Pygmalion~Classic Summer

Pygmalion is a Greek mythological figure who carved a statue of a woman and fell in love with it.

Clearly he was convinced that he had the ability to create the perfect woman.

Enter Henry Higgins.

Professor Higgins is a master of phonetics, obsessed with Milton and the Universal Alphabet. He is rash, unyielding, exacting, and, at times, tyrannical. Only he wouldn't apply most of those adjectives to himself. And he  does this mostly while being a gentleman.

So when he meets Eliza Doolittle, flower girl and the face of cockney accents, he is absolutely certain that he will be able to turn her from a guttersnipe into a lady in no time. And with the help of Colonel Pickering, that is exactly what he does. Their scheme works so well that she is presumed to be a Hungarian Princess at a garden party.

What Higgins cannot calculate is human emotion. With the emotional range of an automaton he cannot understand Eliza's feeling of displacement when his little project is over, and all he has to say is "thank God!".

Eliza comes to realize that she could never abide being Higgins' wife. They are too much alike. So, she marries Freddy, her suitor who is perhaps worth nothing more than his devotion to Eliza, and they open a grocers shop together, and end up quite happy.

Pygmalion spawned the well-loved musical My Fair Lady, which is often regarded as the perfect play. It is loved by many, and the plot is recognizable by most everyone.

Other spin-offs have surfaced, mostly in movie form. One for my generation would be She's All That, where a preppy A-list soccer star turns an anti-social artist into the most popular girl in school for a bet.
Or how about Princess Diaries? That film also smacks of Pygmalion.


I really enjoyed reading this play. There were aspects of Higgins that I found reprehensible, and others that I sort of agreed with.
Once, one of my English professors called me a classicist because I made a face when she said that she thought the way that English as a language was evolving was a good thing. My bad. But I suppose that somewhere deep inside me is a little Henry Higgins. He's probably the one who cringes when reading the various misspellings and incorrect grammar on Facebook. :)

My favorite quotes are from the preface.

"It is so intensely and deliberately  didactic, and it's 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 great art can never be anything else"

"An honest slum dialect is more tolerable than the attempts of phonetically untaught persons to imitate the plutocracy"

Those two made me chuckle.

Check out Julie Andrews version of Eliza singing "Wouldn't It Be Loverly" ( If I had chosen the Hepburn version, I could have given you a video. But I'm and Andrews girl myself. So enjoy the slide show. :)

And now it is on to The Grapes of Wrath. But I will have to start that one tomorrow due to the fact that I have a headache paired with the lonely hell known as the hiccups.

Later :)