Educating Rita and The Pygmalion Effect: Gender, Class, and Adaptation Anxiety

chapter 10
Educating Rita and the Pygmalion effect: gender,

class, and adaptation anxiety
Cynthia Lucia
Eliza Doolittle – the cockney “guttersnipe” turned acceptable bourgeois

parlor guest in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (1912–1913) – speaks
words to her tutor that continue to resonate powerfully through similar
narratives of transformation:
You told me, you know, that when a child is brought to a foreign country, it
picks up the language in a few weeks, and forgets its own. Well, I am a child
in your country. I have forgotten my own language, and can speak nothing
but yours.1
Echoing Eliza’s words, Rita (Susan) White – a twenty-six-year-old women’s
hairdresser turned part-time student of literature in Willy Russell’s 1980
play Educating Rita – expresses her own profound sense of displacement:
I’m a freak. I can’t talk to the people I live with any more. An’ I can’t talk to
the likes of them on Saturday [her tutor’s university colleagues] or them out
there [students on the campus lawn] because I can’t learn the language. I’m
an alien.2
While telling the same general story of social and cultural elevation through
education, these two plays, written decades apart, exhibit several note-
worthy differences, among the most significant being that Eliza speaks of
her displacement after her transformation is completed, raising serious
questions about the motives and obligations of her tutor, Henry Higgins,
and about the complex interplay between internal, “authentic” traits and
the details of social performance that constitute identity. Rita experiences
feelings of displacement at the mid-point of her progress – a point at which
she is doubly displaced, yet retains faith in the process that remains vividly
alive and ahead of her. She asserts, “I want to change” (Illustration 10.1), and
proceeds to instruct her tutor, Frank Bryant, in how best to teach her to
write a “proper” literary essay: “you’ve just gorra keep tellin’ me an’ then I’ll
start to take it in; y’see, with me you’ve got to be dead firm . . . If I do
192
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Toledo, on 05 Dec 2019 at 21:32:07, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of
use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511734311.011
Educating Rita and the Pygmalion effect 193
10.1 Rita (Julie Walters) on her first visit to Frank’s office, dressed in a style and with a
manner she will soon eagerly abandon.
somethin’ that’s crap, I don’t want pity, you just tell me, that’s crap.”3
Despite the differences, both works “speak to the same negotiation between
individual and society, self and other,” Laura Grindstaff explains, referenc-
ing several other adaptations of Shaw’s play, and concludes that “If the
Pygmalion impulse is to remake the woman into something other than she
was, it also prompts a complicated chain of accommodation and resistance
to this desire.”4
Both Eliza and Rita initiate and embrace the idea of change – Eliza with
the goal of speaking proper English so that she can find work in a flower
shop rather than selling flowers on the streets and struggling to survive in
her hand-to-mouth existence; Rita with the goal of learning “everything,” of
learning “how to see”5 and understand opera, literature, ballet. Both women
seek freedom and perceive that gaining admittance to higher worlds of
knowledge will provide greater comfort, security, and choice. Rita explains
that the women who come into the beauty parlor mistakenly believe “they
will walk out an hour later as a different person” and asserts that “if you
wanna change y’ have to do it from the inside, don’t y’? . . . like I’m . . . tryin’
to do.”6 And although the focus on improving her speech and demeanor
would suggest that Eliza’s transformation is centered on the external, Shaw
contends that internal change is an inevitable consequence – with profound
implications his character Higgins refuses to recognize. Vicki R. Kennell
points out that beyond the changes in Eliza’s linguistics and physical
bearing wrought by Higgins, “Eliza herself changes her psychological and
philosophical selves, largely through the auspices of her sociological self
interacting with others such as Mrs. Higgins [Henry’s kindly, perceptive
mother] and Colonel Pickering [Henry’s well-mannered colleague].”7 From
194 CYNTHIA LUCIA
the outset in Educating Rita, Frank does understand the implications of

change. Unlike Henry, who embraces the prospect of re-making Eliza,
Frank only reluctantly agrees to transform Rita: “But don’t you see, if
you’re going to write this sort of thing – to pass examinations, you’re
going to have to suppress . . . perhaps even abandon your uniqueness. I’m
going to have to change you.”8 Frank halfheartedly enables Rita to adopt
and employ the language of academia, while Henry wholeheartedly enables
Eliza to speak and be perceived as a duchess in the highest social circles. The
freedom through transformation to which both women aspire, as guided by
