When I was a kid, my dad owned a VHS of “My Fair Lady” which had two cassettes in the box as the movie was a bit of a long one. He, like most men and women, was in love with Audrey Hepburn and loved to see her as Eliza Doolittle, sticking it up to the aristocracy as the underdog and rising above her flower-girl post. Though “My Fair Lady” is based on Pygmalion, and that the dialogues are borrowed from the play, the two are vastly different texts. Not to mention the movie “Pygmalion” which also has its own interpretation of the original play.
I need to come clean that I barely remembered watching “My Fair Lady” with my dad on VHS, or that I’ve seen the original 1938 movie, and there’s another TV-movie starring Peter O’Toole in 1983. I missed the boat on Netflix when “My Fair Lady” was on, and now I’m waiting for it to come back on. In the end of the day, it is fun to compare the movie with the book as I always do, but the original should be respected on its own.
Pygmalion is a sculptor who fell in love with his own creation. But the title is superficial in a sense that Higgins, as the sculptor, did not really fall in love with Eliza in that way. True to his nature and passions, he has always been too devoted to his work as an elocutionist to trouble himself with love. Higgins’s act of falling in love is the deepening for his own art, thus on the method rather than the subject, though at the end he admitted that he cares about Eliza as a person and not only as a bet.
In this way, Pygmalion has sinister undertones. Eliza is in fact, enslaved by Higgins and Pickering against her will, so that they gamble that Higgins has enough skills to fool the aristocracy. Her howls “Aaaaaaaaah-ow-ooh!!!” are almost animalistic though comedic in purpose — it is a genuine cry of desperation. But there may be more than the rejection of Higgins’s imposition on her condition, but also a lifetime of disappointments — a father who mooches off her, the frustration of the seeming permanence of her post as a flower-girl and a general lack of control of her life.
Eliza’s success came from her learned skills in mastering the English language, as it is this mastery that often separates one class from another. Eliza was good enough to fool rival elocutionists to the point that she was mistaken as a princess. Yet, her new found post was not enough to secure her the future that she wants — too haughty to be a shopkeeper, yet a princess backed with nothing — her position quickly became precarious after the bet is won. And it was fair enough for Mrs Higgins to harangue her son who placed little thought on the consequences of a Eliza’s future.
Shaw’s works are often overtly feminist and Pygmalion is a good exploration of a woman’s position. Eliza’s case is perhaps unique: she has now procured the attitudes and behaviour of a lady, yet she has little financial and social assets. Is she then forced back to revert to her post as a street flower-girl and lose her delicacy? Shaw conjectured that Eliza will marry Freddy — it is the most logical conclusion. Freddy, however, is weak compared to Eliza. They will both have to rely on a patron such as Pickering, or even Higgins so that they can set themselves. In this way, Eliza is still reliant on masculine help to establish herself somewhat. It is a bleak conclusion that no woman in her position would be able to escape from her type of poverty using her own nous and prowess, even with her newfound linguistic assets.
The play ends with a marriage, but not of Eliza’s. Out of all the characters, it is her father’s marriage. Doolittle is perhaps the most hilarious character in the book, because of his no-filter honesty and pluck. In his muddled ramblings to extort from Higgins and Pickering, he exposes the hypocrisy of the “middle-class morality”:
I don’t need less than a deserving man: I need more. I don’t eat less hearty than him; and I drink a lot more. I want a bit of amusement, cause I’m a thinking man. I want cheerfulness and a song and a band when I feel low. Well, they charge me just the same for everything as they charge the deserving. What is middle class morality? Just an excuse for never giving me anything. Therefore, I ask you, as two gentlemen, not to play that game on me.
I personally found his soliloquy the most profound, and his transition from a broke hanger-on to an undeserving gentleman the most amusing. Wealth depresses Doolittle as the table turns on him: he is now the queen bee in the hive where fake friends and relative will try to mooch from him. Money does not give him happiness any longer — but the obligation to give. Ironically, he had more freedom financially and mentally when he was broke.
Pygmalion is my first introduction to Shaw, after all these years. And I don’t read plays often even though I enjoy it — it does take a different mental requirement than the novel. The best plays I’ve ever read have been comedies. It is too early to tell whether Pygmalion will be part of that fold, but at some point I’ll reread it again, after having watched My Fair Lady.
