SHARE NOTES; Pygmalion by G.B.Shaw

[Mashaaal]

Question no 1;
Shaw’s pronouncements about his own plays are normally of two kinds; the literal truth and the fantastic untruth. Both show him at his best as an advertising man. When he called The Devil’s Disciple a melodrama , he was describing it quite accurately. When he called Pygmalion a romance, he was equally accurate , but he then turned on his unsuspecting audience and denounced it for expecting the normal conclusion of a comic-romance.Answer;
G.B.Shaw is famous for setting the course of British drama for the last hundred years. His plays deal with the ‘literal truth’ and the ‘fantastic untruth’, as he himself said “I deal in the tragic irony of the conflict between real life and the romantic imagination”’ . Pygmalion is the best example of this conflict. Shaw always labeled his plays with certain names as romance, comic romance or melodrama and he was justified in doing so. David Bowman credits Shaw for inventing melodrama and Shaw has also accurately described his Devil’s Disciple under this category. In Pygmalion ,shaw trapped the audiences by “discrediting socially conditioned reflexes” and thus gave an anti-romantic ending to his play.
The Devil’s Disciple is a heroic melodrama . Shaw’s goal was to put new ideas in the old dramaturgical models and thus to produce such a play which could appeal to the mass popular audience.Shaw used the Shavian melodrama as a vehicle for commenting on the controversial social and political topics.He inflicted significant changes in the character of Judith Anderson to convey the theme of “appearances and reality”.Shaw’s characters in this melodrama are more complex than that of traditional melodrama and through them he warns the audience about the dangers of falling into “empty conventionality”.Pygmalion was referred to as a romance by G.B.Shaw but later he forced his spectators to “re-evaluate their assumptions regarding the world around them”( Innes, chap 3).Shaw wanted to flush out the traditional models from the minds of the reader. As Cristopher Innes says that“ In Pygmalion what shaw singled out was the tragedy for trapping the audiences”.There are a number of instances in the play that portrays the romantic essence but still Pygmalion presents an “anti-type of the popular cinderella story”due to the fact that Eliza does not marry Higgins. The transformation of Eliza is romantic enough but there is no conventional ending rather Eliza throws the slippers of the hero into his face. Higgins remarks that “ I like you like this” and calls her a “pillar of strength”. Higgins achieves the result of his experiment and is a victor because for Shaw “ Galatea comes to life “ only “ when Eliza emancipates herself” from Higgins. The successful experiments of Higgins portrays the element of ‘fantastic untruth’ in the play.
In Shaws’s times , he audiences were captured by romances but through Pygmalion Shaw made them aware that real things happen to real people. The element of “literal truth” can be found in the play where education is taken as a productive tool to groom the personality and to remove the class distinctions. Higgins regarded phonetics and the proper use of pronunciation of the English language as an instrument of social change and as a hope for achieving the aesthetic state. A s Higgins said “to take a human being and and change her into a quite different human being by creating a new speech for her” abolishes “ the deepest gulf that separates class from class and soul from soul”.In doing so Higgins tried to transform a living individual into a statue because as a phonetician ,all he could teach was grammar and pronunciation and thus the element of “fantastic untruth” unveils over here because only superficial changes could not account for the real spiritual transformation.
Shaw as a dramatist tried to depict reality in his plays as in one of his epilogues to Fanny’s First Play (1911), he said ;
“but oh! I got so tired of the plays
Always the same..........
Not one of them a bit like real life ”That’s why Shaw turned on his audiences in Pygmalion and gave them some clues so that they should not expect the monotonous ending of a romance. An example of these clues can be the throwing back of insult on Higgins by Eliza when she says; “[B]oh!I am only a squashed cabbage leaf[/B]” and when she complaints him that “ what have you left me fit for ?”. In the start of the play Shaw consciously focused on the characters of Eliza and Higgins in a way that it fore-casted the romantic fulfillment but as Innes says “the strategy of the play is the denial of expectation”, so we find a complete shock for the audience by the anti-romantic ending.