their male tutors, is “doubly fraught with contradiction,” as Grindstaff in
reference to other Pygmalion adaptations points out, for although both
women and men must embrace the “Law of the Father” in order to “gain
cultural authority,” in contrast to men, “women are not the primary authors
of these discourses.”9 Gender thus further complicates issues of social class
and status. This is something Shaw also explores through the character of
Eliza’s father, Mr. Doolittle, who has no need for training in speech and
deportment in order to “become extremely popular in the smartest society
by a social talent which triumphed over every prejudice and every disad-
vantage,” as Shaw explains in the Sequel to his play.10
The primary interest of this chapter will rest on Educating Rita, as
adapted from Russell’s stage play to screen, and on the ways in which
cinematic form, structure, and technique lend fertility to the stage play, to
borrow Dudley Andrew’s concept.11 But I shall also spend significant time
discussing Shaw’s Pygmalion and its several screen adaptations, given its
strong influence on both versions of Educating Rita. Shaw’s Pygmalion itself
is rooted, though ironically so, in the centuries-old Pygmalion myth. Ovid’s
Pygmalion, with his desire to breathe life into a statue of the ideal female
figure he has sculpted, has been the direct or indirect subject of numerous
literary, filmic, balletic, musical, and artistic works and, as such, is one of the
most frequently adapted of subjects, with Shaw’s play among the most
interesting adaptations.12
Educating the master: lessons in gender, class, and identity

Although a less-layered work than Shaw’s Pygmalion, Educating Rita never-
theless raises a number of its own interesting questions, particularly con-
cerning the education not only of Rita but also of her tutor Frank. Both in
the play and in the film (directed by Lewis Gilbert in 1983), Frank – a far less
self-assured teacher than Henry Higgins – resists, with varying degrees of
success, the male fantasy of dominance and possession underlying the
Pygmalion myth, with its “idealised markers of femininity and the processes
of objectification and anxiety that underpin the male lover’s fetishistic
efforts to obtain and subsequently contain the ideal woman.”13 As a way
of warning her off when she first appears in his office, Frank says to Rita,
“I’m really an appalling teacher . . . Everything I know – and you must listen
to this – is that I know absolutely nothing”14 and “eventually you’ll find
there’s less to me than meets the eye.”15 The fact that playwright Willy
Russell also wrote the screenplay perhaps accounts for the relatively straight-
forward adaptation insofar as content and theme are concerned. Yet
Russell’s screenplay does significantly “open” the two-character, single-
setting stage play, inventing new characters and spanning varied locations.
Julie Walters, who originated the title role on stage, stars in the film
opposite Michael Caine as the literature professor assigned to be her tutor
in the “Open University” program tailored to older, “non-traditional”
students. Filmed entirely in Dublin, the setting is only vaguely defined, as
it is in the play, with the location described as “the north of England.”16
The interconnecting themes of ambition and displacement in both the
play and screen adaptation of Educating Rita intersect strongly with issues of
independence and choice, ideas that were especially resonant in the early
1980s. At that time, the strength of second-wave feminism had just passed its
peak and was beginning to decline in the US, especially with the election of
Ronald Reagan to the presidency in 1981, the failure of the Equal Rights
Amendment to gain ratification in 1982, and the increasing influence of
New Right rhetoric on a range of social issues, including “family values” and
women’s reproductive rights. As a UK production filmed when a new wave
of conservatism was washing over Great Britain, as well, with Prime
Minister Margaret Thatcher in office, Educating Rita thoughtfully mediates
its particular moment of ideological struggle and transition. The film gives
expression to feminist values of the day, while offering something of an elegy
to depleted masculinity. At the same time, however, Frank’s crisis is rooted
in his own failings (Illustration 10.2) and in his particular way of under-
standing them rather than in any threat that female independence poses.17
Yet Frank does, indeed, feel threatened as Rita becomes more self-assured
in her thinking, writing, and social interaction with other students. Her
growing independence, however, is never shown to be the cause of his larger
crisis, and the film itself supports this – she is not made to pay for making it
on her own. Expressing his insecurity as Rita gains confidence and knowl-
edge, Frank impetuously asks, “Is there much point in working towards an
examination if you’re going to fall in love and set off for the South of
[France],”18 aware that one of his male students takes an interest in Rita.
