Pygmalion

A thinking parrot? Oh dear! Eliza is fed up selling flowers down the streets. She dreams of working in a posh shop. Fair enough! BUT, young girl raised by an alcoholic and from the lower classes of the London Est End, poor Eliza only speaks the dialect of her class, and with a strong accent reflecting her social roots that is, a resounding cockney absolutely unacceptable to serve ladies and gentlemen in a posh shop! Imagine that... ! Oh dear. Fortunately, she will meet Mr Higgins, expert in linguistic and speech therapy who will change all that...

Don't be fooled by the title. The link with Ovid's myth is rather shallow. Eliza is far from being a silly girl, and the rest is more a punchy criticism of English society before WWI (it was show more staged for the first time in 1914) than a naïve romantic little story.

The cruel relationships between the characters, Higgins' tyranny, barely counter-balanced by the curiosity of a Colonel Pickering intrigued by this weird bet to change a poor street seller into a lady, hide in fact a violent slap given right into the face of a arrogant class society, where each is judged, snobbishly, for their language. At the time indeed, to be educated was to speak a 'proper' English that is, the English of London's social elite. To don't abide by it was to risk ridicule, and stigma. An accent carried, after all, a lot of prejudices; Shaw, Irishman in England, knew very well what he was speaking about (no pun intended!).

Oh! Did I write 'at the time'... ? Ha! Yes. We are way above that nowadays, aren't we? We don't judge people anymore solely on their way of speaking, do we?... Gnark gnark^^

Timely, and pure genius! show less

I wasn't crazy about Pygmalion, but I liked it well enough, so it gets a solid three stars from me. I was expecting the story to be more about the process of Liza's transformation from flower girl to lady, but in actually it focused on the way she was treated by others.

That being said, I think it's fascinating to look at how Liza views herself and her worth, and that she's so conscious of the importance of how others view her. She flat-out says as much to Pickering towards the end of the play. So often women are portrayed as self-deprecating and humble to the point of shaming themselves, but not so with Liza. From the very beginning she holds herself in high esteem, and gives Higgins the what-for when he doesn't see her as worth much.

I show more am bothered by the fact that Higgins never apologizes for the way he objectifies and uses Liza, but I'm bothered even more so by his lack of even really seeing the problem. Liza explains how she feels to Higgins, but he just doesn't get it, saying that he treats everyone the same, so what does it matter? He has a deeply ingrained sense of self-importance and righteousness that got under my skin for the entire story and left me fuming when he never seemed to feel bad about any of it. But, that's life I guess, and it probably would have felt inauthentic if he had changed.

I would recommend this if you're looking for:
*a short read
*something that's referenced a lot
*a strong female character who steals the spotlight show less

The play opens with Henry Higgins, a professor of linguistics, at Covent Garden sheltering with a crowd from the pouring rain. He amuses himself by taking down people's accents and telling them where they're from - much to their irritation and the fascination of Colonel Pickering. At one point as he leaves, Higgins tells Pickering that if he had a month or so, he could turn flower girl Eliza Doolittle into a duchess. But no one could be more surprised when she decides to take him up on his offer.

The later musical, My Fair Lady, is actually remarkably faithful to its source (aside from all the singing, of course), except for one crucial thing. The ending. In Shaw's play, Eliza is very much aware that Higgins takes her for granted and show more shows her no real kindness. And thank goodness, in this version when Higgins tells her to run errands for him, she tells him to do them himself. The author even appends an essay to the end of the play explaining the many ways that it is impossible for Eliza and Higgins to have any sort of romantic happy ending. All I have to say to that is Thank Goodness.

The play itself is a quick read, especially since most of the scenes are familiar from My Fair Lady. My favorites are the ones involving Higgins' mother - the only one who sees both the drama and the outcome in advance. She takes Eliza under her wing and does her best to set her son straight. Besides it is at Mrs. Higgins' tea that we see Eliza's disastrous (though perfectly pronounced) first venture into society. Both funny and hinting at deeper truths - the play is well worth a read. And don't leave out the essay at the end!

