My Fair Lady as a Retrograde Example of Erasing Women's Emotional Work
Toby and I went to see My Fair Lady at the Kennedy Center tonight; he got the tickets as a birthday present from his sister Ann and BiL Jeff.
So, you know the story of My Fair Lady, right? It's the musical version of Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion, which is roughly based on the Greek myth, in which a sculptor, Pygmalion, makes a model of a woman so beautiful that he falls in love with her. The goddess Aphrodite takes pity on this hopeless love and brings the statue to life as the woman Galatea. Well, that's all we hear about Galatea; she came to life and was granted to Pygmalion. Shaw took issue with this perhaps, as a feminist and socialist. In his play, the linguist Henry Higgins, on a bet with his friend Colonel Pickering, undertakes the education of a lower class flower-seller - a "guttersnipe" - and teaches her to speak like a lady. His transformation of her is so complete that he triumphs by passing her off as a princess in disguise at an embassy ball. It's a very funny play and I recommend the movie to you, so that you can swoon over Leslie Howard.
The musical contains great chunks of the play's dialogue, but as musicals must have a resolved romance by the last curtain, it chooses to play up the romantic feelings between the irritable, irascible and self-centered Higgins and Eliza Doolittle, his pupil/project. She falls in love with him in the middle of Act I ("I Could Have Danced All Night") when she begins to achieve her linguistic transformation ("The Rain in Spain"). And that so much makes sense, emotionally, because that experience, of someone who allows you to be the person you were meant to be - well, that is the feeling of falling in love, right?
In both the play and the musical, Higgins feels that Eliza is more or less his project and fails to acknowledge her as a feeling human being; that falls to Colonel Pickering and Higgins' housekeeper. But the play stays the course; Eliza triumphs at the embassy ball, stands up to Higgins for his failure to treat her with respect, and leaves him to marry Freddy, a rather silly young man she has met in her short career passing as a lady.
But the musical has her return to Higgins. After standing up to him, she goes off with Freddy. Higgins is surprised and distressed at his feelings at her absence - he sings "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face," which we understand to be the plaint of man unfamiliar with attachment and tenderness, minimizing his pain.
And then Eliza reappears. Apparently, Freddy is a no-go. Without any discussion of their relationship or his treatment of her going forward, she slips into his library and assumes her old position of bringing him his slippers. In true 1956 fashion, we are meant to understand that Eliza has worked out how to resist his bullying and therefore remain in relationship to the man she loves.
Oh, great. She's going to put up with his nonsense and protect his emotional ignorance and sacrifice her chance to be openly loved and appreciated, so she can carry slippers and provide secretarial services to this oversensitive emotional jerk. And this is the happy ending. It's amazing to me that it's taken sixty years for feminist criticism to catch up with this version of romantic love; the woman does ALL the emotional work for the privilege of being in a relationship with a man who, like King Lear, "hath ever slenderly known himself."
Strangely, I still really enjoyed the music and watching it. I'm just more than ever hopeful that the young women I know don't buy into this idea of a happy ever after.
So, you know the story of My Fair Lady, right? It's the musical version of Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion, which is roughly based on the Greek myth, in which a sculptor, Pygmalion, makes a model of a woman so beautiful that he falls in love with her. The goddess Aphrodite takes pity on this hopeless love and brings the statue to life as the woman Galatea. Well, that's all we hear about Galatea; she came to life and was granted to Pygmalion. Shaw took issue with this perhaps, as a feminist and socialist. In his play, the linguist Henry Higgins, on a bet with his friend Colonel Pickering, undertakes the education of a lower class flower-seller - a "guttersnipe" - and teaches her to speak like a lady. His transformation of her is so complete that he triumphs by passing her off as a princess in disguise at an embassy ball. It's a very funny play and I recommend the movie to you, so that you can swoon over Leslie Howard.
The musical contains great chunks of the play's dialogue, but as musicals must have a resolved romance by the last curtain, it chooses to play up the romantic feelings between the irritable, irascible and self-centered Higgins and Eliza Doolittle, his pupil/project. She falls in love with him in the middle of Act I ("I Could Have Danced All Night") when she begins to achieve her linguistic transformation ("The Rain in Spain"). And that so much makes sense, emotionally, because that experience, of someone who allows you to be the person you were meant to be - well, that is the feeling of falling in love, right?
In both the play and the musical, Higgins feels that Eliza is more or less his project and fails to acknowledge her as a feeling human being; that falls to Colonel Pickering and Higgins' housekeeper. But the play stays the course; Eliza triumphs at the embassy ball, stands up to Higgins for his failure to treat her with respect, and leaves him to marry Freddy, a rather silly young man she has met in her short career passing as a lady.
But the musical has her return to Higgins. After standing up to him, she goes off with Freddy. Higgins is surprised and distressed at his feelings at her absence - he sings "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face," which we understand to be the plaint of man unfamiliar with attachment and tenderness, minimizing his pain.
And then Eliza reappears. Apparently, Freddy is a no-go. Without any discussion of their relationship or his treatment of her going forward, she slips into his library and assumes her old position of bringing him his slippers. In true 1956 fashion, we are meant to understand that Eliza has worked out how to resist his bullying and therefore remain in relationship to the man she loves.
Oh, great. She's going to put up with his nonsense and protect his emotional ignorance and sacrifice her chance to be openly loved and appreciated, so she can carry slippers and provide secretarial services to this oversensitive emotional jerk. And this is the happy ending. It's amazing to me that it's taken sixty years for feminist criticism to catch up with this version of romantic love; the woman does ALL the emotional work for the privilege of being in a relationship with a man who, like King Lear, "hath ever slenderly known himself."
Strangely, I still really enjoyed the music and watching it. I'm just more than ever hopeful that the young women I know don't buy into this idea of a happy ever after.