196 CYNTHIA LUCIA
10.2 Frank (Michael Caine) is drunk as he begins to lecture, a signal event on his downward
slide from professional respectability.
When Rita eventually proclaims in both the play and the film, “I can do
without you,” echoing Eliza’s words to Higgins, Frank’s limited under-
standing of her journey, like that of Higgins, is rooted in the insularity of
middle-class privilege:
rita: I’m educated, I’ve got what you have an’ y’ don’t like it because you’d rather
see me as the peasant I once was; you’re like the rest of them – you like to keep
your natives thick, because that way they still look charming and delightful. I
don’t need you . . . I know what clothes to wear, what wine to buy, what plays
to see, what papers and books to read. I can do without you.
frank: Is that all you wanted? Have you come all this way for so very, very little?
rita: Oh, it’s little to you, isn’t it? It’s little to you who squanders every oppor-
tunity and mocks and takes it for granted.19
Like Higgins in his tutelage of Eliza, Frank wishes to lay claim to Rita – not,
however, as a possession he has formed and sculpted, but rather as the
person she was before her transformation, ruefully casting himself as a kind
of Frankenstein.20 Although Frank’s motives appear less self-serving, and he
is, by and large, a more sympathetic character than Higgins, Rita makes her
point that his infatuation with her “thick native” self bolsters his own fragile
sense of empowerment, allowing him to take pleasure in and more easily
colonize her “charming and delightful” performance of working-class iden-
tity. And in the film Rita does consciously “perform” – whether in her often
comic entrances involving the stuck doorknob of Frank’s office, her com-
pulsive need to stand and inspect everything in the room, or her movement
always toward the window, an image that references the woman’s film of
earlier decades in displaying a freedom so clearly visible and near yet
ultimately unobtainable in a world governed by patriarchal imperatives.
Her typically tart rejoinders, she admits, are an act: “I just take the piss
because I’m not, y’know, confident. But I want to be.”21 Clearly, Russell
complicates issues of gender with those of social class; whereas Shaw, one
might argue, complicates issues of social class with those of gender.
Shaw’s Pygmalion appeared when first-wave feminism was gathering
strength, and offers a critique of unreconstructed masculinity resonant
with that movement. Unlike Frank Bryant, who is able to acknowledge,
if not correct, his flaws, weaknesses, and shortsightedness, the prickly
Henry Higgins refuses to question his methods or admit to self-doubt.
Although droll and amusing, Higgins, through much of the play, remains
something of a self-involved adolescent, but one who insists upon his
“rightful” exertion of adult male privilege. He appears compassionless to
Eliza’s plight and proprietary in his “project” of remaking her: “You will
jolly well see whether she has an idea that I haven’t put into her head or a
word that I haven’t put into her mouth . . . I have created this thing out of
the squashed cabbage leaves of Covent Garden.”22 And while his blunt
words are frequently the source of humor, they nevertheless are designed
to reveal his limited understanding of Eliza. Only after his mother repri-
mands him and Eliza stands firmly up to him – as Rita does to Frank – is
Henry able to admit that she is more than a project or an experiment,
that “I shall miss you, Eliza. I have learnt something from your idiotic
notions: I confess that humbly and gratefully.”23 His language, of course,
takes everything away at the very moment he appears to give her credit,
betraying an unwavering sense of masculine superiority, albeit amusing in
the sexist attitudes Shaw so skillfully exposes. While Higgins continually
expresses disdain for class distinctions, he nevertheless adheres strictly to
gender distinctions. “Women upset everything,” he says earlier to Colonel
Pickering.24
Blind to the meaning and impact of gender as it intersects with class,
insofar as women and their lives in the world are concerned, Higgins, cold
and clueless, replies to Eliza’s profound sense of displacement now that she
has been accepted as a lady and the experiment has ended: “How the devil
do I know what’s to become of you?”25 When she asks in panic, “What am
I fit for? What have you left me fit for? Where am I to go? What am I to
do?,”26 he replies:
[as if condescending to a trivial subject out of pure kindness]. I shouldn’t bother
about that if I were you. I should imagine you won’t have much difficulty in
settling yourself somewhere or other, though I hadn’t quite realized that you
were going away . . . You might marry you know . . . I daresay my mother
could find some chap or other who would do very well.27
198 CYNTHIA LUCIA
Incapable of comprehending the meaning of her remark that equates

middle-class marriage, as he presents it, with prostitution (“We were
above that at the corner of Tottenham Court Road . . . I sold flowers.
