Helen and Romance

Abstract

Abstract In the epigraph to this chapter, Shaw registers annoyance at those who assume Eliza will marry Higgins for two reasons. The first is the ending itself: if we consider Eliza’s self-interest and her instincts (Shaw assures us), and if we ask what she might do when faced with the choice between a lifetime of fetching Higgins’s slippers and a lifetime of Freddy fetching hers, “there can be no doubt about the answer.” Given a woman like Eliza who knows what she wants, the sequel is clear and to remove any possible doubts, Shaw spends fourteen pages describing Eliza’s choices, her marriage, her later contacts with Higgins, and the flower stand she eventually opens in Covent Garden. But there is more at stake than simply correcting the record. Shaw’s second reason has to do with what the ending implies: a hand-me-down ending can only come from the ragshop of romance. Pygmalion advertises itself as “A Romance in Five Acts,” according to the subtitle, but does so with typically Shavian irony. The mythical conceit of the title and the dramatic conceit of a play about phonetics make it clear that this is no ordinary romance, and Shaw drives the point home in his epilogue, contrasting the expectations of feeble imaginations with the calculus of benefits in real life. “Complications ensued; but they were economic, not romantic.. . . But when it comes to business, to the life that she really leads as distinguished from the life of dreams and fancies, she likes Freddy and she likes the Colonel; and she does not like Higgins and Mr Doolittle.” The stakes are high indeed. If Shaw cannot convince us of his realistic sequel, he cannot convince us that his play, like all great art (and unlike ordinary romance) is “intensely and deliberately didactic.” The proof of the play is in the ending.