Pygmalion Revisited
The other week, I caught a good portion of the musical My Fair Lady on AMC. A few of the songs were extraordinary (e.g., I Could Have Danced All Night, I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face), and for the most part it was a superb musical. Some of the costumes were a bit overwrought, and Audrey Hepburn was simply too pretty to play a Cockney flower girl. The very next day, I sought out George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion online. To my delight, Bartleby Online featured the full text of the 1916 play. What I discovered was a play that made the musical look rather frivolous to say the least. In contrast to the whimsy displayed on the silver screen, Shaw intended for his work to have social import:
The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it. They spell it so abominably that no man can teach himself what it sounds like. It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him. German and Spanish are accessible to foreigners: English is not accessible even to Englishmen. The reformer England needs today is an energetic phonetic enthusiast: that is why I have made such a one the hero of a popular play....
[This play] is so intensely and deliberately didactic, and its subject is esteemed so dry, that I delight in throwing it at the heads of the wiseacres who repeat the parrot cry that art should never be didactic. It goes to prove my contention that art should never be anything else.
Professor Henry Higgins is described at one point as follows: "His manner varies from genial bullying when he is in a good humor to stormy petulance when anything goes wrong; but he is so entirely frank and void of malice that he remains likeable even in his least reasonable moments." Actually, it sounds as if the Professor and I have a good deal in common.
In terms of their overall characterization, Higgins and Pickering, his cohort, were a bit less patrician and far more misogynist in the stage play -- albeit in a subdued, bumbling manner. To wit, the following exchange from Act II:
PICKERING. Excuse the straight question, Higgins. Are you a man of good character where women are concerned?
HIGGINS [moodily] Have you ever met a man of good character where women are concerned?
PICKERING. Yes: very frequently.
HIGGINS [dogmatically, lifting himself on his hands to the level of the piano, and sitting on it with a bounce] Well, I havnt. I find that the moment I let a woman make friends with me, she becomes jealous, exacting, suspicious, and a damned nuisance. I find that the moment I let myself make friends with a woman, I become selfish and tyrannical. Women upset everything. When you let them into your life, you find that the woman is driving at one thing and youre driving at another.
PICKERING. At what, for example?
HIGGINS [coming off the piano restlessly] Oh, Lord knows! I suppose the woman wants to live her own life; and the man wants to live his; and each tries to drag the other on to the wrong track. One wants to go north and the other south; and the result is that both have to go east, though they both hate the east wind. [He sits down on the bench at the keyboard]. So here I am, a confirmed old bachelor, and likely to remain so.
In Act III, Liza makes her grand debut in the parlour of Mrs. Higgins (cf. the elegant race track in the film. It says a great deal about the relative sophistication of Edwardian audiences (and Shaw himself) that this bit of dialog was excised from the film musical version:
LIZA. Theres lots of women has to make their husbands drunk to make them fit to live with. [Now quite at her ease] You see, it's like this. If a man has a bit of a conscience, it always takes him when he's sober; and then it makes him low-spirited. A drop of booze just takes that off and makes him happy. [To Freddy, who is in convulsions of suppressed laughter] Here! what are you sniggering at?
Why such a candid and witty statement was left out is beyond me, but that sort of grittiness is probably not what 1960's viewers looked for in so-called "light entertainment." Shaw's sentiment about art being intrinsically didatic gives way to timid consumer preferences in the rigors of the entertainment marketplace.
This site has a rather comprehensive overview of the various manifestations of the Pygmalion myth over the ages, including several other Hollywood films that have used it as a narrative template.
The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it. They spell it so abominably that no man can teach himself what it sounds like. It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him. German and Spanish are accessible to foreigners: English is not accessible even to Englishmen. The reformer England needs today is an energetic phonetic enthusiast: that is why I have made such a one the hero of a popular play....
[This play] is so intensely and deliberately didactic, and its subject is esteemed so dry, that I delight in throwing it at the heads of the wiseacres who repeat the parrot cry that art should never be didactic. It goes to prove my contention that art should never be anything else.
Professor Henry Higgins is described at one point as follows: "His manner varies from genial bullying when he is in a good humor to stormy petulance when anything goes wrong; but he is so entirely frank and void of malice that he remains likeable even in his least reasonable moments." Actually, it sounds as if the Professor and I have a good deal in common.
In terms of their overall characterization, Higgins and Pickering, his cohort, were a bit less patrician and far more misogynist in the stage play -- albeit in a subdued, bumbling manner. To wit, the following exchange from Act II:
PICKERING. Excuse the straight question, Higgins. Are you a man of good character where women are concerned?
HIGGINS [moodily] Have you ever met a man of good character where women are concerned?
PICKERING. Yes: very frequently.
HIGGINS [dogmatically, lifting himself on his hands to the level of the piano, and sitting on it with a bounce] Well, I havnt. I find that the moment I let a woman make friends with me, she becomes jealous, exacting, suspicious, and a damned nuisance. I find that the moment I let myself make friends with a woman, I become selfish and tyrannical. Women upset everything. When you let them into your life, you find that the woman is driving at one thing and youre driving at another.
PICKERING. At what, for example?
HIGGINS [coming off the piano restlessly] Oh, Lord knows! I suppose the woman wants to live her own life; and the man wants to live his; and each tries to drag the other on to the wrong track. One wants to go north and the other south; and the result is that both have to go east, though they both hate the east wind. [He sits down on the bench at the keyboard]. So here I am, a confirmed old bachelor, and likely to remain so.
In Act III, Liza makes her grand debut in the parlour of Mrs. Higgins (cf. the elegant race track in the film. It says a great deal about the relative sophistication of Edwardian audiences (and Shaw himself) that this bit of dialog was excised from the film musical version:
LIZA. Theres lots of women has to make their husbands drunk to make them fit to live with. [Now quite at her ease] You see, it's like this. If a man has a bit of a conscience, it always takes him when he's sober; and then it makes him low-spirited. A drop of booze just takes that off and makes him happy. [To Freddy, who is in convulsions of suppressed laughter] Here! what are you sniggering at?
Why such a candid and witty statement was left out is beyond me, but that sort of grittiness is probably not what 1960's viewers looked for in so-called "light entertainment." Shaw's sentiment about art being intrinsically didatic gives way to timid consumer preferences in the rigors of the entertainment marketplace.
This site has a rather comprehensive overview of the various manifestations of the Pygmalion myth over the ages, including several other Hollywood films that have used it as a narrative template.
posted by Nikos A. Leverenz @ 3:53 PM
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