Pygmalion of Cyprus, in Greek and Roman mythology, was granted a happy destiny, because (as recounted in Ovid’s Metamorphoses) he was able to marry GaPygmalion of Cyprus, in Greek and Roman mythology, was granted a happy destiny, because (as recounted in Ovid’s Metamorphoses) he was able to marry Galatea, the beautiful woman he had created as a statue, fallen in love with, and then seen brought to life by the love goddess Aphrodite. Yet when the great Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw adapted the Pygmalion-and-Galatea legend into his play Pygmalion (1912), he had no intention of recasting the story so straightforwardly. Professor Henry Higgins, the British linguist who wagers that he can teach a working-class London flower girl to speak like a duchess, is a troubled Pygmalion with a great many issues; and Eliza Doolittle, the flower girl who serves as the subject of Professor Higgins’s experiment, is a Galatea with a difference – with a mind and a heart of her own.
The story, of course, is a familiar one – in large part, for modern readers and playgoers and moviegoers, because of the massive worldwide success of My Fair Lady, the wildly popular 1956 Lerner-and-Loewe Broadway musical that was subsequently adapted into an equally successful 1964 film that won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director (George Cukor), and Best Actor (for Rex Harrison as Professor Higgins). The success and cultural influence of My Fair Lady make it challenging, but worthwhile, for modern readers to go back to Shaw’s original play and try to experience it as a play – without automatically envisioning Eliza Doolittle as looking just like Audrey Hepburn, and without humming tunes like “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly” while turning each page.
As film critic Roger Ebert aptly points out in his “Great Movies” review of My Fair Lady, it is Eliza who takes the initiative and sets the plot in motion. Hearing Professor Higgins’s idle boast, outside a Covent Garden theatre, that he could take a flower girl like Eliza and make her use of the English language fit for London high society, Eliza seeks out Professor Higgins’s services as a linguist, on a paying basis, and refuses to be put down by Higgins’s considerable capacity for scorn: “I want to be a lady in a flower shop stead of sellin’ at the corner of Tottenham Court Road. But they won’t take me unless I can talk more genteel. Well, here I am, ready to pay him – not asking any favour – and he treats me zif I was dirt” (p. 26).
Eliza is speaking here to Colonel Pickering, a military officer who has just returned from service in India – and who, as a linguist and “confirmed bachelor” like Professor Higgins, is settling in as a long-term guest at Higgins’s home. Colonel Pickering’s courtesy to Eliza from the beginning of their acquaintance – “Won’t you sit down, Miss Doolittle?” – contrasts nicely with Professor Higgins’s consistent disdain for anyone whom he considers not to be an intellectual equal. Higgins and Pickering make a “gentlemen’s wager” regarding whether or not Higgins will be able to teach the working-class Eliza how to speak the language, and take on the social manner, of the upper classes.
Reading Pygmalion while trying to keep My Fair Lady as far out of my mind as possible reinforced my sense of how truly it is Eliza’s play. Eliza Doolittle is a sharp observer of life and society; indeed, as an impoverished and working-class young woman, she has had to be, in order to survive. Installed at Professor Higgins’s home in the fashionable Wimpole Street area of central London, and transported to a new community with new norms and values, she offers wry commentary on the middle-class values among which she has been placed.
Told that she must have night-clothes – she has worn her day clothes to bed all her life – and that fashionable clothes will be furnished for her if she is willing to wait, Eliza replies in a manner that shows all that she is learning: “If I’m to have fashionable clothes, I’ll wait. I should like to have some. Mrs. Pearce [Professor Higgins’s housekeeper] says you’re going to give me some to wear in bed at night different to what I wear in the daytime, but it do seem a waste of money when you could get something to show” (p. 50).
As every viewer or reader of this play and every viewer of My Fair Lady knows, Eliza is a triumph in London high society, winning Higgins’s bet for him – and, in the process, foiling an arrogant rival linguist, once Higgins’s student, who now fancies himself Higgins’s equal. But the joy that Higgins and Pickering feel at Eliza’s triumph is clouded, for the reader, by the two men's failure to salute Eliza herself for her hard work and courage (Pickering’s insensitivity to Eliza at this point seems a rare false note in the play).
When Higgins asks why Eliza is upset, hears her say “What’s to become of me?”, and tries to assure her that Higgins and Pickering can secure her a good marriage, Eliza sees that as little more than a gentrified, upscale version of the sex trade she used to see going on around her in Covent Garden: “We were above that at the corner of Tottenham Court Road….I sold flowers. I didn’t sell myself. Now you’ve made a lady of me I’m not fit to sell anything else” (p. 78).
