Men in Love

Pygmalion, Perfection, and the Work of “My Fair Lady”

“Why can’t a woman be more like a man?” declaims Henry Higgins, the priggish philologist of My Fair Lady. Portrayed by Rex Harrison, Higgins finds one woman in particular difficult to manage: Eliza Doolittle, portrayed by Audrey Hepburn. Higgins stands in a distinguished line of men who are dissatisfied with women and who believe that art and artifice will improve them, and, if not make them more like men, at least make them fit to live with on a man’s terms. My Fair Lady seems to be chiefly about Eliza’s womanhood. But the film has things to say about men and just how much like a man some men really are.

The first man to consider is Pygmalion, whose mythical story is told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. A sculptor, Pygmalion detests the faults of women. To meet his standard, he creates a flawless female statue. At a festival he makes an offering to Aphrodite and wishes for a bride who is as perfect as the statue. When he returns home, he kisses the statue, named Galatea, and finds its lips warm. Aphrodite has brought the statue to life.

The myth of Pygmalion is about many things. One of them is the tension between the idea of a perfect woman and women as they really are. Men like Pygmalion find that art can bring perfection within reach. The myth is sometimes alluded to in works that examine the frustrations of men in love. In Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, for example, Leontes believes that his wife, Hermione, has been unfaithful. She is imprisoned. Some readers think that she dies a captive. Leontes commissions a statue of her. Later the statue comes to life: Hermione has returned and Leontes repents. Art mediates the difference between who she is and who he thought she was. Art also teaches him a lesson about foolishness.

But appearances can be deceiving; female imperfection can be hidden beneath a charming surface. In Jacques Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffman, Hoffman falls in love with a doll named Olympia (Act 1). She has been created by Spalanzani, whose collaborator, Coppélius, sold Hoffman magic glasses that make the doll seem life-like.

Erin Morley as Olympia, Metropolitan Opera, New York, 2024

On command, the doll sings “Les oiseaux dans la charmille” (“The Bird in the Bower”), which is one of the most famous comic arias in all opera. It is a showpiece for coloratura soprano. Olympia’s stiff, doll-like movements keep time with the music (YouTube is awash will examples). Hoffman is enchanted by the performance.

However, Olympia’s mechanical limits soon become obvious. Her singing stops and starts. To keep her animated, someone has to wind her up.

Meanwhile, her creators quarrel over money and the magic glasses. In a rage, Coppélius tears Olympia apart (this presents obvious problems on stage, and opera companies solve them variously). The illusion is destroyed, exposing Hoffman as a fool who has been tricked—by art—into falling in love with a doll. He does not learn his lesson, however, and proves to be equally foolish in the next two acts.

The most influential version of the myth of Pygmalion is George Bernard Shaw’s eponymous play, which was first seen in Vienna in 1913 (in German) and in New York and in London 1914 (in English). Instead of a statue, we have Eliza, a London Cockney who sells flowers. Instead of a man in love, we have Higgins, an ivory-tower professor who studies phonetics and who classifies people socially and intellectually exclusively in terms of their speech. Eliza is his doll, an object that his art can shape into his idea of what a woman should be.

Shaw’s play has often been adapted. It was first filmed in 1938 and most recently in 2014 (Wiki). The 1938 film was directed by Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard, the latter starring as Higgins. Eliza is Wendy Hiller. It is first-rate. The play is boldly reworked in My Fair Lady, the 1956 musical by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Lowe that served as the basis for the 1964 film by George Kukor. My Fair Lady sets the professor’s pedantic and smug views about language against Eliza’s working-class reality. One of the great spectacles in the 1964 film is the scene at the Ascot races, which does not exist in Shaw’s script. The 1938 film was nominated for Best Picture and other Oscars; the only winner was Shaw, for best screenplay, who regarded the award as an insult.

Shaw was a student of language and a critic of British class ideology. He based the character of Higgins on the celebrated Anglo-Saxon scholar Henry Sweet (d. 1912), whose Old English grammar and reader were, for generations, the starting points for scholars of English c. 800-1100 A.D. Sweet was a phonetician and a grammarian. He made extensive studies of the pronunciation of living languages and so was a ready model for Higgins. Shaw wrote that Higgins was “not a portrait of Sweet, to whom the adventure of Eliza Doolittle would have been impossible.” But he added that “there are touches of Sweet in the play” (Frantzen, pp. 71-72; Seboek).

