Nothing new to report about the Pygmalion process today, since Friday night’s rehearsal was cancelled. Thank goodness for that! It was my Perfect Non-Reader’s birthday, and the idea of getting into the car to go rehearse after the day we had… well, it was a Good Thing that I didn’t have to.
So without any new amusing anecdotes from the rehearsal process, I’ll just ramble about the plot of the play, and the problems with it. Which aren’t actually problems, although they do look like problems from most angles.
Look: Pickering is a rich, well-connected bachelor who can wangle invitations to Society not only for himself but for a young woman he has befriended but who nobody else knows. First of all, I don’t think so. The King could get his girlfriends invited to certain kinds of events, but not into Society. But fine. Here’s this Pickering fellow, away for many years, comes back and dives back into Society. Remember: rich, well-connected bachelor. He is going to be the center of gossip. Everyone will know where he is living (with that impossible Higgins fellow!) and who he has been seen with (they were at the Shakespeare exhibition at Earls Court with a nobody of a girl, and Clara Eynsford-Hill says…). Everybody presumably knows Henry Higgins and his profession—his mother is clearly well-connected enough, and he gets an invitation in his own right to a Society gathering, despite being not quite entirely a gentleman, that is, in that he takes money for a service like a merchant or a dancing-master. Fine. I don’t quite understand how Professor Higgins got an invitation, but he did, and clearly everybody knows some American heiress or other who he schooled in received-pronunciation English. And now Pickering arrives with this girl, certainly a beautiful girl, but wouldn’t everyone just assume that she is some tart Pickering picked up in India (or Lord knows where, all those colonial places being the same, really) and Higgins has taught how to speak? Isn’t that the obvious conclusion—far more likely than that Pickering has come across some Hungarian royal by-blow?
But here’s the point: the play isn’t about whether Higgins can pass Eliza off as a duchess. That question is answered halfway through the play, is not a matter of any great suspense and is never questioned afterward. You could imagine a play where that is the main question: either the play would end with the triumph at the ball or the scenes after the ball would be driven by somebody blackmailing Eliza or some loose end of the imposture coming unraveled. This play is nothing like that. This play is about whether Eliza and Higgins can be friends (or lovers, I suppose). And they can’t.
There’s a moment in The History Boys that has become famous, when Hector has been caught fondling the testicles of his students. He tells the Headmaster, “The transmission of knowledge is in itself an erotic act.” Hector, as is unsurprising, has confused the eroticism of the body for that of the soul. But call it a romantic act, and it’s terribly accurate, or accurately terrible. The play is about that kind of romance, and its consequences. Most of the play is Eliza’s extrication from that transmission of knowledge, now that Higgins has nothing more to teach her. Now she is no longer a student, no longer a flower-seller, no longer a false princess, she has to be something else. But what?
As G.B. Shaw writes in a magnificent and lengthy essay that follows the play, despite everybody claiming she is disqualified from working in a flower shop, she in fact could do so very reasonably. If Henry Higgins had any sort of connections with retail places, he could get her a job and an apartment, and there she is. Pickering could get her a job in a bank or even in the military as a secretary, keeping the appointment book and so on—make her Vivie Warren, in fact, despite not having a proper education. Or Mrs. Pearce, bless her, could find her a position with one of the commercial establishments the house comes in contact with, or with an employment agency, where she could be a magnificent asset, impressing both the workers and the toffs. And, of course, Rich Alfie with his three thousand a year (call a pound in 1900 a hundred dollars now, for an income of $300,000) makes even that prospect unnecessary. Like her imposture, her unemployability is a red herring, or rather a platform for Shaw’s magnificent and vicious social commentary, but not a real problem for the characters.
No, the real problem is that the two have, will-they or nill-they, a relationship based on the erotically-charged transmission of knowledge, and that transmission has ended. Higgins can’t quite see it, and probably never will. Of course, he probably will never realize that he has come to the end of what he has to teach her, that he really doesn’t know anything about “Science and Literature and Classical Music and Philosophy and Art” that she couldn’t learn better from someone else. She does know that. And she knows that as long as she stays in that relationship she will always be smaller than he is, and will never transmit her own knowledge to someone else.
I think, and this is just me, that the scene after the ball (when Eliza’s beauty becomes murderous, perhaps the best stage direction in the history of theater) is when Eliza realizes that she has nothing more to learn from him, and that he has no intention of letting her grow. He’s incapable of conceiving of it, in fact. She can’t really imagine getting out from under his shadow. Both there and at Mrs. Higgins, she responds by cutting him down to her size, but eventually she lands on the idea of teaching, of being the bigger one in a new relationship. “You can’t take away the knowledge you gave me,” she says.
Now, Mr. Shaw, in that what-really-happened essay, makes it clear that she does not carry through on her threat to teach, but instead learns (alongside Freddie) how to operate a flower shop, and eventually makes a success at it. She remains close to Higgins, in a way (there is a wonderful and revealing bit in that sequel—wait, I’ll quote:
But the effort that cost her the deepest humiliation was a request to Higgins, whose pet artistic fancy, next to Milton’s verse, was calligraphy, and who himself wrote a most beautiful Italian hand, that he would teach her to write. He declared that she was congenitally incapable of forming a single letter worthy of the least of Milton’s words; but she persisted; and again he suddenly threw himself into the task of teaching her with a combination of stormy intensity, concentrated patience, and occasional bursts of interesting disquisition on the beauty and nobility, the august mission and destiny, of human handwriting. Eliza ended by acquiring an extremely uncommercial script which was a positive extension of her personal beauty, and spending three times as much on stationery as anyone else because certain qualities and shapes of paper became indispensable to her. She could not even address an envelope in the usual way because it made the margins all wrong.
Or, in Alan Bennett’s more economical dialogue, the transmission of knowledge is still and always an erotic act.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.