haw's reinterpretations of myths and fairy tales are pervasive
throughout the canon. In Pygmalion, perhaps the most enduring of Shaw's plays,
critics have focused on mythic motifs ranging from Ovid's Pygmalion to the Grimm tales.
Ellen Gainer locates the Snow White fairy tale with Shaw's casting of "Higgins in the
stepmother role, as he tries to seduce Eliza into staying to learn to talk like a
duchess..." (228). Eliza DooIittle, according to Timothy Vesonder, undergoes a
"spiritual" transformation, the core of which is similar to that of both Galatea
and Cinderella (44). And Arnold Silver, in addition to citing elements from Milton and
Ovid, cleverly points to Higgins's uncanny resemblance to the Devil in Faust (218).
Still, critics typically fail to notice an obvious
parallel between the conflict of Higgins and Eliza and that of two well-known mythic
archetypes: Apollo and Dionysus. I find Camille Paglia's work on Apollo and Dionysus to be
an instructive aid in examining what David Gordon accurately describes as "the
unresolved tension between the 'higher' consciousness of Higgins and the 'lower'
consciousness of Eliza" (149).
I see strains of Apollonianism in Professor Higgins - the cold, often
heartless theoretician. On the other hand, her lowliness and commonness signal Eliza's
archetypal confederacy with chthonian nature. Her world is the street, dirty and vile,
relegating its denizens to an endless search for sustenance. Eliza is always on the move -
a symbolic parallel to Dionysian mobility. Paglia states:
Dionysus is energy unbound, mad, callous, destructive,
wasteful...Volatile, mobile Dionysus is hoi polloi, the Many. He is rabble and
rubble, both democratic mob-rule and the slurry of uncountable objects rumbling through
nature (96-7).
Shaw offers his most dynamic contrast between the two heroes in the first
scene. Under a church portico a group of bystanders huddle together seeking shelter from
the rain. Higgins remains apart, his back turned to them, busily writing notes. The image
is one of detachment and reclusion. Much of his time is spent in a laboratory, where he
conducts an ongoing study of phonetics. The few forays he makes into the real world amount
to field trips made in the name of research. Here, Higgins has left the laboratory site,
yet he maintains a clinical front observing people from a distance as though they were
guinea pigs.
This hard, cold aloofness aligns Higgins with the
categorical thought of Apollo. "Western science is a product of the Apollonian mind:
its hope is that by naming and classification, by the cold light of intellect, archaic
night can be pushed back and defeated" (Paglia 5). Higgins the phoneticist can, with
amazing accuracy, separate and classify individuals by placing them in a certain locale
according to their accent. As he haughtily says to Pickering, "I can place
any man within six miles. I can place him within two miles in London. Sometimes within two
streets" (653).
Higgins further connects with Apollo in his treatment
of Eliza. With a mixture of revulsion and fascination, Higgins describes her as, "so
deliciously low - so horribly dirty," a "dragtailed guttersnipe" (656)
capable of "depressing and disgusting sounds" (653). Caked with dust and grime
from head to foot, Eliza walks the London streets selling her flowers. When Higgins adopts
her as his student his first job is to clean her up, to wash away the smell of the
streets.
We sense the underlying fear Higgins has of Eliza's
past life and all its associations revulsive to Shavianism/Apollonianism: the streets, the
rabble, and most of all, prostitution. Consequently, she is commanded to take a bath,
which literally and ritualistically washes away the dirt of her past life and signals the
remission of sin and a rebirth for Eliza.
But how does an audience react to the unnerving images
of burning clothes, not to mention the aggressive dialogue and stage directions? We hear
Higgins asking Mrs. Pearce: "Is there a good fire in the kitchen...Take all her
clothes and burn them" (657). We see him "thundering" and
"storming" at Eliza, who responds by "running away in terror to the
piano...wounded and whimpering" (655). He assails Eliza with numerous threats to
"throw her out of the window" and to have her "walloped by Mrs. Pearce with
a broomstick" (655, 658). Finally, Higgins tells her that if she fails to become a
proper lady her "head will be cut off" (658). All this adds up to a disturbing
vision of emotional and psychological abuse. These are acts of terrorism, and they belong
not to a reasonable Apollonian, but to the Marquis de Sade.
