Short-lived Enthusiasms Show Impetuousness of Manner and of Feelings
Although the background of Shaws Pygmalion is phonetics, its basic theme is human relations. Pygmalion, in classical Greek mythology, was a legendary king of Cyprus, who, having fashioned an ivory statue of a woman, fell in live with it. The goddess Aphrodite (Venus) gave it life and Pygmalion married the woman who bore him a daughter.
In Shaws play, a phonetics and speech expert Professor Henry Higgins, a bachelor of forty or thereabouts, creates a new image out of a lovely flower-girl Eliza, who is under twenty. With Higgins it began and also ended as a scientific experiment. As for Eliza, it ended with her getting married, not with Higgins, but with Freddy, a nice good-for-nothing young man of twenty of the upper-middle-class, who is infatuated with her.
In the classical legend, Pygmalion marries the animated statue, but Shaw, being an anti-romantic, denies us this. His fifth Act simply announces the successful completion of Higgins experiment. What happens to Eliza afterwards is of no great consequence at all to Higgins. When he speaks only about his own achievement, she in a fury of indignation flings his slippers at him and asks:
What have you left me fit for? Where am I to Iowa Lemon Laws What am I to do?
Higgins reminds her: Eliza, I said Id make a woman of you; and I have. I like you like this.
He also genially suggests that his mother might find some chap who will marry her, or Pickering may be prepared to set her up in a flower-shop. But Eliza is not to be put off so easily. She runs away from his Winpole Street apartment. Higgins does not appreciate that all she wants is to be treated as a human being. He later conference call services her back to Winpole Street for the fun of mortgages for people with bad credit as he has grown accustomed to her voice and appearance. As for her future, he is prepared to adopt her as his daughter and settle money on her. Or she could rather marry Pickering.
But the Elizas own outlook has changed as well as her speech and appearance, and she is not at all satisfied. Higgins concentrated on Eliza as a speech phenomenon, and ignored her as a woman. But to Eliza her new outlook on life is of greater significance than her exquisite speech.
Had Army of Darkness allowed the play to take the romantic course, Eliza would have married Higgins. Instead, as Shaw relates in the Epilogue, Eliza marries her lover Freddy, in spite of his lack of money and employment. Eliza, however, finds time, even when she has become a mother, and successful shopkeeper, to meddle in the housekeeping at Winpole Street, snapping Higgins head off on the faintest provocation.
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posted by liwlsj @ 9:18 AM
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