Transformation of Eliza from a flower girl to a refined lady

Pygmalion is one of the best plays written by Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw. It is also one of the best plays in the history of English literature. The play is centered on Henry Higgins, a professor of Phonetics, who successfully turns a lower class Cockney girl Eliza Doolittle into a well-mannered girl with elevated speech.

Eliza Doolittle, a girl who earns her livelihood by selling flower, comes from a Cockney background and speaks a form of Cockney dialect which only native Londoners can understand. One day, while selling flowers at Covent Garden, she meets Henry Higgins and he makes a bet with Colonel Pickering, a fellow phonetician, that he can train this ignorant Cockney-speaking girl from the gutter to such an extent that she would pass for a duchess in an aristocratic party, something Eliza eventually achieved later in the play.

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Her transformation from a poor, illiterate girl to a fine society lady serves the base of the story in the play. By showing this transformation in Eliza, Shaw ridicules the contemporary higher class society in a subtle fashion and shows that a person coming from Eliza’s background can actually excel in higher society if he or she has some inborn talent and is given the opportunity.

The change in Eliza taking place over the course of the play is both external and internal. At the beginning of the play in ACT I, we can see a very poor, naive and ignorant girl who becomes afraid of Mr. Higgins, mistakenly assuming him a police officer by his taking notes of her speech. But this is more about ignorance, caused by her lack of education, rather than her foolishness.

Despite her lack of knowledge and proper education, we can also see a smart girl out of Eliza when she comes to Higgins’ house by a car to impress the phonetician with the ambition of learning proper English from him so that she can work in a flower shop.

Eliza’s outward transformation is first realized by the readers at a small family gathering at Mrs. Higgins’ house. Mrs. Higgins is the mother of Henry Higgins who, after some initial training of Eliza, requests his mother to allow Eliza to come and associate with the guests to see how she is responding to the speech training. Even though Eliza makes some silly mistakes regarding the substance of her speech, she shows a great deal of improvement in pronunciation.

However, we can see a completely transformed Eliza at the aristocratic gathering of an ambassador where she passes for a duchess tremendously. Her appearance, speech and mannerism are so impressive that the ambassador’s wife reckons she must be a princess, while another elderly lady says that Eliza talks like Queen Victoria.

However, the internal change in Eliza is most significant. While her transformation from a flower girl to a lady who is fit for the aristocratic world is surprising, the internal change in Eliza may be subtle, but no less important. Other characters in the play as well as the readers first come to realize this change when she reacted weirdly at the inquiry of Mr. Higgins about his sleepers. She actually felt unimportant and dejected when Mr. Higgins and Pickering enjoyed their triumph at the ambassador’s party with each other without even acknowledging Eliza’s part in the event, even though she was in the same room while they were talking, having arrived from the party.

That incident touched at the very core of her sentiment and she, perhaps for the first time, realized an identity crisis. She was no more a flower-selling girl from the gutter, but a lady with sheer beauty and manner with which she can easily earn honor and invoke respect in others for her. She became so aware of her self-esteem that she could dare to leave Mr. Higgins’ house and take shelter at his mother’s house.

Later in the play, we see Eliza’s argument with Mr. Higgins, which apparently shows that she does not want to go back to his house as a domestic help or someone who would remain content by managing his works.