![]() Lerner’s idea that women exist only to frustrate men carries over into an Eliza who, at the end of the film, is still expected to fetch Higgins’s slippers. Shaw’s acknowledgement of the equality of men and women is manifested in Eliza’s development into Higgins’s equal as he says, “you and I and Pickering will be three old bachelors together instead of only two men and a silly girl” (Shaw, p. In the song “I’m Just an Ordinary Man,” marriage is likened to the Spanish Inquisition and a noose around a man’s neck, women are accused of jabbering and chattering too much, of invading a man’s privacy and taking over his home, and Higgins claims that when a man wants to talk of Keats and Milton “she only wants to talk about love” (metrolyrics). In the film Lerner’s lyrics, even though they are witty and highly polished, justify the professor’s celibacy by drawing on the kind of sexual stereotypes that would have revolted Shaw. One wants to go north and the other south and the result is that both have to go east, though they both hate the east wind” (Shaw, p. When you let them into your life, you find that the woman is driving at one thing and you’re driving at another.” Shaw’s Higgins supposes that “the woman wants to live her own life and the man wants to live his and each tries to drag the other on to the wrong track. ![]() He explains himself in the play by telling Colonel Pickering, also a bachelor and a scientist, that “women upset everything. In the film and in the play, at least in the beginning, his interest in Eliza is scientific in nature, not romantic. Higgins is also a confirmed bachelor who has a low opinion of women but that is mostly because he admires his mother so much. With the intercession of Venus the statue comes alive, after which the sculptor and his creation marry and have a son, Paphos. The myth of Pygmalion and Galatea tells the story of a Cypriot sculptor who loses interest in women when he witnesses the behavior of local prostitutes, but then falls in love with the statue he carves out of ivory. It will be argued here that the film makers fundamentally misunderstood Eliza’s development after Higgins taught her to be a lady or, to put it another way, the kind of woman Pygmalion’s Galatea, when given life, actually becomes. Nigel Alexander goes so far as to say that “neither the directors of the film nor the author of the musical version understood Shaw’s Pygmalion” (Shaw, p. There are, however, major differences between Shaw’s play and George Cukor’s musical which become more evident when the play and film are compared. Much of the film’s screenplay stays close to the original, and the characterizations are so similar that the film may at first seem a faithful adaptation of the play. ![]() Eliza Doolittle keeps turning into Audrey Hepburn, Henry Higgins into Rex Harrison, and Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loew’s score plays in the background. My Fair Lady is such a classic musical that it is difficult to escape its influence when reading George Bernard Shaw’s play, Pygmalion today. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |