60 years ago, the Changed Ending of “My Fair Lady” Failed Eliza Doolittle
Promotional poster of My Fair Lady (1964)
My Fair Lady is a great movie. Audrey Hepburn is magnificent. Rex Harrison is so deliciously irritating, and of course you can’t forget Jeremy Brett shining as he “sings” (he’s dubbed by Bill Shirley) the wonderfully classic “On the Street Where You Live.” But my feelings towards the film have long been complicated due to its treatment of one of literature’s greatest creations—Eliza Doolittle.
Eliza Doolittle is a young, poor woman who sells flowers on a street corner. After a chance meeting with brash phonetics professor Henry Higgins, she asks for diction lessons in order to procure a more “genteel” accent that will allow her to take on a role as a lady in a flower shop. Higgins takes Eliza in as part of a bet with his friend Colonel Pickering and trains her to be passed off as a duchess at an embassy ball. After months of training, Eliza does succeed in passing as a duchess, but in her success, both Higgins and Pickering overlook her to instead congratulate each other fervently. Eliza begins to realize that not only has she been underappreciated for her work, but that she is also in a tenuous social station.
© 1964 Warner Bros. Pictures
After the ball, Eliza lashes out against Higgins and leaves his house in the middle of the night. The next day, Higgins and Pickering, in distress over the missing Eliza, visit Higgins’s mother, where they find Eliza. After a confrontation, Eliza tells Higgins that she will not return. He is left heartbroken, but she changes her mind and does return after all. And how does Higgins react to this? He smugly demands she find his slippers, and the film ends to the soaring tune of “I Could Have Danced All Night,” a song that Julie Andrews once called “one of the great love songs.”
Why do I find this ending so frustrating? On its surface, it’s a perfectly fine romantic conclusion, but what bothers me is that it squashes the underlying aim of the story, which is about a woman who learns that she has value in herself. Instead, it sets the woman up to set aside her own feelings and legitimate issues with a relationship, all for the sake of love.
I’m a big fan of splashy romantic endings. However I can’t help but find My Fair Lady’s final scene uniquely disappointing, especially knowing the film’s roots. My Fair Lady was based on a Broadway musical which was based on George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion. Now, it might seem a little high and mighty to expect a film to hold its source material’s theme after so many based on’s, but it’s important to note here that almost all of My Fair Lady is directly pulled from Pygmalion and that the changes to Shaw’s original play began pretty much immediately after it was first produced.
Though Shaw’s Pygmalion ends with Higgins declaring to his mother that Eliza will be back* (though it seems clear she won’t be), the play was often altered in favor of a romantic ending. This came as a major frustration to Shaw, who wrote a postscript to the play to clarify his intention. He writes, “The rest of the story need not be shewn in action, and indeed, would hardly need telling if our imaginations were not so enfeebled by their lazy dependence on the ready-mades and reach-me-downs of the ragshop in which Romance keeps its stock of ‘happy endings’ to misfit all stories…Nevertheless, people in all directions have assumed, for no other reason that she became the heroine of a romance, that she must have married the hero of it.”
© 1964 Warner Bros. Pictures
What follows is pages and pages of what we’d now call fanfiction, as we learn not only about what happens to Eliza and Freddy (they marry and open a flower shop to varying degrees of success) but also Freddy’s sister (who only makes minor appearances in the play) as well. What does stand out is that Shaw clearly states that Eliza chooses to marry Freddy because real life is not a romance. He writes, “Eliza has no use for the foolish romantic tradition that all women love to be mastered, if not actually bullied and beaten.” Shaw’s belief that Eliza would not return to Higgins is strong, and he calls the changes that people make to his play “unbearable.” I agree.
At the end of Pygmalion, Higgins is left alone. He believes Eliza will return to him, so he is happy, but we as an audience understand that he has likely lost her, partly because of his lack of self-awareness. His characterization remains consistent in My Fair Lady. (Some of the funniest bits of the film are playing on the fact that Higgins has no self-awareness. His two big comedic songs, “A Hymn to Him” and “I’m an Ordinary Man,” are screeds at imaginary irritating women for having every single bad trait that he constantly displays.) But it is important to note that he is a fool with a certain amount of power over Eliza once he takes her “out of the gutter.” Instead of giving Eliza power of her own, he keeps Eliza in this strange middle space, one in which he has power and she does not, in which he is comfortable and she is not.
Eliza is not a fool. As she grows, she understands that she doesn’t need to live in this middle space. She even asks Higgins, before she leaves him, “What am I to come back for?” When Higgins replies, “For the fun of it,” she points out, “You may throw me out tomorrow if I don't do everything you want.” To this, he replies, “Yes. And you may walk out tomorrow if I don't do everything you want.” As if those two situations are equal. Higgins is secure in his space and wealth. For him, his decisions are “for the fun of it.” As for Eliza, with no money of her own and no ability to even earn money the way she had before (she cannot return to the corner to sell flowers, as she has the manners and accent of a lady now), her decisions are more critical.
