – as a supposed romance with no happy end. Many years later, Shaw’s play was adapted into a love story entitled My Fair Lady, which became a world-wide success of stage and screen.

Bastian Kraft focusses on the linguistic experiment in his analysis of the scintillating character of Eliza Doolittle. What is the connection between language, class and gender? How crucial are the power and influence of the way a person speaks for how society perceives them? Can we play any social role as long as we master its language? And don’t we in fact make bets with ourselves every day, wondering if the others will buy the role we are playing?