Characters
Page.8
with the girl’s affections, When she
enters, Eliza thanks Pickering for
always treating her like a lady, but
threatens Higgins that she will go
work with his rival phonetician, Nepommuck.
The outraged Higgins
cannot help but start to admire her.
As Eliza leaves for her father’s
wedding, Higgins shouts out a few
errands for her to run, assuming
that she will return to him at
Wimpole Street. Eliza, who has a
lovelorn sweetheart in Freddy, and
the wherewithal to pass as a
duchess, never makes it clear whether
she will or not.
Characters
Professor Henry Higgins
Henry Higgins is a professor of
phonetics who plays Pygmalion to
Eliza Doolittle’s
Galatea. He is the author of Higgins’ Universal
Alphabet,
believes in concepts like visible speech, and uses all manner
of recording and
photographic material to document his phonetic
subjects,
reducing people and their dialects into what he sees as readily
understandable
units. He is an unconventional man, who goes in the
opposite
direction from the rest of society in most matters. Indeed he is
impatient with
high society, forgetful in his public graces and poorly
considerate of
normal social niceties-the only reason the world has not
turned against
him is because he is at heart a good and harmless man
His biggest fault
is that he can be a bully
Eliza
Doolittle
Page.9
“She is not at all a romantic figure.
“So is she introduced in Act 1.
Everything about Eliza Doolittle
seems to defy’ any conventional
notions we might have about the
romantic heroine. When she is
transformed from a sassy,
smart-mouthed kerbstone flower girl
with deplorable English, to a (still
sassy) regal figure fit to consort
with nobility, it has less to do with
her innate qualities as a heroine
that with the fairy tale aspect of
the transformation myth itself. In
other words, the character of Eliza
Doolittle comes across as being
much more instrumental than
fundamental. The real (re-)marking of
Eliza Doolittle happens after the
ambassador’s party, when she
decides to make a statement for her
own dignity against Higgins’
insensitive treatment. This is when
she becomes, not a duchess, but
an independent woman and this
explains why Higgins begins to
see Eliza not as a mill around his
neck but as a creature worthy of
his admiration
Colonel Pickering
Colonel Pickering, the author of
Spoken Sanskrit, is a match for
Higgins (although somewhat less
obsessive) in his passion for
phonetics. But where Higgins is a
boorish, careless bully, Pickering
is always considerate and a genuinely
gentleman. He says little of
note in the play, and appears most of
all to be a civilized foil to
Higgins’ barefoot, absentminded crazy
professor. He helps in the
Page.10
Eliza Doolittle experiment by making
a wager of it, saying he will
cover the costs of the experiment if
Higgins does indeed make a
convincing duchess of her. However,
while Higgins only manages to
teach Eliza pronunciations, it is
Pickering’s thoughtful treatment
towards Eliza that teaches her to
respect herself.
Alfred Doolittle
Alfred Doolittle is Eliza’s father,
an elderly but vigorous dustman who
has had at least six wives and who “seems
equally free from fear and
conscience.” When he learns that his
daughter has entered the home of
Henry Higgins, he immediately pursues
to see if he can get some
money out of the circumstance. His
unique brand of rhetoric, an
unembarrassed, unhypocritical
advocation of drink and pleasure (at
other people’s expense), is amusing
to Higgins. Through Higgins’
joking recommendation, Doolittle
becomes a richly endowed lecturer
to a moral reform society,
transforming him from lowly dustman to a
picture of middle class morality—he
becomes miserable. Throughout,
Alfred is a scoundrel who is willing
to sell his daughter to make a few
pounds, but he is one of the few
unaffected characters in the play,
unmasked by appearance or language.
Though scandalous, his speeches
are honest. At points, it even seems
that he might be Shaw’s voice piece
of social criticism (Alfred’s
proletariat status, given Shaw’s socialist
leanings, makes the prospect all the
more likely).
Page.11
Mrs. Higgins
Professor
Higgins’ mother, Mrs. Higgins is a stately lady in her
sixties who sees
the Eliza Doolittle experiment as idiocy, and
Higgins and
Pickering as senseless children. She is the first and
only character to
have any qualms about the whole affair. When her
worries prove
true, it is to her that all the characters turn. Because
no women can
match up to his mother, Higgins claims, he has no
interest in
dallying with them. To observe the mother of Pygmalion
(Higgins), who
completely understands all of his failings and
inadequacies, is
a good contrast to the mythic proportion to which
Higgins builds
himself in his self-estimations as a scientist of
phonetics and a
creator of duchesses.
Freddy Eynsford
Hill
Higgins’ surmise
that Freddy is a fool is probably accurate. In the
opening scene he
is a spineless and resourceless lackey to his
mother and
sister. Later, he is comically bowled over by Eliza the
half-baked
duchess who still speaks cockney. He becomes lovesick
for Eliza, and
courts her with letters. At the play’s close, Freddy
serves as a
young, viable marriage option for Eliza, making the
possible path she
will follow unclear to the reader.
Page.38
Questions
1- In his preface to the play, Shaw writes that
the figure of Henry
Higgins is
partly based on Alexander Melville Bell, the inventor of
Visible
Speech. How does Shaw utilize this idea of “visible
Speech”? Is it
an adequate concept to use to approach people?
