on Pygmalion

One way to interpret the story of Pygmalion, it seems to me, is to see it as a tale in which the monster wins — because Henry Higgins is, quite obviously, a monster. The darkness of the story can be felt more strongly in the 1938 film version than in the play, largely (though not wholly) because of the magnificent performance of Wendy Hiller, in her first film role, as Eliza. I’ll consider the key differences between play and film later, but I won’t say anything about My Fair Lady, which is effectively a different thing.

The story is, I guess, still widely known. When Henry Higgins, the great scientist of phonetics, meets a poor flower-seller named Eliza Doolittle in Covent Garden, he bets his new friend Colonel Pickering that in just a few months he can transform her speech so completely that even the snobbiest of snobs won’t be able to tell that she’s not one of them. Thanks to Eliza’s smarts and skills, Higgins wins that bet. (Marginal notation: Eliza is typically called a Cockney, but whether that’s right or not depends on how you define “Cockney”: the strictest definitions confine the term to the East End of London, but Eliza is from Lisson Grove in the City of Westminster. In what follows I will use “Cockney” to mean a style of spoken English shared by many Londoners of the working classes: whether or not Eliza is a Cockney, she speaks Cockney.)

Back to the Monster: Henry Higgins’s behavior in this movie, and in the play, is so bad that you find yourself casting around for a character to notice it. For much of the story the only plausible candidate for Conscience here is Henry Higgins’s mother. Colonel Pickering is certainly kinder to Eliza than Higgins, and this is true throughout the play/film: in the first scene, when an accusing crowd gathers around Eliza, he defends her, and when Higgins is trampling her he asks Higgins to consider the possibility that the girl has feelings. (Higgins considers it and decides that she doesn’t.) But after Eliza triumphs at an elegant ball, charming everyone and dancing with a prince, when they return to Higgins’s flat to celebrate, Pickering ignores Eliza about as completely as Higgins does. It is only Higgins’s mother who suggests, later, that they might have thanked Eliza for all the work she did to win Higgins’s bet for him. But Higgins does not thank her, and he does not apologize for her months of verbal abuse. There’s only one moment when he acknowledges her quickness and resourcefulness, and he does so out of her hearing. It is only Mrs. Higgins who criticizes her son for his bad behavior; Pickering is perhaps a little too afraid of him to do so. But any criticism he receives is mild in comparison to what he deserves — at least until the final minutes.  

Now, about Eliza herself. Wendy Hiller got an Oscar nomination for her performance, and of course she should have won; perhaps her status as a newcomer worked against her. It’s difficult to overstress how great she is here, in an exceptionally challlenging role. At the outset she’s doing broad comedy and doing it fabulously, but then she has go go through several stages of development.

First of course she’s a poor lass who talks pure Cockney, easy enough for a reasonably skilled actress to mimic. But then, as Eliza undergoes her training, Hiller has to overlay a labored R.P. on Cockney vocabulary and diction — which, by the way, leads to the funniest moment in the whole movie, when as she leaves a tea party the besotted toff Freddy (about whom more later) asks her if she’s walking across the park: she replies with her newly-acquired cut-glass diction, “Walk? Not bloody likely! I’m going in a taxi.” Watch the whole scene and on the basis of that alone you’ll be ready to give Wendy Hiller every Oscar statuette ever made.

Eventually Eliza matches her grammar to her new accent; and finally — this is the most astonishing thing about Hiller’s performance — in a moment of great emotional distress she loses her grip on her training and partly regresses to her native speech, wavering between her recent acquirements and her whole personal history. Higgins loves to hear this, because he treats it as proof that her changes are superficial and that she will always remain the “guttersnipe” he likes to say she is. (In the play he calls her an “impudent slut.”) He wants at one and the same time to celebrate his great achievement and to dismiss it as little more than putting lipstick on a pig.

It’s not just vocally that Hiller excels. Throughout the whole ballroom scene, and especially as she’s dancing with every eye on her, she seems to be in a dream — at one and the same time committing to the role demanded of her but also comprehensively dazed by the coming-true of a poor girl’s fantasy. And afterward, as Higgins rejoices and Pickering (though he has lost the bet) shares hie delight, Eliza looks absolutely devastated, and we can see that’s she is not merely exhausted from the demands of her command performance, but also is just beginning to realize how few genuine choices now lie before her.

She has seen a world of elegance, beauty, and plenty, and, should she go back to her old life selling flowers on the streets, or even should she achieve her former ambition of working as a clerk in a flower shop, she won’t be able to forget everything she now knows. Near the end, Higgins’s casual demand that she fetch his slippers and become a kind of servant to him infuriates her, and Freddy’s obsessive puppy-like love for her brings no comfort. It seems clear that she has come to love Henry Higgins, though it’s not clear just what kind of love it is. Would she want to marry him? Or does she simply want to force him to treat her as a human being?

After their big blow-up, in the final scene of the movie she returns to his flat. But why? She doesn’t say. And with his back to the camera, Higgins once more, in a light-hearted tone, tells her to fetch his slippers. The End.

So does the monster win? Will Eliza fetch Henry’s slippers? Or will she walk out on him again as a hopeless case? Does he mean it jokingly, or does he mean it as a final refusal either to apologize or to treat her with courtesy? It’s hard for me to see this as anything but Henry’s reassertion of his contempt for Eliza, and if I could write my own ending for the film I’d have her fetch the slippers, set them on fire, and shove them into his eye-sockets. But that’s just me.

In any case, the filmmakers are leaving room for us to think that Henry is making light of his earlier fight with Eliza in order to create room for reconciliation. This is more than Shaw had done in the 1913 play, which ends with Eliza refusing to be his servant and stomping out of his house and maybe his life, after which Higgins dismissively insists that eventually she’ll do as she’s told. Curtain.

But even that was not sufficient to dissuade audiences who wanted to believe that Higgins and Eliza would eventually marry. Still less would the film’s ending do so. Shippers gonna ship. What shall we call their image of the characters’ future? How about: The Shipping Forecast.

In any event, this kind of response bothered Shaw sufficiently that he ended up writing an epilogue in which he effectively said to the shippers: Not bloody likely.

What is Eliza fairly sure to do when she is placed between Freddy and Higgins? Will she look forward to a lifetime of fetching Higgins’s slippers or to a lifetime of Freddy fetching hers? There can be no doubt about the answer. Unless Freddy is biologically repulsive to her, and Higgins biologically attractive to a degree that overwhelms all her other instincts, she will, if she marries either of them, marry Freddy.

And that is just what Eliza did.

Shaw actually writes the outline of a second play, or maybe a novel, in which Freddy and Eliza marry and start a flower shop; in which Freddy’s family is reconciled to the marriage through reading the more hortatory works of H. G. Wells; and in which — this is my favorite part — Colonel Pickering “has to ask her from time to time to be kinder to Higgins.” And you know what’s great? She doesn’t do it. I would love to see that play or movie, for sure. 

I feel so strongly about all this largely because of Wendy Hiller’s magnificent performance — and especially that moment of bleak collapse after the ball, when, as Higgins capers about in triumph, she feels that she has lost everything. It’s one of the most memorable moments in film and drama, for me. It’s wondrous what a great actor can do to transfigure a scene without saying a single word, in Cockney or R.P. or anything else.