“Pygmalion” by Bernard Shaw

This book is well known – I think I can very well call it famous – and most people know the plot, if not from the book itself then from the film or theatre. I’ll remind briefly that in the first act we meet a poor flower girl Eliza Doolittle speaking a dreadful dialect of English, Professor Higgins, an expert of phonetics, and Colonel Pickering, who is extremely interested in Professor’s research but has only just met him in the flesh. Next day as Higgins demonstrate his art to Pickering, Eliza pays him a visit to offer to take lessons of good English from him, since that would enable her to become “a lady in a flower shop”. Unfortunately, Higgins is as rude as could be, and his charges are way too high for the poor girl, but Pickering volunteers to pay for the lessons after offering Higgins a bet that he won’t be able to pass Eliza as a duchess in six months.

As the play proceeds we meet a few more fine characters – Eliza’s father and Higgins’s mother, a young lad named Freddy – from a gentle, but poor family – and his mother and sister. We saw the three of them briefly in the first act too, and it’s pure luck that they don’t recognise Eliza in the clean, well dressed lady speaking with pedantically good pronunciation. Should they know her, they would have ruined the experiment, but they don’t – and what’s more, Freddy falls in love with her.

Finally, as we know, Eliza goes to the party at the ambassador’s, where everyone takes her for a princess rather than a just a duchess, and Higgins wins his bet – but that night, after throwing a lot of reproaches in his face, Eliza runs away from his house, to be found later at his mother’s. There they speak again, Eliza announcing her intention to marry Freddy. Higgins responds with one of his most nasty laughs.

There the play ends; but that’s where the complicated part begins. Bernard Shaw himself was quite opposed to the idea that Eliza would actually marry Higgins. which looked so attractive to theatres and was later hinted at in the famous “My Fair Lady” film. Eliza married Freddy, the author insisted, and even wrote a long afterword describing their married life. All in vain: the readers, the film directors, the Russian translators of the book – all seem to insist that this is the wrong end to the story. Eliza is destined to marry her rude, disrespectful teacher who treats her like dirt but justifies it by the fact that he would treat everyone – even a real dutchess – exactly the same.

I must admit I agree with Bernard Shaw here. Granting that Higgins, despite his awful manners, has certain charm, and that marriage to Eliza might have reformed him over time, why should this fine young girl have sacrificed her one and only life to this monster? Just for a bit of adrenalin? Or for love? But she was never in love with him, though her bitter words on the night of her escape might suggest that. To support the common myth that women are most likely to fall in love with those who mistreat them? If there’s a grain of truth in this myth, I am sorry for those women. We aren’t <em>all</em> like that though. Eliza has a strong character, and is exactly the type Freddy needs to guide and support him; with Higgins it would have been permanent war.

But I can’t forbid people to feel the way they do, if the author himself couldn’t.

I remember reading the book for the first time at the age of 23 or 24 – I liked it enormously back then. I laughed and cried while reading it, the exasperated dialogue between Eliza and Higgins’s housekeeper Mrs Pearce about taking baths being my absolute favourite. Later I lended the book to a friend and never saw it again. Now, as so many years have passed, a colleague has given me another copy of it.

I am holding it in my hands trying in vain to resurrect the old feeling, but I perceive the book very differently now. It’s clever and funny, but the old charm has gone. Probably there are just different books for different ages. But I still don’t understand how a person as highly educated as Professor Higgins can be such an ill-mannered bully. These two sides of his personality just don’t go together well.

But perhaps I just lack the necessary knowledge of human nature, and I’m prepared to admit that.