I didn’t sell myself. Now you’ve made a lady of me, I’m not fit to sell
anything else” [257]), Henry offhandedly replies, “Tosh, Eliza. Don’t insult
human relations by dragging all this cant about buying and selling into it.
You needn’t marry the fellow if you don’t like him.”28
Deeply wounded, Eliza must come to terms with her new identity,
having internalized what her transformation means in human terms, in
terms of self-respect and respect accorded by others. Addressing her words
to Colonel Pickering, she says:
Your calling me Miss Doolittle that day when I first came to Wimpole
Street . . . was the beginning of self-respect for me . . . You see, really and
truly, apart from the things anyone can pick up (the dressing and the proper
way of speaking, and so on), the difference between a lady and a flower girl is
not how she behaves, but how she’s treated. I shall always be a flower girl to
Professor Higgins, because he always treats me as a flower girl, and always
will; but I know I can be a lady to you, because you always treat me as a lady
and always will.29
Decades later, Rita echoes Eliza’s understanding that identity is a complex

amalgam of one’s ability to “perform” according to social conventions that
are continually, if subtly, shifting; and of one’s perception of self that is
both shaped by and gives shape to external factors that feed back to inform
it (Illustration 10.3).30 Rita recognizes this most clearly in the way her
mere desire to change has redefined her relationship to her husband
10.3 Rita with her husband and in-laws at the “local” on the night she discovers she has no
voice to join in their song.
Denny, who feels threatened by her studies and her resistance, in the face
of his insistence, to have a child. In the screen adaptation, Denny’s
frustration is fueled by Rita’s father, who berates her for her lack of
interest in motherhood at the poignant moment of her younger, already
pregnant sister’s wedding. Although her father is shown as a rigidly
inflexible working-class patriarch, Denny is depicted, rather, as confused
about the force of a change he never anticipated or imagined. In both the
play and the film Rita acknowledges the complicated ways in which
identity is formed and re-formed:
I see him lookin’ at me sometimes, an’ I know what he’s thinking; he’s
wonderin’ where the girl he married has gone to. He even brings me
presents sometimes, hopin’ that the presents will make her come back.
But she can’t because she’s gone, an’ I’ve taken her place . . . I told him I’d
only have a baby when I had a choice. But he doesn’t understand. He thinks
we’ve got choice because we can go into a pub that sells eight different kinds
of lager.31
With his superior attitude of paternalism, as a “confirmed bachelor” who
rejects women (other than his mother) as “idiots,” Henry in Pygmalion is
certainly as sexist as Rita’s working-class father and husband. But in cleverly
donning the masquerade of the enlightened egalitarian, he effectively shuts
down (for himself) any need to consider gender. When Eliza challenges his
rudeness of manner toward her, he responds:
The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any
other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human
souls: in short, behaving as if you were in Heaven, where there are no third-
class carriages, and one soul is as good as another . . . the question is not
whether I treat you rudely, but whether you ever heard me treat anyone else
better.32
Eliza’s retort in calling him a “born preacher” has the effect of exposing his
myopic vision and a degree of hypocrisy, both in his having shifted the
subject away from the personal and in his larger project, centered entirely on
her speech and manners – all with an acute awareness of class distinction.
When she proclaims, “If I can’t have kindness, I’ll have independence,”
Higgins’s retort rings rather hollow: “That’s middle class blasphemy. We
are all dependent one on another.”33
Frank, likewise, is shown to be as willfully blind to Rita’s struggle in the
context of social class as Henry is to Eliza’s struggle in the context of gender
in a patriarchal world. When Frank has invited Rita to a dinner party at his
home, she looks in from the outside unable to enter, thinking that she is
200 CYNTHIA LUCIA
wearing the wrong clothes, had bought the wrong wine, and would have
nothing of substance to say. This moment prompts her deeply held feelings
of displacement quoted at the beginning of this chapter. Later, Frank
casually remarks, “You weren’t expected to dress up or buy wine,” to
which she angrily replies: “If you go out to dinner, don’t you dress up?
