Eliza Doolittle: a flower girl with a lady's soul

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

Eliza Doolittle is one of those literary characters who are known, if not to everyone, then to almost everyone. It was she who became the heroine of the "novel in five acts" by Bernard Shaw called "Pygmalion". She had to go through a difficult path of rebirth from a beggar to a lady. How this happened, why and who contributed to this can be found in this article.

What is the story about?

One rainy evening Professor Henry Higgins and Colonel Pickering met. They are about to have dinner with the Colonel at the hotel when a young flower girl runs up to them and asks to buy flowers. Higgins threw a handful of coins into her basket, which meant absolutely nothing to him, but to the girl were a significant amount.

The next day, Eliza (that's the name of the flower girl) comes to the professor's house and says she wants to take phonetics lessons from him, because her pronunciation makes her unable to get a good job.

Pickering and Higgins make a bet that a professor can transform a streetsaleswoman to the duchess. Two months later, Higgins brought Eliza to his mother on her reception day. The girl passed the exam with excellent marks: no one guessed that she was not at all a high-society lady by birth. Higgins won the bet.

Such appearances continue for several more months, until the professor begins to realize that he is tired of this story. But what about Eliza, whose whole life has changed?

Whether comedy or tragedy…

The heroine Eliza Doolittle turned out to be unusual. "Pygmalion" turned out to be a kind of mockery of the fans of the "blue blood". This is exactly what the author himself, Bernard Shaw, said. It was a very important task for him to show that all the qualities of a girl that she eventually reveals as a lady could be found at the very beginning of the story, and the qualities of a flower girl were then reflected in the lady.

The character of a person cannot be determined only by the environment. This happens through interpersonal, emotionally colored connections and relationships, through everything that a person goes through in the conditions of his environment. After all, a person is a receptive and sensitive being, and not a factory stamping that meets the standards of a certain social class.

If you do not touch on linguistics, which is given a lot of space in the play, you need to understand that "Pygmalion" was originally a fun comedy, the last act of which contains real drama: Eliza Doolittle, a little flower girl, perfectly copes with the role of a noble lady, but now no one needs it anymore. She has a not very happy choice - to return tostreet or marry one of the three heroes.

The difference between a flower girl and a lady

After watching the film, viewers can understand that Eliza Doolittle became a lady not at all because Henry Higgins taught her how to talk and dress, but because she had normal human relationships with people in a certain environment. Despite the fact that in the play there is a lot of detail instilling in the audience the idea that it is in the behavior of the lady and the flower girl that there is a difference between them, the text says something just the opposite. Eliza herself says that the difference between a lady and a flower girl is not in how she behaves, but in how they behave with her.

According to the girl, the credit for what she has become belongs to Pickering, not Higgins. The latter simply trained her, taught her the correct speech, how to wear clothes … But she could learn this without outside help. But Pickering treated her politely, and it was thanks to this that Eliza experienced the inner changes that distinguish a flower girl from a lady.

Instructive work

And this side of the play is in a kind of synthesis: for any person, the determining factor is how he treats other people. Public relation consists of two sides: behavior and treatment. Eliza Doolittle went from a simple flower girl to a lady because, along with her behavior, the treatment she was able to feel in the world that surrounds her also changed.

She didn't become a countess, as Higgins used to say. She succeeded more: Eliza became a woman, energy and strengthwho is always respected.

The heroine of the play must break the stereotype of the usual image of a well-written work: instead of thinking about Mendelssohn's march and the traditional orange blossom, the girl tries to make plans for an independent life. Of course, it is understandable that the lack of a love line in this story brought disappointment to Shaw fans. But not so Eliza Doolittle. "My Fair Lady" is a film that interpreted the plot of the work somewhat differently. The role of Eliza was played by the beautiful Audrey Hepburn. Here the emphasis was precisely on the lyrical side of the relationship between the characters.