Higgins’s attempt to parry this devastating rhetorical thrust by Eliza – he accuses her of sullying the dignity of “human relations” – has no force. Higgins loves to toss off references and allusions to his favourite author, John Milton – a writer who, like Higgins, tended toward puritanical inflexibility, and toward a tendency to think and speak in moral absolutes. But in his readings and re-readings and re-re-readings of Paradise Lost, has Higgins had no time to read any Jane Austen?
In novels like Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Pride and Prejudice (1813), Austen set forth eloquently the dilemma facing young women in her time. Securing a good marriage in Regency England was, purely and simply, a matter of social and economic survival; there was no other way for a young woman to avoid a lifetime of poverty and social ignominy. One hundred years later, at the time of the first staging of Pygmalion, not much had changed. Eliza is right, and any reasonable viewer or reader of the play is likely to agree with her.
I trust that there is not too much need for me to inform the reader that Pygmalion does not end like My Fair Lady. Indeed, a core part of the history of the play is the story of audience dissatisfaction with the way in which Shaw as playwright resolved the question of the relationship between Higgins and Eliza. Shaw intended for his audience to see that his Pygmalion, Professor Higgins, did not deserve his Galatea, Eliza. But audiences were having none of that.
A good clue to how Shaw wanted his audience to see the relationship comes near the end of the play, after Eliza Doolittle has effectively declared her independence from Professor Higgins, devastating the once-so-self-confident linguist. Trying desperately to work out some compromise solution through which Eliza (who has quietly made herself indispensable) can remain at the Higgins household on somewhat the same basis as before, Higgins suggests that “I’ll adopt you as my daughter, and settle money on you if you like. Or would you rather marry Pickering?” Eliza retorts, “I wouldn’t marry you if you asked me; and you’re nearer my age than what he is” (p. 101).
The import here is clear; Higgins’s feelings toward Eliza are more fatherly or father-like than they are romantic, and both Higgins and Eliza are well aware of the age difference between them. It is perfectly understandable, in the context of these aspects of the play, that Eliza’s heart turns toward Freddy Eynsford-Hill, a feckless but likable young man whose family, clinging desperately to the outward forms of social-class “respectability,” has never managed to teach him how to do anything. Eliza and Freddy belong together; both are creatures of their class-ridden society, their lives malformed by strict social expectations of what people of different social strata are “supposed” to do. They can face the future by trying to build a new and better world together.
And consider this: if Freddy is not meant to be with Eliza by the play’s end, then what earthly dramatological reason is there for him to be in the play at all? In My Fair Lady, he recites a couple of witty lines, sings a nice song, and then disappears from the play as if by spontaneous combustion.
But Shaw, whether he realized it or not, was facing romantic-comedy conventions that were firmly in place long before “rom-com” was a standardized movie category at the video store, or on one’s streaming service. Higgins and Eliza spend so much time on stage together that audiences inevitably start thinking in romantic-comedy terms. Boy finds girl; boy loses girl; boy regains girl. It is an eminently safe first-date choice (take note, single friends), and it has long brought in handsome returns at box offices around the world.
It should be no wonder that Anthony Asquith’s 1938 film version of Pygmalion (with Leslie Howard as Higgins and Wendy Hiller as Eliza) caved to audience demands for a “happy” ending. Even though Asquith’s Pygmalion won Shaw an Academy Award for Best Screenplay – making Shaw the first person in history to win both a Nobel Prize and an Oscar – old G.B.S. couldn’t have been happy at that bit of movie-studio interference. Perhaps it is for the best that he did not live to see what Lerner and Loewe, and then Cukor, did to conclude My Fair Lady.
For his part, Shaw, perhaps somewhat defensively, added to a 1916 reprinting of his play a 13-page sequel showing conclusively why it was inevitable and necessary that Eliza would marry Freddy, not Higgins – and, while he was at it, Shaw set forth the later lives of all the major characters. The sequel is zesty, energetic, and well-written, and yet it begs the question: if the play is saying what the author wants it to say, in the script and on the stage, then why is it necessary for the author to write, four years later, a narrative sequel that most viewers of the play will never read? Why not just write a new play about Eliza, Freddy, Higgins, Pickering, Mrs. Pearce, et al.? Calling it Pygmalion II would have been unworthy of an artist of Shaw's stature; by contrast, Galatea would have been a good title.
But let that go. Shaw’s Pygmalion is one of the greatest and most influential plays ever written. For my part, I returned to Pygmalion in the context of a viewing of My Fair Lady at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., a few months before the coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic closed theatres around the world. The play’s director gave the ending a twist that made it slightly different from what one sees in Cukor’s film. From the audience, there were…murmurings.