The notion is not as far fetched as it sounds. There is
a scene in de Sade's The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom that, despite its
shock value, follows the action of the bath scene in Pygmalion quite closely.
Sold to the wicked Marquis de Mesanges, a young girl recounts how her master ordered her
to undress:
"And as I was not quick enough in undressing, he himself tore my
clothes off, ripping them away by sheer force. But what truly petrified me was to see him
throw them one after another into the fire.
'You'll have no further use for these,' he muttered... 'all you'll need now is a coffin.
'And there I was, naked; the Marquis...contemplated my ass for a brief space...but he did
not bring his lips near it.
'Enough of this, you're going to follow your clothes...I'm going to burn you alive, you
bitch....
"And so saying he falls half-unconscious into an armchair...He rings, a valet enters
and then leads me out, and in another room I find a complete new outfit, clothes twice as
fine as those he has incinerated" (207).
So how does he control the problem of her sex? In the
past, his icy distance in dealing with "scores of American millionairesses..the best
looking women in the world," has been successful. Higgins was able to regard the
women as sacred, or as he says, like "blocks of wood" (659). The connection
between that 'sacred' and 'blocks of wood' carries resonant Shavian undertones. 'Sacred'
implies untouchable, unreachable. It goes beyond the human realm and into the lofty orbit
of the Apollonian/Shavian. When all women are blocks of wood, there are no feelings to
hurt. People are controlled like machines. Sex is irrelevant. For Higgins, and Shaw, sex
is when women can "drag gentlemen down" (678). Higgins is intent on maintaining
his icy front regardless of how attractive his female students are.
If Higgins appears rather cold and asexual, we should look no further
for the reason than to the author himself. Michael Holroyd suggests that Shaw "looked
forward to a time when, in the course of evolution, ecstasy of intellect would replace
sexual passion," (256) an icy sentiment which is manifested in Back to Methuselah.
Regarded by Shaw as his masterpiece, the last segment of the Arcadian play is set in the
year 31,920, when Shaw's lofty ideas of the Life Force and Creative Evolution have finally
married to produce the Superman. Hatched from eggs and fully grown at the age of
seventeen, the Shavian Supermen devote their lives to pure contemplation. They are devoid
of emotions - love, hate, sexuality. Robert Brustein argues that "The bodiless
character of Shaw's Supermen - not to mention Shaw's own vegetarianism teetotalism, and
abstention from sexual intercourse after his marriage - indicates a kind of Swiftian
disgust at the human body and its functions" (203). In a letter to his future wife,
Charlotte, Shaw says, "No: you don't love me one little bit. All that is nature,
instinct, sex: it proves nothing beyond itself. Don't fall in love: be your own, not mine
or anyone else's" (Holroyd 436). Again, sex is where women bring gentlemen down.
Janet Dunbar notes that Shaw was "by preference a passionless man...he seemed to have
no wish for and even to fear passion though he admitted its power and pleasure"
(117). There is a definite fear in Shaw of being the victim of women.
We can say the same for Higgins. Although his feelings
are repressed, much of the emotional and psychological conflict for Higgins can be
explained through his failed relationship with his mother. In many ways Mrs. Higgins is
the source from which her son acquired his cold indifference. Here he shamelessly
acknowledges his dependence on her:
Higgins: ...My idea of a lovable woman is something as like you as
possible...
Mrs. Higgins: Do you know what you would do if you really loved me, Henry?
Higgins: Oh bother! What? Marry, I suppose?
Mrs. Higgins: No. Stop fidgeting and take your hands out of your pockets. (With a
gesture of despair, he obeys and sits down again.) That's a good boy. (664)
When with her son, Mrs. Higgins takes every opportunity to treat him like
a child with admonishments such as "You silly boy" or "Be quiet,
Henry" (668-69), and she apologizes for his bad behavior toward her guests: "I'm
sorry to say that my celebrated son has no manners," adding that he is "rather
trying on more commonplace occasions" (665). Indifferent and icy, Mrs. Higgins
rejects her son's every effort to please her. She fails to acknowledge his talent,
discarding his "pretty postcards" (664) written in an invented shorthand
designed to impress her. She scoffs at the Eliza project by reducing it to a silly child's
game. "You certainly are a pretty pair of babies," she says to Higgins and
Pickering, "playing with your live doll" (668). Disparaged and rebuked by his
mother practically every moment they are together, Higgins the brilliant scientist is
reduced to Henry the precocious child. Henry himself admits that he has never been able to
"feel really grown-up and tremendous like other chaps" (660). His confession is
a signature tune for all sexually impotent males. "No woman has to prove herself a
woman in the grim way a man has to prove himself a man...failure and humiliation
constantly wait in the wings...." For all men, "The woman...is a shadow of his
mother and of all women" (Paglia 20).
