Describe Eliza Doolittle’s
character with reference to her evolution in the course of the play.
Shaw's story of the flower girl from the slums who was taught to
speak so properly that she was able to pass as a duchess at an ambassador's
garden party is perhaps one of the best known works by Shaw, partly because of
the popularity of the play which, in turn, inspired a more sentimentalized
version in a popular movie and, later, became one of the world's most popular
musical comedies, My Fair Lady, using Shaw's broad outlines,
but turning the play from a study in manners to a sentimental love story
between pupil and master.
The character of Eliza is best seen by the progression which she
makes from "a thing of stone," "a nothingness," a
"guttersnipe," and a "squashed cabbage leaf' to the final act
where she is an exquisite lady — totally self-possessed, a person who has in
many ways surpassed her creator. In the opening act, the audience cannot know
that beneath the mud and behind the horrible speech sounds stands the potential
of a great "work of art." This carries through the Pygmalion-Galatea
theme in which a crude piece of marble is transformed into a beautiful statue.
It is not until the third act, when Eliza makes her appearance at Mrs. Higgins'
house, that we know that Eliza possesses a great deal of native intelligence,
that she has a perfect ear for all sorts of sounds, an excellent ability at
reproducing sounds, a superb memory, and a passionate desire to improve
herself.
In the first act, Shaw takes great pains to hide all of Eliza's
basic qualities. He shows her not only as a person who completely violates the
English language, but, more important, he shows her as a low, vulgar creature —
totally without manners. We see her initially as a low-class flower girl who
vulgarly tries to solicit money from a well-dressed gentleman, Colonel
Pickering, and then as a young girl who is vulgarly familiar to another
gentleman (Freddy Eynsford-Hill, who ironically wants her to be familiar with
him when she becomes a lady); last, we see her as a person who is obnoxious in
her protestations when she thinks that she is about to be accused of
prostitution. Thus, what Shaw has done is to let us listen to a flower girl who
totally violates the English language and who is a total vulgarian in terms of
language. The change in Eliza's pronunciation will come about because of
Higgins' lessons in phonetics, but the important change, and the real subject
of the play, is the change that will come about in Eliza's manners — something
which even Higgins cannot teach her because he has no manners himself.....................................................................................
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