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Education and Transformation
Pygmalion asks the question of whether a lowly flower girl can be educated and eventually shaped into a woman resembling a duchess. Eliza’s transformation comes through her education in both speech and higher-class manners and decorum, but it starts with the changing of her appearance. Indeed, when Eliza first arrives at Higgins’ home, he orders Mrs. Pearce to “Take all her clothes off and burn them.” Before Eliza can begin her metamorphosis, she is literally stripped of her clothing. Tellingly, when she appears before her own father, freshly bathed and wearing a new outfit, she is unrecognizable to him until she speaks with her familiar accent. It is through a new wardrobe that Eliza experiences her first transformation, but this scene also shows the inadequacy of change based solely on physical appearance and clothing. Fresh attire alone cannot mask one’s true identity.
Even after Eliza undergoes intensive speech training with Higgins and Pickering, her blunders in middle-class society prove that one also needs more than correct speech to transform from flower girl to duchess. When she is introduced to Mrs. Higgins and the Eynsford Hill family, Eliza shocks everyone with her exquisiteness and beauty. However, even with her studied, elegant speech, Eliza eventually falls back into her old accent and uncouth stories. Shaw again suggests that external transformation is not sufficient enough to fully transform Eliza into the lady that Higgins envisions.
Eliza’s eventual transformation, though an ostensible triumph for Higgins as far as her exterior identity is concerned, really comes from her psychological transformation, one that includes a newfound way of articulating her worth and independence. By the play’s end, Eliza rejects Higgins and asserts her free will, as she is no longer beholden to him as her teacher. She even goes as far as to suggest that she will offer her assistance to his rival professor. Higgins is upset by this possibility and lashes out at her for even making such an assertion. As much as Higgins would like to believe he cannot be changed, Eliza’s access to a middle-class sensibility and freedom both upsets him and makes him proud. In this regard, Shaw shows another instance of Eliza’s transformation, not just from a flower girl into a lady, but from a student into a teacher in her own right. As she says to Higgins in Act V, “You’re not my teacher now.”
The Subversion of Myth and Romance
The subtitle of Pygmalion, “A Romance in Five Acts,” sets up the reader to expect a typical Romance play. The title of the play itself alludes to the Ovid myth, in which the sculptor Pygmalion, through the sheer adoration of his sculpture and a goddess’s power, is able to transform a marble statue into a living lady. Shaw takes not only the myth of Pygmalion, but the genre of Romance itself, and inverts them to show their flaws. In Pygmalion, we see how Higgins is set up to be the Pygmalion figure: a genius with the power to create and manipulate something into life, not so dissimilar from the role of the artist. However, where one would expect Higgins to be a sort of Romantic hero, Shaw denies the audience an ending that concludes with a marriage and with the happily ever after of the hero and their object of affection. Instead, Shaw subverts the myth of Pygmalion as well as the Romantic genre by outright positioning Higgins as an eternal bachelor. For Higgins, romance only gets in the way of his scientific pursuits. Eliza thus occupies the role of the Romantic hero, not by falling in love with a man, but by acknowledging her own worth and power, a power that allows her to say “no” to Higgins in the end and move on of her own accord.
Where Ovid’s myth has Pygmalion as the sole arbiter of change (excluding the goddess) for his Galatea, in Shaw’s play, Mrs. Pearce and Pickering also contribute to Eliza’s transformation from a lowly flower girl into a lady. Shaw thus suggests that change does not come from a singular entity but from a community of people. In this way, Shaw further emphasizes how myth and romance are idealized versions of a world that does not exist, and he instead grounds his story in a more physical reality where everyone has a part to play.
Language, Manners, and Class Identity
Set in early 20th-century London, Pygmalion challenges traditional notions of class and identity, as well as Victorian England expectations. Shaw emphasizes how class identity is not a rigid structure and critiques how people of different classes judge and perceive others. As Clara says, “It’s all a manner of habits.” Depending on one’s education, speech, manners, and wealth, one can move into the middle class and occupy a new position. As seen with Eliza, once she learns the language of the middle class and their manners, she is no longer viewed as just a flower girl but as a lady. Mr. Doolittle, as well, transitions into the middle class, though his movement involves him coming into wealth. However, as Shaw suggests, being in the middle class is not totally advantageous as it also has its share of problems. As Mr. Doolittle says in Act V, “I have to live for others and not for myself: that’s middle-class morality.”