More at my blog. show less

Shaw’s laugh-out-loud comedy centers on the bet between a pair of scientists that they can turn a poor flower-girl into a lady simply by teaching her to speak proper English. If the plot sounds familiar, that’s because it’s based on a famous Greek myth and went on to inspire films like My Fair Lady and Pretty Woman. But Shaw does it better than anyone before or after. He provokes laugh after laugh while slowly revealing an unsettling set of issues that underpin the plot. Fans were so upset by the ending, they forced him to write a sequel.

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3300868.html

I was so struck by the misogyny of the film of My Fair Lady that I went back and watched the 1938 Pygmalion, starring Leslie Howard (in Gone With The Wind the following year) and Wendy Hiller, for which George Bernard Shaw won an Oscar for Best Screenplay (making him the first person to win both an Oscar and a Nobel Prize; he has now been joined by Bob Dylan and arguably Al Gore). I also consulted the original 1913 theatre script - written 25 years before the 1938 film and 51 years before My Fair Lady hit the screens.

It's really striking that in the original play, Higgins is clearly directed to be "entirely frank and void of malice that he remains likeable even in his least reasonable moments", show more whereas Harrison's portrayal is not at all likeable at any time; and even more striking that the 1938 version actually tones down Higgins' chauvinism from the original script, some of the nastier passages about Eliza removed entirely and some of the epithets he uses softened. Both are still pretty bad, but the 1964 film is the worst. The 1938 film, like the musical and the 1964 film, has Eliza returning to Higgins in the end, but given that he has not been as nasty to her it's a bit more plausible. Shaw, of course, disapproved and wrote a long postscript to the original play, explaining how Eliza successfully manages her relationships with Higgins and Pickering after marrying Freddie. show less

Shaw, George Bernard. Pygmalion: A Romance in Five Acts. Edited by Dan H. Laurence. Penguin, 1987.
This month Netflix is streaming My Fair Lady (1964) and HBO Max and Turner Classic Movies are streaming Pygmalion (1937). So, what better time to reread Shaw’s play, the source material for both films. The play, itself, of course was a treatment of the Greek story of the sculptor (Pygmalion) who creates a statue of a woman (Galatea) so perfectly, she comes to life. It was Shaw’s most popular play, and I can’t think of one on which he did more tinkering over a longer time. The play premiered in 1913, and Shaw was around long enough to work on the screenplay in 1937, winning an Oscar for his efforts. From here on in there are spoilers, show more so be warned. When Eliza marches out and does not return, at the end of the play, audiences and producers felt cheated of the kiss and make up they expected from Higgins and the feminine subservience they expected from Eliza. Both films play to the crowd by having Eliza bring Higgins his slippers. But that was not what Shaw wanted. When one early production had Higgins throw Eliza a flower from the balcony, Shaw was so steamed he wrote a long prose epilog in which he explains that Eliza’s decision to marry Freddy was rational and in line with her feminine instincts. She knew Freddy would never dominate her the way Higgins would. Galatea, Shaw concludes, "never does quite like Pygmalion: his relation to her is too godlike to be altogether agreeable." A recent feminist retelling of the Greek myth by Madeline Miller agrees and ends with Galatea taking their child and leaving town. Shaw describes the lives of the characters going on in predictably unromantic ways, none of them ever changing in any significant way. Eliza and Freddy run a flower shop, underwritten by Colonel Pickering, which only succeeds when they turn the management of it over to the hired help. Significantly, Shaw says nothing about Freddy and Eliza having a child. One can hardly blame romcom fans for being nonplussed. show less

Pygmalion is not a romance. Rather, it is a snarky, witty examination of "middle class morality", the ethics of playing with a person's life and feelings; also, that of transformation, gaining self-respect, and strength of character. Shaw also examines class, the station of women, and the skewed morality it brings: “I sold flowers. I didn't sell myself. Now you've made a lady of me I'm not fit to sell anything else.”

I listened first on audio. I got the inkling I was missing details, so I read it, too - and I am glad I did. The preface, and especially the afterword, explains a lot about Shaw's motivations; and offers a brilliant analysis of Eliza's character and the relationship between her and Higgins. They are friends, complement show more and respect each other, but are not romantically suited or involved. Eliza is too smart to marry Higgins - she would never want to spend her life fetching slippers, but would rather have someone fetching them for her.

Take that, My Fair Lady. show less