Pygmalion and Three Other Plays (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Online Free PDF Page A

man admits he has never married because he has never found a woman enough like his mother—a woman, Shaw takes pains to point out, who surrounds herself with art. Now, a son who looks for a replicate of his mother in a wife is a son who wants to take his father’s place, to be his own father (note that Higgins’s father is never so much as referred to in the play). Higgins has mastered the art of speech, of phonetics, so that he can identify people’s hidden origins, as he does with the crowd that gathers around Eliza when she suspects he is a detective ready to arrest her for prostitution and is protesting her innocence. As soon as he hears their accents, he tells them where they were born, all the while concealing his own identity. (There is something of Shakespeare’s “Duke of dark corners” in Measure for Measure, walking amongst his people incognito, as well as of Shakespeare’s Prospero about Higgins.) Pickering even asks him if he does this in a music hall for a living, as if Higgins were a magician. (Shaw had a similar experience when, while lecturing dock workers on elocution, they called him a “quick-change artist.”)
    Higgins belongs with Ibsen’s Master Builder (in The Master Builder, 1892) and Rubek the sculptor (in When We Dead Awaken, 1899) among modern drama’s most profound studies of the artist’s psychology, for the Professor of Speech forgets the difference between life and art. When he undertakes the experiment of turning the “draggle-tailed guttersnipe” Eliza Doolittle into a “duchess at an ambassador’s garden party,” Higgins imagines that he is a god creating out of nothing, out of the “squashed cabbage leaves of Covent Garden.” He fails to see that he has only transported her from one kind of limiting garden to another. As part of the fantasy of creator he lives out, he must become Eliza’s father: “I’ll be worse than two fathers to you.” He considers the “gift of articulate speech” he is to give Eliza a “divine” one, but it is really the parent’s gift to the child; more particularly, the mother gives language to the child (which is why we speak the “mother tongue”). Much later in the play, Shaw will make this point comically by having Henry’s mother, Mrs. Higgins, trick her son into not whistling by provoking a remark from him, and explain herself by saying, “I only wanted to make you speak” (p. 445).
    In making Eliza speak, Higgins becomes her parent; he becomes a creator, instead of someone who is himself created. He can fantasize that he is an original, in the way all artists want to believe that their art is original. That is why Shaw has Higgins tell everyone where they originated; and why Shaw makes Higgins identify himself professionally to Pickering as one who does “a little as a poet on Miltonic lines” (p. 378). (When Shaw prepared the play to be filmed, he excised this reference to Milton, perhaps because it was too revealing of his anxieties about his own originality), for Milton’s Satan (in Paradise Lost) claims not to have been created by God: He considers himself to be coeval with God. In other words, Satan considers himself self-begotten, the author of himself; he has no origin outside himself. Nor does Higgins. Shaw plays a great deal with images of Higgins as a satanic tempter, as when Eliza feels “tempted” by his offer of chocolates, or when Mrs. Pearce reproaches him for “tempting” Eliza; he even munches an apple, the biblical symbol of temptation, as he suggests to her that she might marry someone or other.
    But when his Frankenstein’s “creature,” Eliza, comes to life, he treats her as his creation, not as a fellow creature. Higgins has been slow to see that Eliza has fully as much soul as he, that she is full of humanity and self-respect, that she has ambition and goodness in her. The sailor-hat Shaw gives her to wear befits her willingness to voyage into life, though her voyage begins with a tempest of