Contentious Afterthoughts: Shaw’s Surprising ‘Sequel’ to His Greatest Comedy
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Pygmalion (1913) is widely regarded as George Bernard Shaw’s greatest comedy. A subversive work, it was conceived as an inversion of Ovid’s “Pygmalion and the Statue.” In Shaw’s version, his Pygmalion, phonetician Henry Higgins transforms his “statue,” flower seller Eliza Doolittle, by teaching her to speak like a duchess. Instead of marrying her overbearing “creator,” however, Eliza becomes an independent woman. The play culminates with her walking out on Higgins, vowing never to see him again. But interpreters of Pygmalion thought otherwise, and meddled with the ending to imply that the pair ultimately married. To counter this tampering, Shaw concocted a prose sequel that he appended to Pygmalion. The sequel, he declared, would explain what really happened to his characters after the play was over. Rather than preserving the integrity of his play through the sequel, however, this paper argues that Shaw’s postscript had the opposite effect: it removes all of the finely wrought ambiguity of Pygmalion’s ending by painstakingly detailing a mundane future for Eliza, robbing her of all her great promise in the play. Moreover, Eliza emerges in the sequel as a less talented individual than in the play, further disillusioning admirers of this character. Worse still, her behavior in the sequel contradicts her fierce commitment in the play to an independent life without the misogynistic Higgins, undermining both her and Shaw’s feminism, and the central theme of Pygmalion.
Abstract
Pygmalion (1913) is widely regarded as George Bernard Shaw’s greatest comedy. A subversive work, it was conceived as an inversion of Ovid’s “Pygmalion and the Statue.” In Shaw’s version, his Pygmalion, phonetician Henry Higgins transforms his “statue,” flower seller Eliza Doolittle, by teaching her to speak like a duchess. Instead of marrying her overbearing “creator,” however, Eliza becomes an independent woman. The play culminates with her walking out on Higgins, vowing never to see him again. But interpreters of Pygmalion thought otherwise, and meddled with the ending to imply that the pair ultimately married. To counter this tampering, Shaw concocted a prose sequel that he appended to Pygmalion. The sequel, he declared, would explain what really happened to his characters after the play was over. Rather than preserving the integrity of his play through the sequel, however, this paper argues that Shaw’s postscript had the opposite effect: it removes all of the finely wrought ambiguity of Pygmalion’s ending by painstakingly detailing a mundane future for Eliza, robbing her of all her great promise in the play. Moreover, Eliza emerges in the sequel as a less talented individual than in the play, further disillusioning admirers of this character. Worse still, her behavior in the sequel contradicts her fierce commitment in the play to an independent life without the misogynistic Higgins, undermining both her and Shaw’s feminism, and the central theme of Pygmalion.
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