© 1964 Warner Bros. Pictures
Shaw is extremely aware of the class and gendered issues that Eliza faces, and he makes it clear that Higgins, who has the benefit of both, completely ignores how they might affect Eliza. Throughout the play, the women in Higgins’s life (his mother Mrs. Higgins and his housekeeper Mrs. Pearce) press upon Higgins to make clear decisions on Eliza’s future. This is toned down a little in the film, but it does come up when Eliza first comes to Wimpole Street. With Mrs. Pearce’s prodding, Higgins gives the bare minimum of a response to Eliza (and much of it as a threat): “You are to stay here for the next six months learning how to speak beautifully like a lady in a florist shop. At the end of six months, you shall be taken to Buckingham Palace in a carriage, beautifully dressed. If the king finds out that you are not a lady, the police will take you to the Tower of London, where your head will be cut off as a warning to other presumptuous flower girls. But if you are not found out, you shall have a present of seven and six to start life with as a lady in a shop.”
Throughout the course of the film, Eliza takes on more of a role in the household and in Higgins’s and Pickering’s lives than a mere pupil. She arranges the calendar and household purchases, taking note of all the details that Higgins can’t be bothered to remember. If Eliza were given a clear role in the household at the beginning, the situation would not have been so complicated or socially treacherous for her. Though she becomes indispensable to Higgins by taking up many essential household tasks, she is given no official place there. There’s a structure of uncertainty placed on her that robs her of any control over her life. As she points out, Higgins can throw her out tomorrow if she doesn’t do everything he wants. This uncertainty rings powerfully as she asks Higgins after the ball who owns her clothes, she or Colonel Pickering, who had purchased them. Higgins dismisses her query as ungrateful, yet it is clear that the query is essential. If she leaves with her new clothes, will Higgins name her a thief?
When Eliza despairs of what will come to her now that the great experiment is over, and Higgins suggests that she get married off to some suitable man, Eliza tells him, “We were above that at Covent Garden…I sold flowers. I didn't sell myself. Now you've made a lady of me, and I'm not fit to sell anything else.” Higgins has displaced her, something all the women in the play seem to realize, and he can’t bring himself to care. To me, it seems clear that for Eliza to find a place once more, she must leave and set out on her own. But My Fair Lady sees it differently. The film understands that she is displaced, so it places her in the only position it can think of—as a protagonist in a romantic film. Her place may not be socially stable, per se, but she is a lover, and there is no greater reward in a romantic film than to be a lover!
The funny thing is that Shaw's postscript doesn’t argue that the relationship between Eliza and Higgins is fully platonic. Shaw points out that any woman in Eliza’s position would take a relationship with any bachelor seriously. It is that she chooses otherwise. Shaw’s Eliza deserves better than to return to that vague station where she has no power or control over her own life. She deserves better treatment than what Higgins will give her. My Fair Lady’s ending argues that romance trumps all other issues. Shaw’s Pygmalion, does not.
Pygmalion’s Eliza understands that Higgins will never be who she wants him to be, so she decides to leave instead of settling or trying to change him, as both Eliza and Higgins know that he will not change. He will not suddenly begin to act like a romantic hero, so why should Eliza be forced into the role of the romantic heroine? Why should she squash herself into the role of someone so overcome by love that she overlooks all else? According to Shaw, it is because of the audience’s “lazy dependence.” Perhaps that is true, or perhaps something more sinister is at work, an implication that, for all to end well, Eliza must not only fall in love but also fall in line. That she needs to sacrifice control over her life and the ability to steer her own ship. That she needs to bend.
After Eliza leaves, Higgins asks his mother, “What am I to do?” She responds, “Do without.” For Shaw’s story to work, for Eliza Doolittle to truly become herself, she must leave Higgins behind, and Higgins must sit with his consequences and end up alone.
Pygmalion is, at its center, a political play—one that argues that much of class is a construct, that there are gentlemen who get away with bad manners because they were born gentlemen, that there are flower girls who can be trained into the good manners of a lady, and that there are flower girls who know enough of their self-worth to know that the gentleman does not deserve her. It is Eliza’s standing up for herself that makes her come alive. If she backs down, what is the point of Pygmalion? What is the point of Eliza Doolittle?
*[It is worth noting that there are two major versions of Shaw’s Pygmalion. One earlier version ends with Mr. Higgins laughing about the possibility of Eliza marrying Freddy, though I think that ending is less poignant than the one in which the play ends on his declaration that Eliza will return.]