Don’t you take wine?” The dialogue that ensues exposes the insularity of
Frank’s experience, much as Henry’s insularity is exposed in Pygmalion:
frank: Why couldn’t you relax? It wasn’t a fancy party. You could have come as
yourself. Don’t you realize how people would have seen you if you’d just – just
breezed in? They would have seen someone who’s funny, delightful,
charming. . .
rita: But I don’t want to be charming and delightful; funny, what’s funny?
I don’t want to be funny. I wanna talk seriously with the rest of you . . . I
don’t want to be myself. Me? What’s me? Some stupid woman that gives us
all a laugh because she thinks she can learn, because she thinks one day she’ll
be like the rest of them, talking seriously, confidently, with knowledge, live a
civilized life. Well, she can’t be like that really but bring her because she’s
good for a laugh.34
Trying to enlighten Frank, while at the same time explaining her desire to
learn, Rita speaks of the absence of culture in her working-class world,
saying “I don’t see any culture; I just see everyone pissed or stoned tryin’ to
find their way from one empty day to the next.”35 She adds that she would
never express this to her friends because in their pride they proclaim they do
possess a culture, centered on “the pub quiz” and “singin’ karaoke.” When
Frank proposes that this may be what they want, what makes them happy,
Rita interrupts: “But they don’t want that! There is no contentment.
Because there’s no meanin’ left.” She compares the consumerist present
with the more difficult past, observing that when people talk about years of
struggle during the war, for instance, “their eyes light up . . . because there
was some meanin’ then. But . . . now that most of them have got some kind
of a house an’ there is food an’ money around, they’re better off, but honest,
they know they’ve got nothin’ as well – because all the meanin’s gone.”36
Frank does not fantasize a classless society as Henry does but nevertheless
discounts the implications of class difference; Henry dismisses the implica-
tions of women’s struggles, experiences, and perceptions as possibly differ-
ent from his own. On these subjects and with differing degrees of success, it
is up to Eliza and Rita to tutor their tutors.
Pygmalion in Ovid’s Metamorphoses “loathing their lascivious Life, /
Abhorred all Womankind, but most a Wife: / So single chose to live, and
shunned to wed,”37 and Henry Higgins, as a self-proclaimed “confirmed
bachelor,” likewise expresses his discomfort with, if not disdain for
women (“they’re all idiots”). Frank, on the other hand, turns his hatred
inward, thus distancing himself from genuine emotional commitment
and engagement, just as Henry’s superior attitude does. By exposing
Frank’s core of raw vulnerability, Russell evokes sympathy for Frank – a
less complicated, less ambivalent sympathy than Shaw evokes in Henry.
Frank is as self-absorbed in his drinking as Henry is in his elocution
technology: “the great thing about the booze is that one is never
bored when drinking. Or boring for that matter; the booze has this
marvelous capacity for making one believe that underneath all the
talk one is actually saying something.”38 He is burdened by his own failure
as a poet and his failed relationships with women – we only hear
about the wife who divorced him, but in the screen adaptation we do
meet Julia, the former student and literature professor with whom he now
unhappily lives. Frank’s self-loathing, at the same time, morphs into a
performative self-pity that he sometimes uses to manipulate Rita’s (and
others’) sympathies. In his discussion of tragedy vs. the tragic (presented
in dialogue with Rita in the play and a classroom lecture in the film), one
senses Frank’s secretly and perhaps subconsciously casting himself as a
tragic hero: “tragedy is something that is absolutely inevitable, pre-
ordained almost.” In discussing Macbeth, he may well be talking about
himself: “He’s warned . . . constantly warned. But he can’t go back . . .
