Pygmalion

In the Pygmalion myth, the sculptor rejects the women around him, condemning them as sexually immoral, and instead sculpts an ideal woman, ultimately falling in love with his own creation. Higgins, too, rejects the women around him, but his own creation stuns him by choosing to leave him when he refuses to treat her with respect and dignity.

Higgins’s misogynistic explanation for his bachelorhood accuses women of being “jealous, exacting, suspicious, and a damned nuisance” (Act II, Page 47). He twice uses a slur against Eliza that usually indicates a man finds a woman to be too sexually permissive, although he flings this insult at her in nonsexual situations. This echoes Pygmalion’s judgment of the women around him. Unlike Pygmalion, when Higgins creates his ideal woman, she does not act as he expects. She seeks independence and won’t tolerate Higgins’s verbal abuse. Even his proposal that the three of them continue to live together after the bet is won is predicated on a gender imbalance: Eliza would still live as if she were a servant, as suggested by Higgins’s placement of her on the payroll in Act II, or like a dog who fetches his slippers while the men do as they please. Rather than submit, she leaves. Eliza transforms not into the ideal Victorian female, but into an independent woman. Whether Higgins accepts this difference and learns to see Eliza as an equal or rejects it and demands conformity is unresolved at the play’s conclusion. However, Eliza’s transformation shows that the ideal Victorian woman is unnatural, constructed, and artificial, similar to Pygmalion’s statue. The role of the ideal upper-class woman must be studied and performed and is not an authentic way of living.

Victorian gender roles were rigid. At first glance, Mrs. Pearce and Mrs. Higgins appear to fulfill the expected gender roles for their class. Mrs. Pearce dutifully serves Higgins, and Mrs. Higgins dotes upon her son. However, these women try to assert their own agency as best they can. Mrs. Pearce advocates for Eliza, attempts to create privacy and personal space for her, and criticizes Higgins’s poor manners. Mrs. Higgins protects and supports Eliza over her own son when his behavior is harsh and cold. Eliza dramatically attempts to reject gender roles through her transformation, which is driven for her desire to be an independent working woman. She supported herself prior to meeting Higgins, and her proposal to take lessons from him was rooted not in her desire to find a husband or enter into an idle society life but in the wish to carve out a better-paying and more secure role as an employee of a flower shop. Despite her longing for autonomy and her independent nature, at the end of the play she has three options that are defined by the men in her life: live with Higgins, live with her father, or marry Freddy. Men control her future, regardless of her choice, given the constraints on her gender in the era. Without wider social reform, women cannot fully escape the constraints of Victorian womanhood.

In Shaw’s worldview, marriage is transactional. Eliza compares marriage to sex work. As a lady, she no longer sells flowers but must “sell” herself by taking on a husband (Act V, Page 100). While this blunt description offends Higgins’s sense of middle-class morality, he, too, uses financial terms in describing her. After the experiment, he describes her emotional state as “cheap” (Act V, Page 99) and suggests that sleeping and refreshing herself will make her a more profitable match than she is in her tired state. The bargain struck between Doolittle and Higgins further underscores marriage as a financial transaction and women as something to be purchased. Doolittle claims he arrives to rescue his daughter’s honor. The five-pound payoff, then, is positioned as if it were a dowry to cement a marriage. Doolittle makes the financial subtext explicit when he says he would give Higgins a “good deal” (Act II, Page 56) on Eliza. Higgins confirms this transaction when he states that Eliza “doesnt belong” to Doolittle because Higgins “paid him five pounds for her” (Act V, Page 114). Shaw presents marriage as the reduction of women to objects meant to be bought and sold.