The fact that Pygmalion and its ending still intrigue and trouble people more than 100 years after the play’s premiere testifies to its enduring power. Truly, Shaw, a 20th-century Irish Pygmalion, successfully sculpted an immortal creation....more
Wars of invasion were very much upon the minds of people in Great Britain, and in other major nations of the world, during the late 19th century. WoulWars of invasion were very much upon the minds of people in Great Britain, and in other major nations of the world, during the late 19th century. Would Germany invade Belgium? Would the Austro-Hungarian Empire invade Serbia? But only the visionary mind of H.G. Wells was able to extrapolate from those fears of his time to imagine something even more seemingly unthinkable – an invasion of the Earth by hostile, technologically superior beings from another world – in a way that would capture the imaginations of countless thousands of readers, from Wells’s time to our own. Welcome to The War of the Worlds (1898).
In our time, Wells is best-known for his classic works of science fiction – works that, in his own time, would have been called “scientific romances”: The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The First Men in the Moon (1901), The Food of the Gods (1904), In the Days of the Comet (1906), and of course The War of the Worlds.
The basic principle in that time – as with many science-fiction works now – was to take what was known from the science of the time, extrapolate from that science, and use that imaginative leap as the basis for a suspenseful story. But because Wells was a thinker of such enormously wide interests, well-versed in history and philosophy as well as science, works like The War of the Worlds went far beyond the “scientific romances” of their time, and continue to thrill and fascinate the readers of today.
The narrator of The War of the Worlds is an unnamed writer of considerable accomplishment and wide-ranging interests – a man much like Wells, come to think – whose peaceful and contemplative life in a quiet corner of Surrey is forever changed when a cylinder, constructed by beings from another world, crashes in a nearby part of his home county, opening a crater where it fell. Wells’s narrator begins his story by recalling ruefully how ill-prepared the people of the Earth were for this event:
No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s, and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns, they were scrutinized and studied, almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. (p. 1)
It is, or course, conscious and deliberate that Wells links arrogant humankind with the microscopic organisms that were relatively new objects of discovery and interest for the scientists of that time – elsewhere in The War of the Worlds, the narrator refers to these creatures as “the humblest things that God, in His wisdom, has put upon this Earth” (p. 103). The major nations of the world – then, as now – competed for power and influence; and meanwhile, “across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this Earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment” (p. 1)
The Martians emerge from the cylinder and quickly demonstrate their hostile intent, spreading death and destruction through the power of a Heat-Ray. A full 62 years before the construction of the first laser device, Wells posited the idea of a new kind of weapon – “A beam of heat is the essence of the matter. Heat, and invisible, instead of visible light. Whatever is combustible flashes into flame at its touch; lead runs like water; it softens iron, cracks and melts glass; and when it falls upon water, incontinently that explodes into steam” (p. 15). Generations of creators of “ray-gun” books and movies owe an incalculable debt to Wells.
It quickly becomes clear that the British armed forces – while well-prepared for a possible war against an earthly enemy like, say, the German Empire – are all but helpless before the Martians and their Heat-Ray. And the destruction that the Martians wreak with their Heat-Ray is increased exponentially, once the Martians in their craters have constructed their tripods – vast war machines with which the Martians can cover territory even more quickly than the tanks that would see action 20 years later in the Great War.
The narrator is utterly shocked by his first sighting of a Martian tripod:
And this Thing I saw! How can I describe it? A monstrous tripod, higher than many houses, striding over the young pine-trees, and smashing them aside in its career; a walking engine of glittering metal, striding now across the heather; articulate ropes of steel dangling from it, and the clattering tumult of its passage mingling with the riot of the thunder. (p. 27)
In narrative terms, The War of the Worlds goes back and forth between what the narrator witnessed in Surrey and what his brother saw happening in London. Both eyewitnesses would agree that “Never before in the history of warfare had destruction been so indiscriminate and so universal” (p. 32). Indeed, while the Great War was still twenty years away, a modern reader of The War of the Worlds, contemplating Wells’s description of the Martians’ indiscriminate killing of soldiers and civilians, of peaceful cities being made the targets of military violence, might well find his or her thoughts moving from Wells’s Martians to the guns of August 1914.