As a mother, Mrs. Higgins is an overwhelming force from
which her son escapes through rationalism and intellectual achievement. "Mothers can
be fatal to their sons...She that gives life also blocks the way to freedom...lt is
against the mother that men have erected their towering edifice of politics and
sky-cult" (Paglia 14). Silver observes that Henry "ruefully confesses his
woodenness with women and retreats when threatened by them behind oral defenses"
(210). To this end, Higgins withdraws into his study of phonetics. How ironic that he
should escape his mother by locking himself in his laboratory, a converted drawing room,
originally the setting for polite conversation among ladies, now the site of clinical
experiments coldly conducted with a variety of tuning forks, burners, organ pipes,
laryngoscopes, charts and recording devices, all constituting the harsh, impersonal tools
of the Apollonian phoneticist.
It is within the confines of this cold setting where
Higgins will create his masterpiece. Higgins unconsciously wishes to forge a new and
improved woman, a mechanical doll, so to speak, with a tripartite personality comprised of
mother (a perverse version of his own), daughter (Eliza), and scientist (himself). She
will be a product of 'higher consciousness,' a pure work of the mind. Professor Higgins
resembles the sculptor, Pygmalion, as his project is an attempt to chisel Eliza into the
hard, harsh blocks of his Apollonian personality. Implicit in his action lies a
misogynistic zeal to negate the female sex. With stony indifference to her womanliness,
Higgins's attempt to regard Eliza as a 'block of wood' without feelings is a barricade
against his own incestuous longings.
Higgins insists that passing off Eliza as a duchess is
an experiment designed to fill up "the deepest gulf that separates class from class
and soul from soul" (668). Beneath the surface, however, Higgins seems to be
searching for a surrogate mother, an idea echoed by Silver who argues that the professor
ultimately seeks "to regain his boyhood with a new mother" (200). Like Pygmalion
in the Greek myth, Higgins is disenchanted with the women around him and sets out to
invent the perfect mate, an all-in-one special, one who will be everything to him -
mother, daughter, and scientist. Most important, it will be a mate who never needles him
for affection. After all, Higgins is a lifelong bachelor who "can love only one
woman, his mother; but even mother and son find life under the same roof - if only for a
few hours at a time - intolerable" (Vesonder 40). The professor's childish dependence
on his mother is a sad "fact from the past living on in the present" (Silver
247).
Eliza's potential as a new and improved mother would
erase that sad fact from the past and guide him into a brighter future. The 'brighter
future,' I would argue, is one that involves the recovery of boyhood, and clearly anyone
trying to regain his boyhood with a new mother probably had an unhappy childhood at the
hands of an uncaring mother.
Here we may draw some interesting parallels between
Higgins the fictional scientist and Shaw the troubled author. Regarding his own mother,
Shaw confessed that "she was the worst mother conceivable...We lived together until I
was forty-two years old, absolutely without the smallest friction of any kind; yet when
her death set me thinking curiously about our relations, I realized that I knew very
little about her" (Autobiography 184-85). Rosset insists that "young Shaw hated
his mother" and that his antipathy toward her brewed out of the "belief that a
sexual intimacy between her and (Vandeleur) Lee did exist..." (347, 135).
More important to us than whether Shaw loved or hated
his mother is the notion of a tenuous balance between mother-love and mother-hate. While
Shaw maintained a curious and dispassionate admiration for his mother, he always
remembered his unhappy childhood and her part in it. It is no surprise that we see mothers
rendered so caustically in his plays. For Henry, Mrs. Higgins is a looming giantess in the
tradition of "The Great Mother," a source of both dependency and disgust (Paglia
discusses the Great Mother in detail on pgs. 41-54, and Cleopatra and de Sade's female
libertines as examples of the archetype on 225-37). Constantly under his mother's thumb,
Higgins clearly carries the deep, dark scars of a sad childhood. Shaw drops a slew of
hints throughout the play that point toward Henry's pain. Some are less obvious than
others. Who can explain why Higgins, a lifelong bachelor living in seclusion, keeps his
own selection of "Japanese dresses" bought overseas (660)? No criticism I have
read addresses this issue. Is Higgins a closet transvestite trying to memorialize his
mother? Paglia argues that a man putting on women's clothes is searching for
God"(90). More convincing is the idea that Higgins is exerting his power over Eliza.