Answer
Through the
concept of “Visible Speech,” Shaw hits on the two
aspects of
theater that can make the greatest impression on an
audience: sight
and sound. Therefore, the transformation of Eliza
Doolittle is most marked and obvious
on these two scales. In regard
to both these
sense, Pygmalion stays faithful to the most clichéd
changes
drastically in the most external ways. However, while Eliza
certainly changes
in these blatant external ways, these changes serve
as a mask for a
more fundamental development of self-respect that
it makes him
liable to forget that there are other aspects to human
in the final
scene, and in is inability to recognize that loss as a
possibility at
all, the play makes certain that its audience sees the
tension between
internal and external change, and that sight and
sound do not
become measures of virtue, personality, or internal
worth.
Page.39
2- It has been
said that Pygmalion is not a play about turning a
flower girl
into a duchess, but one about turning a woman into a
human being.
Do you agree?
Answer
When Eliza
Doolittle threatens Higgins that she will take his
phonetic findings
to his rival in order to support herself, art imitates life, and Shaw’s
literature echoes a significant episode
from his own
youth. As a boy, Shaw’s mother was an
accomplished
singer who dedicated herself to the perfection of
“The Method,” her
teacher George Vandeleur Lee’s yoga-like
approach to voice
training, She went so far as to leave her
husband to follow
her teacher to London. However, upon
realizing that
Lee was concerned only about his appearances and
the status of his
street address, she left him and brought up her
daughters by setting
up shop herself, teaching “The Method” as if
it were her own.
Shaw could not have helped but be impressed
and influenced by
this courageous move on the part of his mother
to strike out on
her own and to create an independent life for
herself. Thus, though
Pygmalion shows a lot of sympathy for
Page.40
the flower girl
who wants a higher station in life, it is even more
concerned with
the unloved, neglected women who decides to make
herself heard
once and for all. The plays determination to have Eliza
grow into a full
human being with her own mind and will also
explains why the
play makes seemingly inexplicable structural
moves like
leaving out the climax, and carrying on for a further two
acts after the
climax. In other words, the superficial climax is not the
real climax at
all, and Shaw’s project is deeper than that of a fairy
godmother.
3- What is the
Pygmalion myth? In what significant ways, and with
what effects,
has Shaw transformed that myth in his play?
Answer
The Pygmalion
myth comes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
Pygmalion is a
sculptor who creates a sculpture of a woman so perfectly formed that he falls
in love with her. Aphrodite is moved
by his love and
touches the statue to life so that she becomes
Galatea, and the
sculptor can experience live bliss with his own
creation. While
Shaw maintains the skeletal structure of the fantasy
in which a gifted
male fashions a woman out of lifeless raw material
into a worthy
partner for himself, Shaw does not allow the male to
fall in love with
his creation. Right to the last act, Higgins is still
Page.41
quarrelsome and
derisive in his interaction with Eliza, and does
not even think of
her as an object of romantic interest. Shaw goes
on to undo the
myth by injecting the play with other Pygmalion
figures like Mrs.
Pearce and Pickering, and to suggest that the
primary Pygmalion
himself is incomplete, and not ideal himself
In transforming
the Pygmalion myth in such a way, Shaw calls
into question the
ideal status afforded to the artist, and further
exposes the
inadequacies of myths and romances that overlook
the mundane,
human aspects of life.
4- “I care for
life, for humanity; and you are a part of it that has
come my way and
been built into my house. What more can you
or anyone ask?”
Henry Higgins has this to say to Eliza when she
complains that he
does not care for anybody and threatens to
leaves him. How
does the professor of phonetics treat the people
in his life? Can
one ask for more?
5- Describe the
primary ways in which Eliza Doolittle changes in
the course of the
play. Which is the most important
transformation,
and what clues does Shaw gives us to indicate
this?
Page.42
6- While Eliza
Doolittle is being remade, Victorian society itself can
be said to be
unmade. How does Shaw reveal the pruderies
hypocrisies and
inconsistencies of this higher society to which the
kerbstone flower
girl aspires? Do his sympathies lie with the lower
or upper classes?
7- “The great
secret, Eliza is not having bad manners or good
manners or any
other sort of manners, but having the same manner
for all human
souls: in short, behaving as if you were in heaven,
where there are
no third-class carriages, and one soul is as good as
another.” It is
no small coincidence that the author of Higgins’
Universal
Alphabet is the same man to blur social distinctions,
thereby
suggesting that social standing is a matter of nurture, not
nature, Examine
carefully Higgins’ attitude towards his fellow men.
Can this be taken
as an admirable brand of socialism? Or does he fail
as a compassionate
being in his absolutism?
8- Is “A Romance
in Five Acts” an accurate description of the play
Pygmalion? How
does the play conform (or not) to the traditional
form of a romance
(for example: boy meets girl, boy likes girl, boy
meets girl’s father/evil
twin/ex-fiance, boy learns to love girl despite
everything, boy
and girl live happily ever after…)? what do you
Page.43
think Shaw is
trying to achieve in highlighting the concept of the
romance in the
title? (Hint: You might want to look closely at the
written sequel to
the play, in which Shaw gives some very strong
opinions about
romances.)
9- If you were to
create a sixth act to Pygmalion, who would
Eliza marry? Or
does she marry at all? Use the lines and
behavior of the
characters throughout the first five acts to support
the outcome of
your finale.
10- If possible,
try to watch the film version of Pygmalion (1938,
screenplay by
Shaw), and even the Audrey Hepburn film of the
musical My Fair
Lady (1956), Consider what has been changed,
removed, or
enhanced in the move from the stage to the screen,
and from a
talking play to a musical. What does each subsequent
adaptation reveal
about popular expectations of a romance,
versus the
original intentions of the playwright? In your opinion,
which of these
works is the best? Why?
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