with every step he’s spinning one more piece of thread which will
eventually make up the network of his own tragedy.”39 This vision allows
him to abnegate responsibility for the need to change. In describing his
relationship with Julia he says, “She’s very caring, very tolerant, admires
me enormously and spends a good deal of time with her head in the
oven.”40 While his self-deprecating humor is engaging, his “tragic”
course, paradoxically, is also his means of gaining control – whether
over the university administration that, as he says, “didn’t tell me to
stop drinking, they told me to stop displaying the signs”41 or to some
degree over Rita, with whom he never becomes romantically involved but
to whom he modestly, often in the guise of gentle humor, expresses his
affection: “If it was up to me, what I’d like to do is take you by the hand
and run out of this room forever . . . there are a thousand things I’d rather
do than teach – most of them with you, young woman.” When he asks,
“Oh Rita! Why didn’t you walk in here twenty years ago,” after her comic
quip (“Because I don’t think they would have accepted me at the age of
six”), Rita plainly states the incontrovertible truth: “It’s now – you’re
there an’ I’m here.”42
202 CYNTHIA LUCIA
Masculine dominance, female independence,

and adaptation/performance anxiety
Rita’s assertion of independence at the end of the play and the film –
refusing Frank’s offer to accompany him on a two-year teaching stint in
Australia (an exile imposed by the university as punishment for his overt,
embarrassing display of drunkenness in a lecture hall) – is in fact, not only
an expression of its time, in line with second-wave feminism as many critics
have pointed out, but also very likely the most faithful rendering of Shaw’s
conclusion to Pygmalion produced up to that time – whether in film or on
the stage, and whether during Shaw’s lifetime or thereafter. Shaw’s original
1912–1913 ending of the play has Eliza asserting her independence from
her teacher with unambiguous resolve, though not without wounded feel-
ings. The play remains open-ended insofar as her future is concerned. Rita,
likewise, expresses her need for the fundamental freedom to choose, as she
says in response to Frank’s offer at the end of the play: “I might go to France.
I might go to me mother’s. I might even have a baby. I dunno. I’ll make a
decision. I’ll choose, I dunno.”43 The play ends with Rita, herself, now
playing Pygmalion, promising to “take ten years off” Frank’s appearance by
giving him a proper haircut. Although Rita also cuts Frank’s hair in the film,
the final scene is set at the airport, where she sees him off to Australia. While
certainly we don’t know what she will choose, we do know that a life with
Frank will not be among those choices. The similarly unresolved question of
Eliza’s future prompted various stage and film adapters, whether directors or
actors, either to imply or unambiguously declare that Eliza would, indeed,
return to Higgins – a point on which Educating Rita intervenes most
decidedly on Shaw’s behalf.
Although Higgins appears blindly secure in his masculinity, it would
seem that many male members of the theatrical (and later the film) estab-
lishment experienced some sense of crisis in dealing with Eliza’s independ-
ence. In various ways, they tempered (or completely undermined) Eliza’s
choice, further undermining the play’s provocative ambiguity. As a result,
Shaw felt compelled to write a prose “Sequel” to the play in 1916. Unlike
Ovid’s Pygmalion, who marries and lives happily with his now animate
sculpture Galatea – “a Maid, so fair, / As Nature could not with his Art
compare”44 – Eliza, Shaw states explicitly in the Sequel, does not marry the
supremely smug Higgins, who is so mistakenly confident in assuming he
holds Pygmalion-like power over her. After their verbal duel that takes place
in his mother’s home, Higgins, in Shaw’s original 1912–1913 ending, orders
Eliza to buy a few groceries and to pick him up a pair of gloves and a tie on
her way back to his home, where she has lived for months since his tutelage
began. Eliza “disdainfully” “sweeps out,” according to stage directions, now
ordering him, “Buy them yourself.” When Higgins’s mother offers to buy
them, Higgins “sunnily” utters the last words of the play: “Oh don’t bother.
