George Bernard Shaw - Pygmalion and Three Other Plays

LIZA You dont call the like of them my friends now, I should hope. Theyve took it out of me often enough with their ridicule when they had the chance; and now I mean to get a bit of my own back. But if I’m to have fashionable clothes, I’ll wait. I should like to have some. Mrs. Pearce says youre 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 shew. Besides, I never could fancy changing into cold things on a winter night.

MRS. PEARCE [ coming back ] Now, Eliza. The new things have come for you to try on.

LIZA Ah-ow-oo-ooh! [She rushes out].

MRS. PEARCE [ following her ] Oh, dont rush about like that, girl. [ She shuts the door behind her ].

HIGGINS Pickering: we have taken on a stiff job.

PICKERING [ with conviction ] Higgins: we have.

It is Mrs. Higgins’s at-home day. Nobody has yet arrived. Her drawing-room, in a flat on Chelsea [208] Artists’ quarter in London. embankment, has three windows looking on the river; and the ceiling is not so lofty as it would be in an older house of the same pretension. The windows are open, giving access to a balcony with flowers in pots. If you stand with your face to the windows, you have the fireplace on your left and the door in the right-hand wall close to the corner nearest the windows.

Mrs. Higgins was brought up on Morris and Burne Jones; and her room, which is very unlike her son’s room in Wimpole Street, is not crowded with furniture and little tables and nicknacks. In the middle of the room there is a big ottoman; and this, with the carpet, the Morris wall-papers, and the Morris chintz window curtains and brocade covers of the ottoman and its cushions, supply all the ornament, and are much too handsome to be hidden by odds and ends of useless things. A few good oil-paintings from the exhibitions in the Grosvenor Gallery thirty years ago (the Burne Jones, not the Whistler {52} 52 8 (p. 409) Mrs. Higgins was brought up on Morris and Burne Jones; and her room ... is not crowded with furniture and little tables and nicknacks.... the Morris wall-papers, and the Morris chintz window curtains and brocade covers.... A few good oil-paintings ... (the Burne Jones, not the Whistler): English poet and artist William Morris (1834-1896), a friend of Shaw, introduced the idea of designing homes and furnishings according to aesthetic principles; he designed wallpaper, chintzes, and the like. Mrs. Higgins rejects Victorian horror vacui (“fear of empty spaces”) by not crowding her drawing room with “furniture and little tables and nicknacks”; in doing so, she proclaims her modernity. Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898) was a pre-Raphaelite painter and an associate of Morris; Mrs. Higgins’s embrace of Burne-Jones shows that her modernity stops short of Shaw’s contemporaries, for she has no paintings in the more modern manner of Whistler. side of them) are on the walls. The only landscape is a Cecil Lawson [209] English landscape painter (1851-1882), whose best-known work, “The Minister’s Garden,” was exhibited in 1878 at the Grosvenor Gallery in London. on the scale of a Rubens. There is a portrait of Mrs. Higgins as she was when she defied fashion in her youth in one of the beautiful Rossettian [210] After the English poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), who painted medieval religious and fantasy subjects. costumes which, when caricatured by people who did not understand, led to the absurdities of popular estheticism in the eighteen -seventies.

In the corner diagonally opposite the door Mrs. Higgins, now over sixty and long past taking the trouble to dress out of the fashion, sits writing at an elegantty simple writing-table with a bell button within reach of her hand. There is a Chippendale chair further baclz in the room between her and the window nearest her side. At the other side of the room, further forward, is an Elizabethan chair roughly carved in the taste of Inigo Jones. On the same side a piano in a decorated case. The corner between the fireplace and the window is occupied by a divan cushioned in Morris chintz.

It is between four and five in the afternoon.

The door is opened violently; and Higgins enters with his hat on.

MRS. HIGGINS [ dismayed ] Henry [ scolding him ]! What are you doing here to-day? It is my at-home day: [211] Particular day reserved for casual visits from acquaintances. you promised not to come . [As he bends to kiss her, she takes his hat off, and presents it to him ] .

HIGGINS Oh bother! [He throws the hat down on the table].

MRS. HIGGINS Go home at once.

HIGGINS [kissing her] I know, mother. I came on purpose.

MRS. HIGGINS But you mustnt. I’m serious, Henry. You of fend all my friends: they stop coming whenever they meet you.

HIGGINS Nonsense! I know I have no small talk; but people dont mind. [He sits on the settee].

MRS. HIGGINS Oh! dont they? Small talk indeed! What about your large talk? Really, dear, you mustnt stay.

HIGGINS I must. Ive a job for you. A phonetic job.

MRS. HIGGINS No use, dear. I’m sorry; but I cant get round your vowels; and though I like to get pretty postcards in your patent shorthand, I always have to read the copies in ordinary writing you so thoughtfully send me.

HIGGINS Well, this isnt a phonetic job.

MRS. HIGGINS You said it was.

HIGGINS Not your part of it. Ive picked up a girl.

MRS. HIGGINS Does that mean that some girl has picked you up?

HIGGINS Not at all. I dont mean a love affair.

MRS. HIGGINS What a pity!

HIGGINS Why?

MRS. HIGGINS Well, you never fall in love with anyone under forty-five. When will you discover that there are some rather nice-looking young women about?

HIGGINS Oh, I cant be bothered with young women. My idea of a loveable woman is something as like you as possible. {53} 53 9 (p. 411) “My idea of a loveable woman is something as like you as possible”: Shaw refers to Higgins as having a “mother-fixation,” and as such he must be accounted as one of the earliest literary characters created from a consciousness of the Oedipus complex (a child’s sexual attraction to the parent of the opposite sex and jealousy of the parent of the same sex), a theory developed by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). Shaw was familiar with Freud’s theories and wrote about them extensively to Gilbert Murray on March 14, 1911. I shall never get into the way of seriously liking young women: some habits lie too deep to be changed. [ Rising abruptly and walking about, jingling his money and his keys in his trouser pockets] Besides, theyre all idiots.

MRS. HIGGINS Do you know what you would do if you really loved me, Henry?

HIGGINS Oh bother! What? Marry, I suppose?

MRS. HIGGINS No. Stop fidgeting and take your hands out of your pockets. [With a gesture of despair, he obeys and sits down again]. Thats a good boy. Now tell me about the girl.

HIGGINS Shes coming to see you.

MRS. HIGGINS I dont remember asking her.

HIGGINS You didnt. I asked her. If youd known her you wouldnt have asked her.

MRS. HIGGINS Indeed! Why?

HIGGINS Well, it’s like this. Shes a common flower girl. I picked her off the kerbstone.

MRS . HIGGINS And invited her to my at-home !

HIGGINS [ rising and coming to her to coax her ] Oh, thatll be all right. Ive taught her to speak properly; and she has strict orders as to her behavior. Shes to keep to two subjects: the weather and everybody’s health — Fine day and How do you do, you know — and not to let herself go on things in general. That will be safe.