In Cukor’s My Fair Lady we meet Higgins in a marketplace, where he is busily transcribing Eliza’s Cockney speech, making her nervous; she’s afraid he is an officer of the law. There Higgins encounters Colonel Hugh Pickering (played by Wilfrid Hyde-White), another phonetics expert. He has come to London from India to meet Higgins. Higgins boasts that, with enough time, he could teach Eliza to speak like a duchess. The men agree to a bet on Higgins’s project and go off to Higgins’s home.

At the flower market, Higgins transcribing Eliza’s speech (Broadway)

Eliza has overheard some of their conversation and has memorized Higgins’s address. No dummy, she shows up at his doorstep and asks for speech lessons in the hope that she can work in a flower shop rather than sell flowers on the street. However cowed, she is industrious and ambitious.

Higgins hardly hears a thing she says. He believes that anybody who speaks the right kind of English can pass as the right kind of person. He does not seem to realize that a flower girl who speaks well is, in the end, still a flower girl. For him the art of correct speech carries the day. In My Fair Lady, Eliza is the equivalent of Pygmalion’s statue or Coppélius’s doll. Higgins will use the “art” (or better, perhaps, the artifice) of phonetics to teach his doll to speak beautifully. But Eliza is neither a statue nor a doll, as Higgins will learn.

After improving Eliza’s pronunciation, and after buying the clothes he thinks she should wear (her views are not solicited), Higgins introduces her to society. He tests his success at the opening of the Ascot races, a premiere social event. This event is a trial run for the upcoming Embassy Ball.

At Ascot, the horses are the least of it. The screen is flooded with extras, the women wearing a dazzling array of white and black dresses and hats that are the stuff of fantasy (some 250 fitted costumes were made for the film, which had a total of 1,000 outfits). The scene must be some of the best color photography of black and white ever attempted. Dozens of paired-off singers moved in studied choreography that captures the artificial and impersonal nature of their society. Not just anybody can step into this ritualized dance. (Costumes by Cecil Beaton.)

Eliza enters the scene slowly, on Pickering’s arm, wearing an immense black and white beribboned hat and a close-fitting white dress. She is wrapped like a package, with a bow on her left shoulder and two horizontal, ribbon-like bands around the bodice. Eliza walks with a parasol and carries a white lace drawstring bag that, along with a bit of red hat ribbon, adds the only touch of color. Men stare. Other women seem to disappear.

Eliza and Higgins go to the box that Higgins’s mother has taken trackside. Higgins introduces Eliza all around, giving her many opportunities to use her most practiced lines and her perfect H’s: “How do you do?” “How kind of you to let me come.” She has been told to stick to the weather and people’s health, the safest subjects. Once seated, Eliza hears someone mentions that it might rain. Thus prompted, she says, “The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.” Everyone is baffled but smiles politely. She adds that “in Hartford, Hereford, and Hampshire, hurricanes hardly ever happen.” These samples of pronunciation exercises for Higgins serve her well.

Her accent is perfect but her range of acceptable topics is limited. There is also, of course, what she knows from her own experience as a street-wise flower girl. Someone mentions death, and Eliza comments, in the studied tones she has now mastered, that one of her aunts died in suspicious circumstances. Asked by surprised women why the death was suspicious, she says that people believed influenza had “done the old woman in.” Eliza, however, has her doubts. With a roll of her eyes, she observes that the old woman had “come through diphtheria right enough the year before” and seemed healthy then. There are gasps. “Done her in?” asks one. “What does it mean?”

Pert Eliza knows her stuff; Higgins listens closely

Confident of form (her pronunciation is perfect), Eliza draws on her own content. Higgins, who seems to know nothing about who she really is, cannot stop her. Someone mentions alcohol. Eliza tells the guests, some shocked, some amused, that gin was “mother's milk” to her aunt. She mentions that her own father was “always more agreeable when he had a drop in.”

Her eccentric conversation mortifies Higgins and Pickering, but it delights a handsome young man named Freddy, who has already been taken by Eliza’s beauty. Charmed, he asks her a question. Her answer is unexpected. He smiles. “What are you sniggering at, young man?” she says. “I bet I got it right.” It’s a great comeback, showing Eliz’s steel. Her job is to remember her lessons, and she does.

Freddy (Jeremy Brett), in the dark, “On the Street Where You Live.”