She’ll buy em all right enough. Goodbye.” Stage directions tell us that after
kissing his mother, “Higgins, left alone, rattles his cash in his pocket; chuckles;
and disports himself in a highly self-satisfied manner.”45 The “‘richly sugges-
tive’” ending, as L. W. Conolly quotes Shaw’s biographer A. M. Gibbs as
having termed it,46 was deeply unsettling, it would seem, to actor Herbert
Beerbohm Tree, who originated the role of Henry. In his April 1914
performance, he approached Eliza “like a bereaved Romeo” and, most
famously on July 15, 1914 – the 100th performance – threw flowers toward
Eliza as she exited the stage.47 Tree’s actions, of course, had the effect of
“sabotaging . . . Shaw’s intentions” that otherwise would have given rise to
“interesting talking points for the audience as they leave the theatre,” as
Conolly explains: “Is Higgins’s self-satisfied confidence that Eliza will
return justified? And if she does return, what will her relationship with
Higgins be? Does Eliza’s imperious exit indicate emancipation from her
teacher and a new life independent of him?”48
In his “Sequel,” Shaw’s frustrated comments seem directed toward stage
artists, readers, and audiences:
The rest of the story need not be shewn in action, and indeed, would hardly
need telling if our imaginations were not so enfeebled by their lazy depend-
ence on the ready-mades and reach-me-downs of the ragshop in which
Romance keeps its stock of “happy endings” to misfit all stories.
Eliza, in telling Higgins she would not marry him if he asked her, was not
coquetting: she was announcing a well-considered decision.49
Shaw’s statement reflects his admiration for Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, which
he reviewed both in 1889 and 1897, and which is often cited as a significant
source for Pygmalion.50 In the introductory essay to his edition of
Pygmalion, Conolly quotes Shaw’s 1897 review on Nora’s leaving her hus-
band as “‘an impulse of duty to herself,’” describing her slam of the door as
“‘the end of a chapter of human history . . . more momentous than the
cannon of Waterloo or Sedan.’”51 The alterations in performance of
Pygmalion thus truly dismayed him.
In the Sequel, Shaw goes on to explain that Eliza’s decision, like that of
any woman in the early twentieth century, would “depend a good deal on
whether she is really free to choose; and that, again, will depend on her age
and income.”52 Once again, in Educating Rita Russell adopts not only
204 CYNTHIA LUCIA
Shaw’s theme but also his prescient language, which was the language of
contemporaneous second-wave feminism, as well. Over the course of some
fifteen pages, Shaw provides a thorough analysis of those factors defining
freedom of choice relative to Eliza and to the other characters as they operate
within larger social and class contexts. Beneath “age and income” also lie the
freedoms and limitations of gender – a factor that tacitly informs all of
Shaw’s arguments. Eliza, Shaw explains, will marry Freddy Eynsford Hill, a
young man whose mother is a friend of Mrs. Higgins, at whose home
Freddy first meets and is smitten with Eliza during a “test-run” Higgins
orchestrates, introducing his newly tutored and sculpted Eliza into drawing-
room culture. Freddy, Shaw explains, is much nearer Eliza’s age than is
Higgins:
he is a gentleman . . . and speaks like one . . . and is not her master, nor ever
likely to dominate her in spite of his advantage of social standing. Eliza has
no use for the foolish romantic tradition that all women love to be mastered,
if not bullied and beaten.53
Some feminist critics have taken exception to the Sequel, in which Shaw
presents Eliza as less intelligent and talented than in the play and has her
remain financially dependent on Colonel Pickering when she and Freddy at
first struggle to make a go of their flower shop – all of which seem to
diminish their complete independence.54 It is important to note, however,
that Shaw is acknowledging the same social and economic factors that
would likely have reduced the opportunities for any woman striking out
on her own in that era (and factors that Henry Higgins chooses to ignore).55
At the same time, however, the critics are correct in pointing out that Shaw
frames Eliza’s choices in contingency to the men who surround her –
whether Freddy, who has class standing but no money or practical work-
place skills; Higgins, who either is indifferent or who feigns it, while
simultaneously claiming his “ownership” of Eliza (“Let her find out how
she can get on without us. She will relapse into the gutter in three weeks
without me at her elbow”56 and later when Eliza announces she will marry
Freddy, “I’m not going to have my masterpiece thrown away on Freddy”57);
the Colonel, who offers kindness and financial assistance; or Eliza’s father –
“formerly a dustman” who, through his native wit, has “shot up at once into