As is the case in the erotic novel, The Story of O, where costumes dictate the
taking of a persona, we see in Pygmalion the supplanting of one identity for
another. It is emblematic that Higgins dresses Eliza the way he wants her to dress, part
and parcel of his measure of control. And like the vicious Marquis de Mesanges, he insults
her to demean and further exert his control over her. To Higgins, Eliza is little more
than a "presumptuous insect" (670) or a thing he created "out of the
squashed cabbage leaves of Covent Garden" (675). He rationalizes his cruel behavior
by the fact that he is a celebrated scientist who can allow himself to hurt others through
rudeness, all under the pretense of a concern with loftier ideas than the mere manners his
mother promulgates.
Eliza, then, becomes a convenient target at which he
will "release his cruel impulses guiltlessly" and "inflict pain without
being conscious of his enjoyment" (Silver 205). His brand of sadism - brutal and
humiliating - is suitably balanced toward the psychological rather than the physical;
suitable because, by nature, Higgins is not the physical type to lay hands on anyone.
Despite his one physical display, we know he will not blacken her eyes with his fists.
Being a phoneticist, his tools of torture will be words. The job of manhandling Eliza,
interestingly, lies in the hands of the house drudge, Mrs. Pearce. She is instructed to
"take (Eliza) away and clean her...take all her clothes off and burn them...put her
in the dustbin," and, if she causes any trouble, Mrs. Pearce is to "wallop
her"(657). The vision conveyed is one of a brutal military camp, with Mrs. Pearce as
the menacing drill instructor. There is an element of vicarious punishment, as Higgins,
through the cruelty of Mrs. Pearce, can beat Eliza by proxy. Mrs. Pearce is a surrogate
henchwoman who doles out the punishment, much in the same way the secant girls do in The
Story of O.
The vicarious enjoyment is probably unconscious to
Higgins, who narrowly defines hurt as only physical pain which, in his mind, he never
inflicts. Still, we see the mental pain and anguish he has caused is enough to drive Eliza
nearly to suicide (674). During her agony, Higgins remains curiously nonchalant. In fact,
his first words in the play directed at Eliza, who is beside herself with fear, are
"There, there, there, there! who's hurting you, you silly girl" (652). And even
while he is tormenting her in Act 4, he reassures her that "Nobody's hurting
you" (671). But he is an uncomfortable sadist who all along has been calculatingly
cruel in order to elicit a violent response. Take his conscious refusal to acknowledge
Eliza's part in the victory at the garden party. In a fit of anger, Eliza lashes out at
Higgins. It's exactly the response he has been waiting for.
Eliza tries to control herself...she is on the point of screaming...
Finally she gives way and flings herself furiously on the floor raging.
Higgins (in despairing wrath outside): What the devil have I done with my
slippers? (He appears at the door) Eliza (snatching up the slippers, and
hurting them at him one after the other with all her force): There are your slippers.
And there. Take your slippers; and may you never have a day's luck with them!
Higgins: ...What did you throw those slippers at me for? Liza: Because I wanted to smash
your face. I'd like to kill you, you selfish brute...(670)
All the messy emotions both characters have hidden just beneath the
surface finally explode in this violent scene. Initially, Higgins gains the upper hand
through sheer physical force, only to have the tables turned in the next exchange. Eliza,
with the cool calm of a scientist, summons all the artfulness of rhetoric she has learned
from her master, and subtly hammers Higgins with his very own oral weapons:
Liza: Before you go, sir--
Higgins (dropping the slippers in his surprise at her calling him Sir): Eh?
Liza: Do my clothes belong to me or to Colonel Pickering? Higgins: What the devil use
would they be to Pickering? Liza: He might want them for the next girl you pick up to
experiment on.
Higgins (shocked and hurt): Is that the way you feel toward us?
