Pygmalion
Throughout the play “Pygmalion” by Bernard Shaw, the fundamental character of Eliza Doolittle doesn’t change. At the beginning of the play Eliza is overly materialistic, a snob, and a liar. By the end of the play these character traits are still omnipresent. Her violent temper never subsides during the play, and people never stop viewing her as a whore. When Eliza first meets Henry Higgins and Colonel Pickering, she views Pickering as a gentleman and Higgins as rude. During the course of the play her opinion of these two pivotal characters never changes. Eliza Doolittle started and ended the play as a snob and “classist”. In Act two Eliza behaves as if she doesn’t want or need the clothes Higgins is offering her. She talks as if she has closets full of furs and designer clothes. “I wouldn’t have taken them. I can buy my own clothes.”(43) When Eliza first receives a bath and new clothes she says, “I should just like to take a taxi to the corner of Tottenham Court Road and get out there and tell it to wait for me, just to put the girls in their place a bit. I wouldn’t speak to them, you know.”(62) All she has done is taken a bath and put on new clothes, and already wants to rub it in her old friends’ faces. Mrs. Pearce Detzky 2 even tells her this action would be considered snobbish. In the last scene of the play Eliza says to her father, “Youre going to let yourself down to marry that low common woman!”(123) Yet that’s just what she was a few months before. She has forgotten her former station in life and looks down upon those that are worse off than her. In Eliza’s last conversation with Higgins she says, “Freddy’s not a fool. And if he’s weak and poor and wants me, may be he’d make me happier than . . .”(120) Once again she is forgetting what she was just a few months ago. Eliza has no right to call anyone poor. Freddy might be poor to upper-class standards, but Eliza is not upper-class. The materialistic nature of Eliza is present before and after the ball. Higgins bribes Eliza to stay by saying, “You have Eliza; and in the future you shall have as many taxis as you want. You shall go up and down and round the town in a taxi every day. Think of that, Eliza.”(45) The way Eliza loves taking rides in taxis, is easily bribed by jewels, and wants to have fashionable clothes is evidence of her materialistic nature. Eliza says, “But if I’m to have fashionable clothes, I’ll wait. I should like to have some.”(63) After the ball, Eliza again demonstrates her materialistic tendencies by saying, “All I want to know is whether anything belongs to Detzky 3 me.”(103) Most people who have been insulted or suffered a wrong would leave at once without saying goodbye to anyone and with only the clothes on their back, but not Eliza.