Eliza Doolittle is a low-class girl who sells flowers, sometimes with a penchant for scammish behaviour. Henry Higgins is a phonetics professor who has studied, essentially, linguistics, and can decipher all ranges of accent. After a chance encounter on a rainy night where he places Eliza’s accent (and makes her think he’s reporting her to the authorities), Eliza arrives at Higgins’ home seeking a tutor so that she can speak in a more proper fashion. Higgins and Pickering take her on as a project (or in their words: an ‘experiment’) and bet that they can trick people into believing that Eliza is an upper-class lady within six months. If this seems familiar and you were alive in the 90s, Pygmalion is She’s all That with Freddie Prinze Jr. and Rachel Leigh Cook.
Of course, Pygmalion is also the basis for My Fair Lady. but doing a compare / contrast of the play and its film seems less fruitful than examining some of the other literary connections I picked up on throughout the play. I suspect that, at least in some respects, Pygmalion is an extension of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, especially when we catch a glimpse of Higgins’ lessons with Eliza. Higgins and Petruchio share a cruelty that makes it hard to find your allegiance with them. Incidentally, and probably because of my interest in education, I would have liked to have seen more of Higgins’ lessons with Eliza. I think there could have been some fruitful scenes of thematic and character development that would enrich the play and provide fuel for academic fires. In the script for My Fair Lady, Alan Jay Lerner expands on that a bit, but not quite enough to be satisfying in a pedagogical regard.
While the play does not fully emphasize its pedagogical concerns, there’s enough there to draw an interesting connection to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. In Frankenstein, the creature is created only to be immediately abandoned by his creator. The creature later spies on a family where the father reads the children John Milton’s Paradise Lost, among other things. Their education then inspires in the creature a sense of morality and a legalistic mindset that he leverages against his creator. Twice in Pygmalion, Higgins references Milton: once in an account of the greatest minds of England, and once when he derides Eliza by saying, “I waste the treasures of my Miltonic mind by spreading them before you” (85). Milton seems to form the basis of moral feeling and pedagogy in both works and nothing can convince me of it being a coincidence, especially given the plot parallels.
Frankenstein, to me, is a timeless story, and Pygmalion seems to draw from that same well. While the play starts quite slowly, eventually Higgins and Pickering pass Eliza off as a member of the elite. Like Frankenstein, he creates new life and abandons it. He sees his project of ‘creating’ Eliza: “The hardest job I ever tackled [...] you have no idea how frightfully interesting it is to take a human being and change her into a quite different human being by creating a new speech for her. It’s filling up the deepest gulf that separates class from class and soul from soul” (53). Upon their return from their experiment, though, the men discuss how trying the process has been and how bored they’ve been by it. Meanwhile, Eliza is acting like a devoted puppy to Higgins, bringing him his slippers but listening in as they speak as if she did not exist. The scene is powerful and absolutely gutting. The scene is an easy standout with a similar gravity to the scene where Frankenstein’s creature, having been abandoned by his own creator, is told that the doctor will never create a companion for him or fulfil any of his fatherly obligations. Higgins’ callousness is comparable to Frankenstein’s emotional impotence.
The central question—or rather problem—of Pygmalion is brought forward by Mrs. Higgins, Higgins’ mother, and pertains to the ethics of the play and Shelley’s novel. Mrs. Higgins points out to the men that they have failed to consider “the problem of what is to be done with [Eliza] afterwards” (54). Their concern is the success of the experiment. Her concern is the collateral damage following its success. I appreciate Mrs. Higgins’ challenge to their work because she adds an ethical dimension to the premise that seems highly transferable to other areas. Both the play and the film script allude to Eliza no longer being fit for regular society but unable to support her own lifestyle following the success of the experiment. This is one instance where I think a whole additional play could be written to explore the actual limitations of a life following such a high degree of interference.
Actually, there’s a novel that explores essentially the very issue that was published around 20 years earlier: The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, which is another book I’d consider ‘timeless.’ In both texts, we have men engaged in “experiments” that play off the innocence and naivety of a younger person. Lord Henry (coincidence that Henry Higgins shares a name?) seduces Dorian with alternative views on morality that lead him down a hedonistic path. There are two central similarities that I find compelling. First is the way the male leads justify their morals with scientific language. In both stories, there’s a sense that science need not be connected with ethics. The second connection is that very discussion of morality. In Shaw’s play, “middle class morality” is often derided as being ineffectual.