Higgins and Pickering do their best to smooth the alarm that spreads as the other women begin to realize that this young, beautiful, and elegantly dressed woman is not, despite her accent and her appearance, one of them. How is such a thing possible, and at Ascot’s opening day or, really, anywhere at any time? Mysterious people have no place in society.

The measured ways of those in society show that they have no more to say, and no more freedom, than Eliza has. They sing about status and conformity: “Every duke and earl and peer is here. Everyone who should be here is here.” Faces frozen, they say that they have never “been so keyed up.” Propriety binds the women as tightly as their famous corsets.

Eliza certainly should not be there. She has no society talk. However beautiful, she is, after all, just a working girl. But Eliza is excitable. She has been “keyed up” before, and she feels right at home at the races. No doubt she knows plenty about betting as well.

To make the race more exciting for her, Freddy gives Eliza the ticket for a bet he has placed on a horse named Dover. When the races start, her old self emerges. The others are unfazed by the racing animals, calmly looking through their glasses as the animals go by. But Eliza understands competition and knows what it means to come from behind. She shouts encouragement to Dover, who seems to be far back in the pack. When she tells the horse, “Move you bloomin’ arse,” a woman nearby faints. Higgins and Pickering whisk Eliza away, now realizing that Eliza is not ready to make the professor’s case. Artifice has not triumphed.

The comedy of Eliza’s blunder should not keep us from the larger point of the Ascot scene and indeed of the entire film and Shaw’s play. In society, any sort of work is out of place. Nobody there works. Dukes, peers, earls, gentlemen and gentlewomen, do not work. Others—like Eliza—work for them, sell them their flowers, sweep their streets, drive their carriages. Work is beneath nice people. The working world, unlike the drawing room or the dance floor, plays rough and ready. Higgins thinks that the right accent and the right clothes are all you need to step across the chasm that divides these realms. Eliza shows that that is harder than he supposes. Speech does not make the man, or the woman.

At Ascot, Eliza learns that it is forbidden to show that you care. At the embassy ball, her second try-out, we see that Eliza has come a long way in acquiring the artifice Higgins and Pickering are trying to teach her. They are waiting for her to finish dressing so they can leave for the event. Higgins supposes, in his impatient and imperious way, that she has to be pinned into her clothes. He thinks now that perhaps they should have taken her with them to buy them. Pickering doubts that Higgins can pull this off and wonders if it was wise to trust French designers with her dress, a nice poke at English provincialism.

Then Eliza comes down the stairs. She wears a white sheath with a beaded overskirt and a lot of (rented) diamonds. Her Ascot costume was overstated, as was Eliza’s conduct. Her costume for the ball is understated but more impressive: less dress, more woman. As Mrs. Pearce helps Eliza into a red velvet cloak, Higgins hurries to the door and then realizes that Eliza is not following him. He turns to see her standing, as still as a statue. She is waiting for him to offer her his arm. He has forgotten his manners. Or, more likely, he does not think that his manners are needed for a woman like her. When he extends his arm, she comes to life. But what will happen next?

At one point in Eliza’s training, Higgins’s housekeeper, Mrs. Pearce, says that he and Pickering are “a pair of babies playing with your live doll” (1:32 DVD). Her comment points to the connection between Higgins’s project and that of Spalanzani and Coppélius. They succeeded in tricking Hoffman into believing that a mechanical doll was real. Higgins wants to trick the upper class into believing that Eliza is one of them—in other words, to get them to believe that his mechanical doll, which is all Eliza is to him, is real.

His success at the ball is complete. It more than makes up for the fiasco at Ascot. When the queen of Transylvania makes her grand entrance, along with her son, the prince, Eliza curtsies. The queen stops, touches Eliza’s chin, and says she is charming. After that, all eyes are on Eliza. She dances divinely; this too had to been learned (in the 1938 film, we see her learning to dance, and being made over for the ball). But nobody knows who she is.

A linguistic spy named Zoltan Karpathy (Theodore Bikel) is in attendance. A comic, inelegant form of competition for Higgins, he makes it his business to solve the mystery about this lovely woman; he will analyze her speech and identify her. After they dance, he concludes that she is a Hungarian princess. Everybody at the ball is bowled over by this news—Eliza is, as Higgins had hoped, able to pass as royalty. The Transylvanian prince asks to dance with her.

Once they are at home, Eliza takes unexpected turn. Galled as the two men smugly celebrate their triumph and their hard work, she rebels. What about her work? She asks what will become of her. Now that she is a lady, she can’t do real work. But she has no money, so work she must. Higgins has given this no thought; his work is finished and she can do as she pleased.