Liza: I dont want to hear anything more about that. All I want to know is whether anything
belongs to me...
Higgins:...Why need you start bothering about that in the middle of the night?
Liza: I want to know what I may take away with me. I dont want to be accused of stealing.
Higgins (now deeply wounded): Stealing! You shouldnt have said that Eliza. That
shews a want of feeling.
Liza: I'm sorry. I'm only a common ignorant girl; and in my station I have to be
careful...Please will you tell me what belongs to me and what doesnt? (671)
By now we know that very little belongs to Eliza. Her old possessions -
the rough dialect and mannerisms, and even her own personality - are, like her burnt
clothes, a distant memory. Dionysian morphs into Apollonian. Raging fury settles into icy
logic, allowing her to step over the Apollonian line of western rationality and become an
aggressive, calculating woman who can think like a man.
For his part, Higgins descends from the purity of
Apollonian heights into a murkier realm. Subconsciously he finds more gratification here
than in the triumph of passing off Eliza as a duchess, for now he can include her in an
intense, sadistic relationship. Indeed, all his efforts with Eliza - the infantile games
of dressing her like a doll for the theater, inventing new Elizas to fool their friends,
and all the hours absorbed in watching her lips and her teeth and her tongue - have led up
to this angry scene. We see that he has grown increasingly dependent on Eliza because of
her apparent willingness to obey orders. Higgins may never publicly acknowledge Eliza's
contribution, but he values her for the way she reminds him of his appointments, fetches
his slippers, and indulges in any game he invents. Conversely, he praises her mastery of
phonetics and her ability to absorb his hard-earned knowledge like a sponge. Her role in
the play has progressed from nurse/playmate to colleague in science. But now her success
in deceiving the aristocratic elite confirms for him two things: that all his theories of
class distinctions were true and, more importantly, that Eliza now is orally skilled
enough to graduate to the next level, in which she can assume the role of his mother.
I noted earlier how his pleasure in hurting Eliza made
him an uneasy sadist since it exacerbated his guilt. His only outlet is to find relief in
punishment. Eliza's ascension to 'mother' gives her the ability to hurt Higgins and,
hence, provides him with an outlet for his guilt. It is exactly this way in which the
sadistic phase flows into the masochistic one. Eliza's command of language translates into
strength and power, enough so she can fight back and wound her 'creator.' By the end of
the play, when she has rejected him outright as she chooses to live her life as she
pleases, allowing herself the option of marrying any man she wants - in short, laying
claim to her own soul - Higgins the creator says "By George Eliza, I said I'd make a
woman of you; and I have. I like you like this" (679).
This decisive moment in the play is pivotal,
constituting her final stage of metamorphosis. She is now the all-in-one special
companion, flexible enough to be either daughter/colleague/mother at any given moment.
Higgins has created the perfect monster able to challenge, beat, and hurt him at all his
games. And here we see the reversal of roles: he who at the beginning of the play had
occupied a godlike stature is now vulnerable and open to attack, so that Eliza, infuriated
by her master's cruelty, can provoke and hurt him, thereby gratify him. As Paglia might
say: "One domination dissolves into another...the dominated becomes the
dominator" (26).
Silver argues that Eliza becomes an "improved'
mother for Higgins' and in many ways she is. While he is unable to exert any control over
his own mother, Eliza will be much more manageable. Silver says:
Unlike his mother, she will be at home and available at all times.
Moreover, with Eliza (and surely not with his mother) he will be able to choose both the
occasions for his humiliations and their degree. Inside that large area of control, again,
he can allow himself to be uncontrolled as he certainly cannot be with his mother"
(209).
"Women and nature stand ever ready to reduce the male to boy and
infant...The Apollonian is a male line drawn against the dehumanizing magnitude of female
nature..." (Paglia 28). In Pygmalion, Apollo's towering edifice of reason
sinks into a Dionysian swamp. Yet for Higgins, the scientist and creator, there is victory
in defeat. Eliza stands as a monument to his work. Like Athena, who sprang from the
forehead of Zeus, Eliza springs from the creative mind of Higgins. It is an effort to make
thought the basis of being and reality, but subconsciously, it is an effort on the part of
Higgins to find someone with whom to connect. Creating Eliza as a surrogate mother is an
attempt to heal himself.
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