The whole play is not anti-romantic as G.B.Shaw himself used the word “romance” in the sub-title because the transfiguration of Eliza seems exceedingly improbable and it is directly related to the ideals of romanticism. She acted like a beautiful creature and spoke with “pedantic correctness of pronunciation and great beauty of tone” in the party. All this “fantastic romance” disappears at once when Eliza realizes that she was just an “object” of experiment and now at the end of the experiment she is left with nothing. She realizes that she has been equipped with “those manners and habits that disqualify a fine lady from earning her own living” because the gap between the social class was bridged by the beauty of language. Here Shaw portrayed the “literal truth” of the society that how the people defined other’s values by the external coverings only whereas the real transformation is always ‘internal’ as pointed out by Pickering.The underlying ideals of Shaw's ideal society could thus be felt here.
“Romance” as a sub-title for the play is quite ironical for Higgins . His anti-romantic attitude is exhibited when he says “you see, she’ll be a pupil; and teaching would be impossible unless pupils were sacred”. This establishes their sacred and unequal relationship .Like the legendary ‘Pygmalion’ he does not fall in love with his own creation.Higgins refuses to compromise his aesthetic endeavor by marrying Eliza. He says;
“you find me cold, unfeeling,selfish ,don’t you? Be off with you the sort of people you like”.
Higgins is anti-romantic as far as his love for Eliza is concerned as Mohammad.R.Salami says “his code is the cold superman zeal to change the world”. Higgins himself accepts his anti-romanticism and his cold attitude towards Eliza by telling her that “I care for life, for humanity and you are a part of it that has come to my way and been built into my house”.Higgins quite clearly represents a mechanistically distorted view of life with “a life-size image of half a human-head,shewing in section the vocal organ, and his reductive dismissal of beautiful women as ‘blocks of wood’’(Innes, chap3)
The anti-romantic ending of Pygmalion was underlined by Shaw again as he wrote the sequel of it in order to correct the popular misinterpretation of his play. Shaw in his preface said that the misinterpretation is is an evidence of “the imaginations enfeebled by their(audience’s) lazy dependences on the ready-mades , in which Romance keeps its stock of ‘happy-endings’ to misfit all stories”.
In Pygmalion , Shaw attacks the ‘romantic imagination’ of audiences by exploding the conventional specific models of a hero and heroine because they thought that in order to become a heroine, she must marry the hero of the play.Eliza marries Freddy instead of Higgins and this is declared in the prose-epilogue.Eliza tells Freddy that she will always be treated as a flower girl by Higgins but she says that “I know , I can be a lady to you because you always treat me as a lady, and always will”.Sexual love is an essential element in a romance and this element of romance is provided by the Freddy-Eliza love story. Freddy falls deeply in love with Eliza when he meets her at the house of Mrs. Higgins. He is simply fascinated by her and from that day on wards he begins to haunt Whim-pole street where Eliza lives in Higgins house. Freddy keeps looking at Eliza’s room every night until the light go out , when he says ‘Goodnight, darling, darling, darling”. Freddy thus becomes a love-lorn man and supports the sub-title of the play that is “romance’.
Although the play is sub-titled as a romance but comic elements are present in it which relates it to the “literal truths” of daily life.Eliza talks in a robotic manner and her content of speech induces comic effect. When Mrs. Higgins asked her that will it rain?, she replied that “The shallow depression in the west of these Islands is likely to move slowly in an easterly directions”. Freddy could not stop his laughter and said “ha!ha!how awfully funny”.Eliza’s character is more instrumental than fundamental.She describes the matter of her aunt’s death with phrases like “do her in” which induces fun.the first scene of the play with the sole objective of finding a cab also produces comic effect. Through Doolittle’s comic personality, Shaw is able to make many satirical thrusts at middle-class morality and to make additional comments on class distinctions and on class manners.
Throughout Shaw’s career, his treatment of plot, situation and character was conditioned by his attack on the fallacies of sentimental imaginations and he argues that he was sent into the world to dance on romances with thick boots.According to Eric Bentley Pygmalion stands in relation to the traditional romance in the same way in which The Devil’s Disciple stands to the conventional melodrama.Hence, it is concluded that both of these plays are critiques to the traditional models and are alternative to them.

References;
Innes,Christopher. ‘chapter3’ Modern British Drama1890-1990.Australia:Cambridge university press,1992.
[Salama, Mohammad.R.] “The Aesthetics of Pygmalion in G.B.Shaw and Tawfiq al-hakim:A Study of Transcendence and Decadence”Brill, journal of arabic lit.vol 31, no.3(2002),pp.222-237.
[Bowman,David.] “Bernard Shaw Discovers Melodrama”, scriptorium press, interpretations vol7,no1(1975)pp.30-37.