In Act 1 - pages 30 to 31 - Shaw describes what Eliza’s room looked like - “A small room with very old wallpaper which was falling off” This showed that Eliza had neither the time nor the money to redecorate or tidy up her room so it looked a little more presentable. She also had pictures of actors and fashionable women which tells the reader she likes these things and that perhaps she wants to be a rich, famous girl who poses in expensive, new and clean clothes. The description of her bed also shows that she does not have much money. (“A wretched bed heaped with all sorts of coverings, one penny in the slot meter, rent four shillings a week.”).
By contrast, Mr. Higgins’ laboratory in Wimpole Street is totally different from Eliza’s small, dirty and cold room. It is big and has all the latest high-tech gadgets. It is fully furnished, has a lot of light (many windows) and a balcony with good views over the expensive area, not like the run-down area in which Eliza’s room is situated. It also has a comfortable, leather-covered easy chair at the side of a fireplace. His listening devices and other equipment were the most modern of the day and must have cost a fortune. The room was well heated, unlike Eliza’s who only had one penny in the slot meter. Higgins also has a piano and a dessert dish overloaded with fruit and chocolates, just the things that a poor girl like Eliza could only dream about.
I believe George Bernard Shaw did a very good job in highlighting the differences between the working class and the upper class people. The only thing I can say about Eliza and the other working class people is that she really fought for what she believed in whereas the other working class girls would give up, turning to a life of misery working on the streets.
The other main difference dealt with in the story is the one between Mr. Higgins and Pickering who are both of the same class and wealth. Pickering is shown to be a kind, caring man whereas Higgins is self-centred which was not unusual in the upper classes of that time.
Eliza, Higgins and Alfred Doolittle are the major characters in the play all the rest are minor, less memorable than those three, as they are not individualised in the same detail.
Eliza’s father, Alfred Doolittle, was shown as a typical man in the early 20th century as when Higgins first takes on Eliza to change her into a real lady. Doolittle (as he was referred to in the play) tries to sell his daughter, Eliza, to Higgins as he was desperate to try and gain some money as he was poor, or has he referred to himself he is a spokesman for “the undeserving poor”.
Shaw has made the character attractive and amusing, whereas a realistically presented drunkard who beat up his daughter and cared nothing for her and who preferred blackmailing gentlemen to earning money by working, would very probably be repugnant to us; or, if treated sympathetically, would be a pathetic or even tragic character.
It is Doolittle’s frankness and lack of shame, and his self-confident ease in the company of very different people that make him attractive in Act II. These are all positive characteristics suggestive of good health and good temper, as such negative characteristics as self-consciousness, fear and guilt never are.
We laugh with Doolittle in Act II; we laugh at him in Act V. for on his second appearance, he asks for sympathy and appears somewhat pathetic. The recognition that this character is not real, but a device of the author’s, controls the degree of pathos he arouses and allows us still to laugh. Indeed we laugh all the more because the sharp contrast between Doolittle in Act II is very unlikely and because we are at least vaguely aware of the paradox that this character is happy in circumstances that would make most people miserable and he is miserable in circumstances that would bring joy to others.
His appearances stand out in the structure of the play like turns by a comedian or a clown put on in the intervals of a continuing play.
In Act I the flower girl whom we know later as Eliza Doolittle seems rather like a heroine in a melodrama, a favourite nineteenth-century type of play which encouraged audiences to indulge their emotions and presented its heroines (often poor girls) as helpless innocents in distress, claiming the audience’s pity. A cliché describing such heroines was ‘She was poor, but she was honest’. The flower girl describes herself as ‘a poor girl’ and keeps insisting that she is ‘a respectable girl’, meaning ‘honest’. She is, in fact, seeing herself as this conventional type of character, but also capable of exaggerating the impression she makes, as if deliberately playing a role. Thus, when the crowd starts reacting with pleased interest to Higgins’ display of skill, she does not respond with them but remains apart, repeating her grievances over and over:
Aint no call to meddle with me, he aint;
He’s no gentleman, he aint, to interfere with a poor girl;
He’s no right to take away m character.
She even speaks of herself in the third person:
Poor girl! Hard enough for her to live without being worried and chivied.
Vanity and boastfulness turn into self-respect and a demand for fair treatment that becomes justifiably aggressive in reaction to Higgins’ treatment of her. We can perceive a consistency in Eliza’s character, continuity from Act I to Act V, despite the evident changes.
Higgins is the clown of the play. He is full of tricks and antics, which are amusing to watch. Shaw comments explicitly on the fact that he is like a spoilt baby. His bursts of temper, his generally noisy behaviour, his egotistic sense of his own importance, his careless untidiness, his rudeness, his self-indulgence (indicated at the very beginning of Act II by the presence of the dish piled up with fruit and chocolates), are all childish features. He does not seem to know himself at all well; certainly he does not recognise himself in Mrs Pearce’s view of him. His energy comes across very strongly, through his restless physical movements; the swift and ready movements of his mind enable him to outwit others and get his own way all the time; through his verbal readiness and fluency; and, not least, through the assertive vigour of his style of speech with its swift twists and turns, it exaggerations, and its constant use of slangy expressions or striking and usually comic metaphors and similes.
It is possible to see Higgins as Shaw’s satirical portrait of himself, and to see the Professor’s cat-and-mouse game with Eliza, in Act V, as a reflection of the dramatist’s evasive flirtation with Mrs Patrick Campbell, the actress who played Eliza in 1914. In so far as Higgins stands for Pygmalion, the artist, he must also represent the dramatist, whose play is the product of a creative process and will, when finished, stand independent of him. The laughing figure of Higgins then stands at the end of the screen version like the signature of the author, or of his Muse of Comedy.
This is not a book that I would usually read as I like horror stories but all the same it was very interesting and I can now understand why he is such a famous writer. I used to think that he was a bit like Shakespeare who has wrote plays that do not appeal to my age range but I may well read another of his books in the future.