When Higgins tells Eliza to marry and pass her time that way, she says she will marry Freddy, who is good to her. Higgins sneers. To him, Freddy is merely an errand boy, not a working man. Enjoying his own success, Higgins tells her to bring him his slippers. Instead she throws them at him, astonishing him, and us. “Bravo, Eliza!” his mother says. But Higgins is not to be outdone. He enjoys her outburst, calling her (mockingly) “a tower of strength” and taking credit for her growth. She storms off.

Like Shaw’s play, My Fair Lady lacks a love story, not unusual for Shaw but very unusual for Hollywood in the 1960s. Ovid’s Pygmalion is rewarded when his statue comes to life. They are in love. They have a daughter. Other versions of the myth end with the creator’s humiliation (as in The Tales of Hoffman) or his education, marked by repentance (The Winter’s Tale).

This is not the spirit in which My Fair Lady ends. Higgins congratulates himself on making Eliza compete. She returns to Higgins and finds him listening to a recording of her speaking as she did when she first came to him. Eliza briefly shifts into her Cockney accent. It seems that she is not finished being his doll, a conclusion that must disappoint many of the film’s fans. Higgins tells her to fetch his slippers; she does. He is immensely pleased that she has returned.

It has seemed, up to this point, that Eliza is working towards independence and freedom. She has criticized herself as a “dominated fool,” and we might agree. That said, Eliza does not march off into a new life, and she does not do so at the end of Shaw’s play. In the play, Higgins approves and claims that he has made “a woman” of her. Since she was already a woman, what he might mean is that he has made a lady of her, but that is not what he says. To Shaw’s mind, a woman was independent and able to shape her own life. Her future is up to her. Shaw’s play and the film turn living Eliza into a restrained lady, less free to speak her mind. The story of Galatea is stood on its head.

Galatea, from a work by Edward Burne-Jones (d.1898)

In the myth, Aphrodite brings a statue to life. In Shaw’s play, the objective is to bring a living creature to statuesque poise, to suppress life in the name of art and culture, and human feeling be damned. This is, of course, how civilization creates society: civilization instills restraint. Eliza has to learn the conventions that will restrain her. The play focuses on her speech, but in other ways too (e.g., dance) she must be molded into the social creation that Higgins has in mind.

S. Ross has noted that the play’s ending was often altered to conform to a love story in which the hero gets the girl. Shaw saw such adapted performances, despised them, and complained. Producers did not care, since their versions made money. Shaw wanted Eliza to demonstrate her independence and leave it at that. My Fair Lady reverts to the kind of happy ending Shaw himself avoided—or at least, like the play, hints at a happy ending.

Eliza’s return looks like forgiveness and reconciliation, not love. She has made herself happy, but her indifferent creator—he’s not the marrying type, he says—has lost none of his triumphalism. Eliza is a lady. But, in some ways, she is less than the woman she was in the flower market. She has been civilized and made presentable to society. She has traded animation for poise and has exchanged free expression for polite speech. Reversing the legend of Pygmalion, Eliza has become a doll. Her creator, like many Pygmalions before him, is a man in love. And also like them, Henry Higgins is in love with his own work.

January 2025

With thanks to George Paterson

Sources

Frantzen, Allen J. Desire for Origins: Old English, New Language, and Teaching the Tradition. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990.

Lerner, Alan Jay. My Fair Lady: A Musical Play Based on 'Pygmalion' by Bernard Shaw. Constable, London, 1958.

Ross, S. “Visions and Revisions of the end of Pygmalion.” 2000, 2016. Seen Jan. 1, 2025. https://www.syaross.org/writings/nonfiction/pygmalion.html

Shaw, George Bernard. Pygmalion & Other Plays: Androcles and the Lion, and Major Barbara. London: Macmillan Collector's Library, 2021.

Shaw, George Bernard. Pygmalion, dir. Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard. DVD. Running time 90 min. New York: Loew’s, 1938.

Warner, Jack L., producer. My Fair Lady, dir. George Cukor. DVD. Running time 2:52. New York: Columbia Broadcasting System, 1964.

Wren, C. L. “Henry Sweet.” In Thomas A. Sebeok, ed., Portraits of Linguists: A Biographical Source Book for the History of Western Linguistics, 1746-1963. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966. https://muse.jhu.edu/book/84741. 512-32.