Eliza Doolittle is one of those literary characters that are known, if not all, then almost everyone. It was she who became the heroine of the "five-act novel" 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, the acquaintance of Professor Henry Higgins and Colonel Pickering took place. They are going 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 nothing to him, but to the girl they were a significant amount.
The next day, Eliza (that’s the name of the flower girl) comes to the professor’s house and says that she wants to take phonetics lessons from him, because because of her pronunciation, she cannot get a good job.
Pickering and Higgins bet that the professor in a short period of time will turn a street saleswoman into a duchess. Two months later, Higgins brought Eliza to his mother on her reception day. The girl passed the exam perfectly: no one realized that she was not a high-born lady of birth at all. Higgins won the bet.
Such outings continue for several months, until the professor begins to understand that he is tired of this story. But what about Elise, whose whole life has changed?
Either comedy, or tragedy ...
Unusual turned out to be the heroine of Eliza Doolittle. “Pygmalion” turned out to be a kind of mockery of fans of “blue blood”. That is what the author himself said - Bernard Shaw. It was a very important task for him to show that all the qualities of a girl, which 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 interhuman, emotionally colored connections and relationships, through everything that a person passes through in his environment. After all, man is a receptive and sensitive being, and not factory stamping that meets the standards of a particular social class.
If you do not touch on linguistics, which takes up a lot of space in the play, you need to understand that “Pygmalion” was originally a fun comedy, the last act of which contains a real drama: Eliza Doolittle, a little flower girl, copes with the role of a noble lady, but now nobody else need not. She has a not very happy choice - to return to the street or to marry one of the three heroes.
The difference between a flower girl and a lady
After watching the film, viewers can understand that Eliza Dolittle did not become a lady because Henry Higgins taught her to speak and dress, but because she developed normal human relations with people in a certain environment. Despite the fact that in the play a lot of details inspire the viewers with the idea that it is precisely in the behavior of the lady and the flower girl that there is a difference between them, the text says something completely opposite. Eliza herself says that the difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she behaves with her.
According to the girl, the merit in who she became belongs to Pickering, not Higgins. The latter simply trained her, taught her the right speech, how to wear clothes ... But she could learn this without help. But Pickering treated her politely, and it was thanks to this that there were internal changes with Eliza that distinguish the flower girl from the lady.
The instructiveness of the work
And this side of the play is precisely in a certain synthesis: for any person, how it relates to other people is decisive. Public relations consist of two sides: behavior and appeal. Eliza Doolittle from a simple flower girl became a lady because, together with her behavior, the treatment with her that she managed to feel in the world that surrounds her changed.
She did not become the countess, as Higgins used to say. She succeeded more: Eliza became a woman whose energy and strength invariably inspire respect.
The heroine of the play should destroy the stereotype of the familiar image of a well-written work: instead of thinking about the Mendelssohn march and the traditional orange blossom, the girl tries to build plans for an independent life. Of course, it is clear that the lack of a love line in this plot has disappointed fans of the Show. But not at all Eliza Doolittle. “My Fair Lady” is a film that interpreted the plot of the work in a slightly different way. The role of Eliza in her was played by the beauty Audrey Hepburn. Here the emphasis was precisely on the lyrical side of the relationship of the heroes.