Despite not playing much of a role in the plot, Eliza’s father serves as an intriguing foil to his daughter. Both are elevated to a higher status, and Alfred Doolittle, like his daughter, is mortified at his new position. Whereas in The Picture of Dorian Gray, the characters pursue exquisite pleasures (like cigarettes), Alfred Doolittle makes an impassioned plea to not be spoiled. He identifies himself as an “undeserving poor.” When he comes to Henry Higgins’ home, he says, “Think of what that means to a man. It means that he’s up agen [sic] the middle class morality all the time. If theres [sic] anything going, and I put in for a bit of it, it’s always the same story: ‘Youre [sic] undeserving, so you cant [sic] have it.’ But my needs is as great as the most deserving widow’s that ever got money out of six different charities in one week for the death of the same husband” (35). It actually makes me think of Shakespeare; Hamlet seems to prove a font of wisdom. When Polonius tells Hamlet that he’ll take care of the actors according to how they deserve, Hamlet says to treat them better: “God’s bodkin, man, much better: use every man after his desert, and who shall ‘scape whipping? Use them after your own honor and dignity – the less they deserve, the more merit is in your bounty” (II.ii.528-531). I’ve always found Hamlet’s logic here beautiful: treat people better than they deserve; the less they deserve, the more it is to your credit. By extension, Alfred Doolittle takes on the moral conscience of the play: treat people well, especially when they’re undeserving. Don’t conform to the middle class morality that demands people ‘earn’ their right to good treatment. Perhaps that’s an element that makes literature timeless: it advocates for the most downtrodden in society and never punches down. Doolittle continues, “I dont [sic] need less than a deserving man: I need more. I dont eat less hearty than him; and I drink a lot more [...] well, they charge me just the same for everything as they charge the deserving” (35). “What is middle class morality?” Doolittle asks, “Just an excuse for never giving me anything. [...] I aint pretending to be deserving. Im undeserving; and I mean to go on being undeserving” (35). The line of logic is hard to resist and it seems important enough that he gives one of the longest monologues in the play, which is also preserved in the film script.
The play deals with some big issues, like morality, though obliquely. In most cases, the concepts are dramatized rather than given long didactic monologues. The play gives a clear discourse on language and its relationship to class. Essentially, one could follow the thread to see that language is intrinsically linked to identity. It’s divisive because on the one hand speaking the language clearly is supposed to elevate a person’s status, but potentially at the expense of their identities [Higgins says he gives Eliza a new soul, after all]. I think one could easily find parallels here to colonial discourse as well: in crass and outdated terms, Higgins ‘elevates’ the ‘savage’ Eliza, who then is removed from her context and unable to return to her former state. There’s some comparisons to be drawn between colonial powers imposing their language on a people, and the people no longer being able to engage with one another in the same way.
In terms of the actual play, I alluded to a few elements from a writing perspective. I think the play is somewhat unbalanced; the opening takes a long time that could have been (and partially is) condensed in My Fair Lady. It isn’t until the fourth act that I felt it was truly gripping. The conversation the men have, ignoring Eliza, and her reaction is superb. The richness of her character and the dynamic she has with Higgins is complicated and layered. In the final act of the play, the tension is ramped up and Shaw’s stage directions offer motives, intentions, and emotional responses that aren’t necessarily written into the dialogue that flesh out Eliza’s character in a complex and surprising way. In particular, the way she enjoys rattling Higgins is worth discussing—but I feel I need to see some performances to see how others have interpreted these moments.
Between Pygmalion and My Fair Lady, there are some differences, but none I feel particularly inclined to discuss. The main difference, of course, is the songs. I haven’t heard them, so I might have different favourites after actually hearing them, but I thought the most interesting addition was the song “Show Me”, which decries words in romantic relationships. In part, it reads: “Haven’t your lips / Longed for my touch? / Don’t say how much, / Show me! Show me! // Don’t talk of love lasting through time. / Make me no undying vow. / Show me now!” Given that the play is so intently focused on the connection of language, manners, class, identity, and so on, I like how this song just completely rejects the philosophy underlying the rest of the play. Eliza tries to find love through a material realism that rejects the lofty idealism of Higgins-types. The counterpoint, especially its placement in the play, is a wonderful addition that lets the final scene breathe while further complicating central themes in the text.
I’m not really any closer to determining what makes a classic a classic, the timeless timeless, the universal universal, and so on, but I will say that Pygmalion is a play worthy of discussion. Books can be memorable for different reasons. Some books speak to the heart, or the mind, or the soul. In this case, For me, Pygmalion is more of an intellectually memorable story, but if its cultural significance is any indication, it’s a play that speaks to peoples’ hearts and souls as well.
In short, it’s worth the read. Thanks to Heather for giving me a (possibly stolen) copy of this book.
Happy reading!