Those parallels with the First World War take on additional force when one reads about how another weapon in the Martians’ arsenal is poison gas. The Martian tripods, it turns out, carry canisters that deploy a chemical weapon that the narrator refers to simply as “the black smoke”:
These canisters smashed on striking the ground – they did not explode – and incontinently disengaged an enormous volume of heavy, inky vapour, coiling and pouring upward in a huge and ebony cumulus cloud, a gaseous hill that sank and spread itself slowly over the surrounding country. And the touch of that vapour, the inhaling of its pungent wisps, was death to all that breathes. (p. 54)
Part of what impressed me, on this re-reading of The War of the Worlds, was a renewed sense of the predictive power of the book. It is not just that Wells’s novel looks ahead to topics like poison gas, or the laser, or mobile war machines that prefigure the development of tanks. A 21st-century reader might be just as impressed by Wells’s description of how the Martians bring with them a “Red Weed” – a strange form of red vegetation that grows in profusion wherever there is a water supply, and that chokes out all the Earthly vegetation around it. The term “invasive species” may not have been much in use in Wells’s time, but this aspect of The War of the Worlds certainly looks ahead to the global problem of invasive species today.
People are undone by the invasion; the truths and philosophies that they have depended on all their lives can no longer sustain them. A curate, who takes shelter with the narrator in an abandoned home after the Martians have destroyed the town of Weybridge, moans with self-pity; in response, the narrator angrily calls upon the curate to “Be a man!” and adds that “You are scared out of your wits! What good is religion if it collapses under calamity? Think of what earthquakes and floods, wars and volcanoes, have done before to men! Did you think God had exempted Weybridge? He is not an insurance agent, man” (p. 43)
The house in which the narrator and the curate have sought shelter is later struck and destroyed by a Martian cylinder, trapping them, for a time, in the ruins. Before long, the narrator gets the chance to see a Martian for himself:
They were, I now saw, the most unearthly creatures it is possible to conceive. They were huge round bodies – or, rather, heads – about four feet in diameter, each body having in front of it a face. This face had no nostrils – indeed, the Martians do not seem to have had any sense of smell – but it had a pair of very large, dark-coloured eyes, and just beneath this a kind of fleshy beak. In the back of this head or body – I scarcely know how to speak of it – was the single tight tympanic surface, since known to be anatomically an ear, though it must have been almost useless in our denser air. In a group round the mouth were sixteen slender, almost whip-like tentacles, arranged in two bunches of eight each. (p. 77)
As if the description of the Martians was not chilling enough, what we subsequently learn of their eating habits is even worse. The narrator recalls how the Martians “took the fresh, living blood of other creatures, and injected it into their own veins” (p. 78). The narrator, who saw the Martians carrying out this process, insists that he can’t even bear to describe what he saw: “Let it suffice to say, blood obtained from a still living animal, in most cases from a human being, was run directly by means of a little pipette into the recipient canal…” (p. 78) It is details like these that make The War of the Worlds a truly disturbing novel – a classic of horror as well as science fiction.
On the chance that there is someone out there who doesn’t know how the novel ends, I will take care to avoid the need for a spoiler alert. I will say only that Wells adroitly scatters clues throughout the early parts of The War of the Worlds, preparing the reader for a resolution that affirms the narrator’s declaration at one point that “By the toll of a billion deaths, man has bought his birthright of the Earth, and it is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are. For neither do men live nor die in vain” (p. 103).
Throughout The War of the Worlds, Wells’s descriptions of the Martians’ literally bloodthirsty behaviour are meant to remind the reader of humankind’s distressingly regular demonstrations of a metaphorical thirst for blood. Near the book’s beginning, the narrator, looking back on the interplanetary war, writes that “before we judge of [the Martians] too harshly, we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought”, and “not only upon animals, such as the bison and the dodo”. Citing the killing of almost all of the Indigenous people of Tasmania, “in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years” – Wells’s narrator asks implacably: “Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?” (p. 1)
And near the conclusion of The War of the Worlds, the narrator writes, more hopefully, that “Surely, if we have learnt nothing else, this war has taught us pity – pity for those witless souls that suffer our dominion” (p. 92). If the world has not yet learned that lesson, or any sort of meaningful lesson about compassion – as the grim record of the twelve decades since the publication of Wells’s novel would seem to indicate – then the blame for that failure cannot be laid at Wells’s feet. Few writers, of any era, have been more prolific in their presentation of plans for social improvement and global peace.
The War of the Worlds is, purely and simply, one of the most influential novels ever written. Orson Welles’s panic-inducing 1938 radio-broadcast version of the novel is very fine, as are the film adaptations by George Pal (in 1953) and Steven Spielberg (in 2005); but there is no substitute for returning to this singularly powerful and disturbing short novel....more
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