To what extent can Pygmalion and A Streetcar Named Desire be seen to have, directly or indirectly, a social or political purpose? Can you please help...

These two
plays are quite strikingly dissimilar
in many respects. , an English play,
was written some
decades earlier than the American Streetcar, and both

plays differ in mode and presentation. However, they share, to a great extent, a central
concern
with social class.They both show the effect of social displacement,
as enacted in the persons of
their respective heroines. In
Streetcar, this is due to a series of
misfortunes which
sees the heroine, Blanche and her sister lose their aristocratic family

estate, while in Pygmalion Eliza is deliberately plucked from
working-class
obscurity by Higgins.

These are the
similarities between the female
protagonists of the play; their differences
are equally apparent. Eliza moves up the social
ladder; Blanche moves down.
Elizas social ascent is undertaken in the spirit of a social, and
more
particularly linguistic experiment on the part of the eccentric Higgins; Blanches
descent
is the result of a slow decline in her familys fortunes. But both
characters experience a
terrible sense of social disorientation and isolation
as they are cut adrift from their own
class. Eliza cant return to her roots
as a lowly flower girl, but she doesnt know how to make
her way in the new
world she finds herself in. €˜What is to become of me? she cries. Likewise

Blanche cannot return to her aristocratic origins; there is literally no place left for
her to
go back to, as the family estate is lost. At the same time she finds
it impossible to
acclimatize herself to the new strange world she finds
herself in, and particularly the rundown
impoverished section of New Orleans
where her sister Stella  now lives.

However, although
Blanche clings frantically to the genteel identity of her past, she
does also
make an attempt to plan for both herself and her sister Stella by setting up a
shop.
Her plans are vague and in any case Stella is not willing to be part of
it, being perfectly
content with living with Stanley, but at least this shows
some attempt on her part to plan for
her practical future. Similarly Eliza
defiantly states to Higgins that she could set up as a
teacher of phonetics.
Both women have been left unsure of their social standing but they show

awareness that business and employment opportunities that might now be open to
them.

Both Blanche and Eliza, then, are shown to be left
in limbo as a result of their social
experiences. However, the sense of
social isolation in Blanches case is far more thoroughgoing,
permeating the
entire play; in fact it becomes tragic. The overwhelming sense of her solitude
is
conveyed in her famous line at the end of the play: €˜I have always
depended on the kindness of
strangers. She has lost her sense of social and
familial identity and appears entirely lost.
Elizas position does not appear
so terrible. It is not really rendered as tragic, on the
contrary it gives
rise to some comic moments, as for example when she vents her frustrations on

Higgins, the architect of her social dislocation, by flinging his slippers at
him.

The two plays are markedly different in outlook;
Streetcar is
consciously a , and draws heavily on such
techniques as symbolism, whereas
Pygmalion is often
comic in effect (although it does not deny the
seriousness of the issues
which it raises) and realistic in style. This difference is apparent
in the
suggested fate of the respective heroines: we know that Eliza will survive and
most
likely flourish in whatever she chooses to do, but Blanche appears
doomed.