The character of Pygmalion goes back to the The Metamorphoses by Ovid, written around 8 CE. This "storehouse of myths and legends" includes the story of the sculptor Pygmalion who fell in love with a statue he had sculpted, after which it became a living woman. The story is echoed and copied in the many works from the Romantic period in which dolls or automatons come to life, as in E. T. A. Hoffmann, but the most famous incarnation was George Bernard Shaw's 1913 play Pygmalion, a modern variant of the myth in which flower-girl Eliza Doolittle is metaphorically "brought to life" by a phonetics professor, Henry Higgins, who teaches her to refine her accent and conversation and conduct herself with upper-class manners in social situations. The play inspired the 1938 film Pygmalion, as well as the 1956 musical and 1964 film My Fair Lady (starring Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn).
[Portrait of Eliza Doolittle by William Bruce Ellis Ranken (1914)]
The story revolves around Professor Henry Higgins, an expert in phonetics (his character was based by Shaw on the acclaimed phonetician Daniel Jones) and the humble Cockney-speaking flower seller Eliza Doolittle. After meeting her by chance in the streets of London, Higgins makes a bet with his friend Colonel Pickering that he can turn the yowling, filthy guttersnipe Eliza into a proper lady who can pass herself off as an aristocrat - so to speak a socio-scientific experiment.
With the help of Pickering (who plays a sort of warm and considerate Watson to Higgins's imperious Holmes), in only six month's time, Higgins puts the poor girl through some difficult paces, not only teaching Eliza the perfect English upper-class pronunciation but also the etiquette necessary in high society. The final test is an embassy party where Eliza succeeds with flying colors in passing herself off as a duchess. Along the way, Higgins' influence even turns Eliza's father, a chimney sweep, against his will into a middle-class patriarch.
But that does not detract from the fact that Higgins is a cold, nerdy scientist who treats Eliza purely as an object for study. He eventually succeeds in his plan, and completes Eliza's transformation, but during the process Eliza has become so changed that she can never go back to being a flower girl again. She is stuck in limbo between two different classes in English class society. But during a final fierce discussion with Higgins, she shows that she is now so emancipated that she is no longer dependent on the professor and can go her own way - she doesn’t want to be Higgins’ secretary or - for that matter - his wife.
Note that Shaw's ending is very different from the 1938 film (which earned him an Academy Award, although he hated the film), the 1956 musical, or the 1964 film based on the musical, where the original play, which was in the first place a feminist manifesto, is turned into a saccharine "chick flick". Shaw didn’t write a romantic confection, but wanted to advocate women’s suffrage and the end of Britain’s class system. In the finale of the play, after an enormous battle of wills, Eliza decides to strike out on her own. “If I can't have kindness, I'll have
independence.” Then, according to Shaw’s final stage directions, Eliza "disdainfully sweeps out."
[Shaw in 1911]
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) was an British-Irish playwright, critic and polemicist, who exerted a huge influence on the Western theater. Inspired by Henrik Ibsen, he sought to introduce a new realism into English-language drama, using his plays as vehicles to disseminate his political, social and religious ideas. He wrote more than sixty plays, and in 1925 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
In many of his plays, Shaw was so intent on
getting his social or political message across, that he falls into preaching. Pygmalion, however, is justly famous and a pleasure to read. The original ending which I now read for the first time, also enhanced the value of the play for me.
I have read Pygmalion in Oxford World's Classics.
An online version of the play which is in the public domain is available at Wikisource.
Illustration from Wikimedia Commons.
Greatest Plays of All Time