Pygmalion Essay Critical Essays

Critical Evaluation
Throughout his career, George Bernard Shaw agitated for the reform of the vagaries of
English spelling and pronunciation, but his assertion that Pygmalion was written to
impress upon the public the importance of phoneticians is immaterial. Pygmalion, like all
of Shaws best plays, transcends its authors didactic intent. The play is performed and
read not for Shaws pet theories but for the laughter its plot and characters provoke.
The play is a modern adaptation of the Pygmalion myth (although some have claimed
that it is a plagiarism of Tobias Smolletts The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, 1751), in
which the sculptor-king Pygmalion falls in love with Galatea, a creature of his own
making, a statue that the goddess Aphrodite, pitying him, brings to life. The Pygmalion of
Shaws play turns up as Henry Higgins, a teacher of English speech; his Galatea is Eliza
Doolittle, a Cockney flower girl whom Higgins transforms into a seeming English lady by
teaching her to speak cultivated English. In the process of transforming a poor,
uneducated girl into a lady, Higgins irrevocably changes a human life. By lifting Eliza
above her own class and providing her with no more than the appurtenances of another,
Higgins makes her unfit for both. On this change and Higginss stubborn refusal to accept
its reality and its consequences, Shaw builds his play.
From the beginning, when Higgins first observes her dialectal monstrosities, Eliza is
characterized as a proud, stubborn girl, though educated only by the circumstances of
her poverty and gutter environment. She has the courage to ask Higgins to make good
his boast that he can pass her off as a duchess within a matter of months, and she calls
on him and offers to pay him for elocution lessons that will enable her to work as a
saleswoman in a flower shop. Like all the proud, she is also sensitive, and she tries to
break off the interview when Higgins persists in treating her as his social inferior.
Higgins can best be understood in contrast to Colonel Pickering, his foil, who finances the
transformation. As a fellow phonetician, Pickering approves of the project as a scientific
experiment, but as a gentleman and a sensitive human being, he sympathizes with Eliza.
It is Higginss uproariously tragic flaw that he, like all of Shaws heroes, is not a
gentleman. He is brilliant and cultured, but he lacks manners and refuses to learn or
even affect any, believing himself to be superior to the conventions and civilities of polite
society and preferring to treat everyone with bluntness and candor. He is, or so he thinks
until Eliza leaves him, a self-sufficient man. When he discovers that she has made herself
an indispensable part of his life, he goes to her and, in one of the most remarkable

courtship scenes in the history of the theater, pleads with her to live with Pickering and
himself as three dedicated bachelors. At the end of the play, he is confident that she will
accept his unorthodox proposition, even when she bids him good-bye forever.
As a matter of fact, Shaw himself was never able to convince anyone that Eliza and
Higgins did not marry and live happily ever after. The first producer of the play, Sir
Herbert Beerbohm Tree, insisted on leaving the impression that the two were reconciled
in the end as lovers, and this tradition has persisted. Enraged as always by any liberties
taken with his work, Shaw wrote an essay that he attached to the play as a sequel in
which he denounces sentimental interpretations of Pygmalion. He concedes
that Pygmalion is a romance in that its heroine undergoes an almost miraculous change,
but he argues that the logic of the characterization does not permit a conventional happy
ending. Higgins is, after all, a god and Eliza only his creation; an abyss separates them.
Furthermore, Shaw contends, their personalities, backgrounds, and philosophies are
irreconcilable. Higgins is an inveterate bachelor and likely to remain so because he will
never find a woman who can meet the standards he has set for ideal womanhoodthose
set by his mother. Eliza, on the other hand, being young and pretty, can always find a
husband whose demands on a woman would not be impossible to meet. Therefore, Shaw
insists, Eliza marries Freddy Eynsford Hill, a penniless but devoted young man who has
only an insignificant role in the play. Stubbornly, Shaw does not even permit them the
luxury of living happily ever after: They have financial problems that are gradually solved
by their opening a flower shop subsidized by Colonel Pickering. Shaws Pygmalion is too
awe-inspiring for his Galatea ever to presume to love him.
Even with the addition of this unconventional ending to the play, Pygmalionwould be
highly atypical of Shavian drama were it not for the presence of Alfred Doolittle, Elizas
father. Through Doolittle, Shaw is able to indulge in economic and social moralizing, an
ingredient with which Shaw could not dispense. Like Eliza, Doolittle undergoes a
transformation as a result of Higginss meddling, a transformation that in his case is,
however, unpremeditated. Early in the play, Doolittle fascinates Higgins and Pickering
with his successful attempt to capitalize on Elizas good fortune. He literally charms
Higgins out of five pounds by declaring himself an implacable foe of middle-class
morality and insisting that he will use the money for a drunken spree. Delighted with the
old scoundrel, Higgins mentions him in jest in a letter to a crackpot American millionaire,
who subsequently bequeaths Doolittle a yearly allowance of three thousand pounds if he
will lecture on morality. Thus this dustman becomes transformed into a lion of London
society, and the reprobate becomes a victim of bourgeois morality. Although he appears
only twice in the play, Doolittle is so vigorous and funny that he is almost as memorable
a comic character as Higgins.

The play itself is memorable because of its vigor and fun, notwithstanding Shaws
protestations about its message. It is likely that Shaw insisted so strenuously on the
serious intent of the play because he too realized thatPygmalion is his least serious and
least didactic play. In 1956, Pygmalion was adapted into the Broadway musical My Fair
Lady; the musical, with book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and music by Frederick Loewe,
was extremely successful, and several revivals have been produced since that time. A
film version of My Fair Lady, starring Audrey Hepburn as Eliza and Rex Harrison as
Higgins, was released in 1964.