My Fair Lady

Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1956

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Summary

Background

Act Summaries & Analyses

Act I, Scenes 1-11

Act II, Scenes 1-7

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Themes

The Links Between Language and Social Class

Henry Higgins is both fascinated and repulsed by any permutation of the English language that varies from the standard of the Queen’s English, also known as Oxford English. He offers elocution lessons to “correct” these accents and wishes to homogenize the English language. He acknowledges that the differences are simply geographical, even showing off his ability to pinpoint someone’s place of birth with impossible accuracy simply by listening to them speak. However, his own attitude quickly reveals how accents are closely tied to social status, reflecting the class hierarchies of English society.

Eliza Doolittle’s Cockney accent is exaggerated through her wailing and exclamations to show how rough and unrefined she sounds to Higgins’s ears. It seems counterintuitive that a linguistics scholar would be so thoroughly offended by such a diversity of dialects, but Higgins sees “dropping aitches everywhere” (7) and “speaking English any way they like” (8) as an assault on a singularly “correct” version of English that must be protected. More importantly, Higgins attributes Eliza’s low social status as a flower seller on the street to her accent alone, claiming that he can reinvent her as respectable—even as royalty—by simply changing her speech. Notably, his servants have taken on his disdain for dialects, as they all speak and sing in the Queen’s English, suggesting that dialect is an easy excuse to feel superior to someone else.

As Eliza’s use of language changes, so do the ways other characters see and respond to her. At the Ascot races, Eliza Doolittle befuddles the aristocrats by speaking mostly in a proper accent, but with set phrases linked in surprising and sometimes comedic ways, revealing that she still has not fully absorbed upper-class sensibilities and mannerisms. Her relapse into her class origins by shouting at Dover to “move [his] arse” (73) even causes nearby ladies to faint—or perhaps pretend to faint in a demonstration of their so-called respectability. At the Embassy Ball, Eliza’s pronunciation of the Queen’s English is tested, although she manages to convince Karpathy that her English is too perfect, leading to him declaring her a Hungarian princess—and winning his full approval.

In the end, however, Eliza realizes that changing one’s speech isn’t enough to truly change one’s place in society—at least, not entirely. She ends the play in limbo between her working-class peers who no longer see her as one of their own, and the upper-class elite with whom she can never truly belong. Eliza’s linguistic dilemmas thus reflect her economic and social dilemmas, reinforcing both the role language plays in status and its limitations.

(Im)permeable Hierarchies of Class

At the beginning of the play, Eliza’s dreams are not of aristocracy or attending balls at the palace. Rather, she wants to be middle class. She wants to work inside where it’s warm, get off her feet, and eat chocolates. While she agrees to Higgins’s experiment because she hopes to genuinely better her economic circumstances, Higgins treats it as a mere exercise in professional vanity. The tensions between how the working-class characters like Eliza are treated in comparison to the upper-class ones thereby reflect the difficulties in defying class hierarchies.

Higgins’s fixation on Eliza’s accent and speech style emphasizes that having a non-upper-class dialect immediately marks her as poor, while an elite English accent (along with appropriate manners) would, he claims, make her undetectable in middle- or upper-class settings. Changing her accent alone, he asserts, would transform her economic and social prospects. However, Higgins’s own behavior toward Eliza repeatedly reveals how superficial and empty that transformation is in terms of actually changing Eliza’s class status. Even as Eliza’s accent and speech adapt to Higgins’s ideals of “correct” English, he does not see her as more his equal, and his abusive treatment of her does not improve.

If anything, her transformation only persuades him of his own talents and successes instead of leading him to appreciate what she has achieved. When, after her success at the Embassy Ball, Eliza objects to his crass and dismissive behavior toward her, Higgins responds with astonishment, labeling her a “heartless guttersnipe” (98) who is ungrateful to him. When Eliza leaves him, he responds by demanding her back as though she were no more than property, exclaiming, “The girl belongs to me! I paid five pounds for her!” (113, emphasis added). Higgins’s behavior reinforces for Eliza the idea that, regardless of how much she may change her voice and appearance, no class mobility is really possible if others do not alter their treatment of her—she has changed, but the system has not. As she remarks ruefully to Mrs. Higgins, “[T]he difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she is treated” (121, emphasis added).

However, Eliza’s success at the Ball does imply that class hierarchies are based on no real inherent merit or moral qualities. The Greek ambassador must avoid speaking and pay a hefty bribe to avoid being ousted as a class “imposter,” yet his success as an ambassador implies that he has real merit regardless of his class origins. Karpathy’s occupation reveals upper-class paranoia of being forced to confront that the circumstances of their birth don’t make them inherently special or extra worthy as people. Thus, while the musical suggests that class hierarchies are, in essence, worthless and unfair, Eliza and the Greek ambassador’s experiences acknowledge the difficulties in trying to overcome a system designed to keep them in their place.

Gender Stereotypes and Expectations

Higgins articulates his distaste for women early in the musical, when he laughs at the idea that he would ever take advantage of Eliza, having established himself as a lifelong bachelor who has no need for women at all as long as he has his linguistics work. In “Ordinary Man,” he asserts that when a man lets a woman into his life, she destroys his peace and contentment. The song is full of stereotypes of women. However, by bringing Eliza into his house, Higgins is, unwittingly, letting a woman into his life and initiating a gendered conflict between them.

Higgins doesn’t seem to see Eliza as a woman at first, treating her like a child or a dog to be trained. Higgins believes that he is above emotion and romantic feelings, and he is distressed after the ball when Eliza causes him to lose his temper, since he prides himself on keeping his emotions under control. When Eliza feels hurt after the ball and has an emotional response that Higgins can’t quite comprehend, he tries to chalk it up to women being women, asserting that they need to be more like men. However, Eliza’s anger is justified and most of the women in the play aren’t driven by overly emotional whims. Furthermore, Higgins’s stunted emotionality isn’t the default for men in the world of the play either: Freddy Eynsford-Hill is fully open with his emotions, while Colonel Pickering demonstrates a more marked tendency for compassion and nervousness. Higgins’s strict gender stereotypes are therefore exposed as false.

Like Pygmalion, Higgins believes that he created a woman out of nothing, even attempting to take credit for Eliza becoming independent and walking away from him. In an oddly similar way, Doolittle claims ownership of, and gratitude from, Eliza based on his assertion that he created her and gave her the gift of life. Neither of these claims give any credit to the woman that Eliza becomes on her own—Doolittle didn’t raise her, and Higgins didn’t carve her out of ivory. The success of the linguistics wager is down to Eliza’s hard effort, not just Higgins’s coaching, and she has been self-sufficient and independent of her father for a long time. Eliza’s self-development and triumphs reveal that, despite the patriarchal control Higgins and her father try to assert over her, she can stand on her own without them.

By the end of the musical, Higgins learns what it means to let a woman in his life when Eliza walks out of it, as he feels the loss acutely. Ironically, he doesn’t know how to articulate it properly, singing that he’s “grown accustomed to her face” (131), expressing gratitude that Eliza is a woman, which makes her “easy to forget” (131), although she clearly isn’t easy to forget. Eliza, meanwhile, is asking questions about her place in the world now that she’s not just appropriate for middle-class work but can pass as a lady. Traditional gender roles dictate that she gets married, but Eliza regards angling for an advantageous match as akin to selling herself. She fulfills a role in Higgins’s household that is partially traditional and partially unconventional—and that’s what she chooses at the end of the play, suggesting that the two may reconcile permanently after all.