Drama notes

Rain, a church portico, late night. Clara and Mrs Eynsford Hill wait; Freddy is sent for a cab and knocks into a flower girl, scattering her violets. The girl is Eliza Doolittle: Cockney, wet, “I’m a respectable girl.” A note-taker is taken for a policeman or an informer. He is Henry Higgins, a professor of phonetics. He places every speaker by their vowels: this neighbourhood, that suburb. Colonel Pickering, author of a book on spoken Sanskrit, has come from India to meet him. Higgins boasts he could pass the flower girl off as a duchess at an ambassador’s garden party in three months, or as a shop assistant, which takes more cunning. He throws a handful of coins. Eliza hears Wimpole Street. The idea-play has already named its tools: speech as class-costume; science that can unmake a guttersnipe; a woman who is still a person under the dirt. Allusion to Pygmalion is the title only: no statue on the portico.

Freddy never gets the cab. The rain eases. Higgins and Pickering go off together, already a pair of experimenters. Eliza takes a cab with the unexpected money — her first lift out of the gutter, comic and exact. Hold names: Eliza, Higgins, Pickering, Freddy, Mrs Eynsford Hill. Do not start the play in the laboratory. The street is the social map: who may wait under a portico, who sells flowers in the wet, who writes down other people’s sounds as if they were specimens.

Next morning, Higgins’s laboratory: lamps, tuning forks, a phonograph, Mrs Pearce the housekeeper. Eliza arrives in a taxi, in a hat, asking for lessons so she can work in a flower shop. She will pay a shilling, which is her proportion of Higgins’s fee from a millionaire. Pickering bets the cost of the experiment if Higgins can do what he boasted. Higgins treats her as baggage, as dirt, as a squashed cabbage leaf. Mrs Pearce insists on baths, clothes, and what is to become of the girl when the joke is over. That last question is the play’s moral nerve: a made lady cannot go back to selling violets, and the maker has not thought of a life. Pickering asks whether Higgins is a gentleman to her; Higgins says he treats everyone the same, which is not the same as respect.

Alfred Doolittle, dustman, Eliza’s father, arrives to see what can be got. He will not play the outraged parent for long. He wants five pounds, not fifty: middle-class morality, he says, would make him save and be prudent; he is the undeserving poor and likes it. Higgins is delighted with the rhetoric and pays. Doolittle will return in Act V as a different animal, made “respectable” by a letter of Higgins’s. Eliza is taken upstairs to be washed. The act is the contract: speech lessons, money, no love-plot yet, and a father who sells his daughter’s keep for five pounds and a lecture on morality. Do not skip Mrs Pearce. She is the play’s adult caution inside the house of science.

Mrs Higgins’s drawing-room on at-home day. Henry has promised to bring his “experiment.” The Eynsford Hills are there — the same family from the portico, which Eliza does not fully place. Eliza enters, magnificent, and speaks in careful English about the weather, then about influenza, then, in a rush of her old life, “they done her in,” gin, and a father who drinks. The new vowels carry the old facts. Clara thinks the slang is fashion; Freddy is enchanted; Mrs Eynsford Hill is stricken. Higgins calls it the new small talk. The scene is the play of ideas as comedy: phonetics can change the surface and not yet change the store of life underneath. Mrs Higgins tells her son he has no idea what to do with the girl when he is done. That is Mrs Pearce’s question again, in a higher room.

The ambassador’s garden party and the ball are not fully staged in every printing as a separate act; Shaw often lets them happen between III and IV, then shows the exhaustion after success. Some later printings add an embassy scene in which a phonetician swears Eliza is a Hungarian princess because her English is too good to be native. Many Indian textbooks skip that scene. The duchess-test is passed either way. The point is not the dresses. The point is that the world accepts a voice. Hold the at-home as the comic peak of unfinished making: the vowels have been drilled, not a place in the family. Do not write a musical’s extra songs as if they were Shaw. This paper’s play is the talk and the idea.

Midnight, Wimpole Street. Higgins and Pickering congratulate themselves: the trick worked, they are tired, they want slippers and bed. Eliza is silent, then blazing. She has won their bet for them and is not even thanked. She is a lady with nowhere to go. She throws the slippers. Higgins is astonished that the creature has feelings. She asks what is to become of her — the question Mrs Pearce and Mrs Higgins already asked. He suggests she might marry, or keep a florist’s shop. She is an object that has been finished and is now in the way. Pickering is kinder and still does not see that the experiment was done on a person. Eliza leaves. She is still wearing the jewels; she puts them back. Freddy is on the pavement, mooning. She will go with him into the night, not yet into a settled plot.

This is the reversal of Ovid. The statue speaks, and the sculptor does not want a wife; he wants his slippers. Unit 1’s play of ideas is sharpest here: class is not only vowels; it is who gets thanked, who owns the success, who may sit by the fire. Do not soften Higgins into a secret lover in this act. His cruelty is absent-mindedness plus vanity. Eliza’s anger is the beginning of a self that is not a duchess-puppet.

Mrs Higgins’s house the next morning. Eliza has taken refuge. Doolittle arrives in wedding clothes, a victim of middle-class morality: Higgins wrote to an American millionaire that Doolittle was the most original moralist in England; a bequest now forces him to lecture and to support relatives. He is miserable in money. Eliza comes down, self-possessed, and thanks Pickering for always treating her as a lady — that, not the vowels, made the difference. She will not be bullied by Higgins. She can earn by teaching phonetics herself, or by marrying Freddy and keeping a shop. Higgins is half-furious, half-admiring, still calling her his masterpiece, still expecting her to fetch his slippers in his mind. The curtain does not give a kiss. Shaw’s afterword is explicit: she marries Freddy Eynsford Hill; they struggle; they open a flower shop; Higgins remains a bachelor of science and tantrums.

What to write as genre. Play of ideas: can you separate a person from a class-voice? Comedy of manners: drawing-room codes, the at-home disaster. Allusion: Pygmalion/Galatea reversed. Not dystopia; not Golding. Not postcolonial in the empire sense — Eliza is Cockney London, not a colony; Pickering’s India is a scholar’s travel, not Tagore’s village. Unit 1 warned against that mix. Hold: shilling lessons, five pounds, “they done her in,” slippers, “Am I a lady because I was treated as one,” Freddy not Higgins. That is the set play.