the highest circles . . . [but] absolutely refused to add the last straw to his
burden by contributing to Eliza’s support,” as Shaw explains in the Sequel.58
The Sequel, of course, was not intended for performance, prompting
Shaw once again to revisit the play’s ending at least twice, according to
Conolly. For a 1920 London production, Shaw has Higgins watch from his
mother’s balcony, as Eliza exits onto the street. He returns “‘triumphantly’”
and says simply “‘Galatea!’” “Shaw believed that this would show that ‘the
statue had come to life at last,’” with Eliza asserting her independence as a
human being. As Conolly points out, however, it also “implies at least the
possibility that the play follows the myth and that just as Pygmalion marries
Galatea so Higgins marries Eliza.”59 In a 1939 published version of the play,
Shaw made yet another change – Eliza comments on the size and style of
gloves Higgins should have and says that she has already spoken to his
housekeeper about ordering the ham,60 thus asserting her own propriety, it
would seem, over Higgins, and implying, at least, that she remains in
charge. (Rita’s subjecting Frank to a haircut has something of the same
effect.) In this version, before Eliza determinedly exits rather than saying,
“Buy them yourself,” she says, “What you are to do without me I cannot
imagine,”61 paraphrasing Higgins’s earlier words about her and indirectly, it
would seem, expressing a dimension of her own desire. Mrs. Higgins, rather
than offering to shop for the items her son has requested, instead speaks
about Eliza. Shaw retains her first line from the original dialogue, but then
adds another line concerning a possible romance between Eliza and
Pickering:
mrs. higgins: I’m afraid you’ve spoilt that girl, Henry. I should be uneasy
about you and her if she were less fond of Colonel Pickering.
higgins: Pickering! Nonsense: she’s going to marry Freddy. Ha ha! Freddy!
Freddy!! Ha hahahaha!!!!!
[He roars with laughter as the play ends]62
This version is far more interesting in its ambiguity that runs in both
directions.
The 1938 screen adaptation, with Shaw as screenwriter, was also subject to
revised endings, first by Shaw, then by others. In a 1934 version of the
screenplay, Shaw places Higgins on the balcony of his mother’s home,
looking down on Eliza and Freddy kissing: “Higgins shakes his fist at the
couple while Eliza ‘cocks a snoot’ in response and Freddy ‘takes off his hat to
HIGGINS in the Chaplin manner.’” This, it would seem, is unambiguous in
terms of Eliza’s immediate action but rather more ambiguous in terms of
whether someone like Freddy could possibly make her happy. Shaw’s
revised 1938 screenplay shows “‘a vision of the future,’” with Eliza and
Freddy running their successful flower/green-grocer shop, as Shaw describes
their business in the 1916 Sequel.63 The film’s co-directors, Anthony
Asquith and Leslie Howard (who also played Higgins), along with producer
Gabriel Pascal, surreptitiously changed this ending for a new one that
206 CYNTHIA LUCIA
“shows not the married independent business woman that Shaw wanted,
but a subservient Eliza returning to Higgins’s home,” an ending, according
to Conolly, that Shaw saw for the first time just two days before the film’s
premiere.64 The 2005 Criterion Collection DVD version of the 1938 film
has Higgins watch as Eliza gets into a car with Freddy. He runs down into
the street, both frantically and angrily – betraying genuine concern beneath
his façade of indifference. He walks the streets purposefully, yet with some
degree of humility as if to follow them, with a dissolve implying that he has
traveled quite a distance before entering his Wimpole Street home and, on
doing so, immediately smashes his collection of gramophone records on
which he recorded Eliza’s voice during their elocution lessons. One disk
remains on the gramophone, however, and Henry’s jacket accidentally
snags the switch. Eliza’s untutored cockney voice – recorded during their
very first session when she protests that she is not as dirty as he accuses her of
being – fills the room: “I washed my face and hands before I come, I did.”
Higgins appears distraught and defeated when he hears her voice, only to be
surprised (as we are also) to hear her voice again, repeating the same words
without the cockney inflection. Having just entered the room, Eliza
(Wendy Hiller) stands at the door as the camera tracks into a close-up,
capturing her soft, affectionate eyes as she gazes at Henry. A cut to Leslie
Howard as Higgins registers his momentary relief, followed by a conscious
pulling back of emotion and an assertion of control. The film ends as he
turns his back to Eliza and the camera, leans back in his chair, tips his hat
down over his eyes, and asks with supreme self-assurance, “Where the devil
are my slippers, Eliza?” – the final words of the film, as romantic music
swells. While Henry’s arrogance is unsettling and potentially exposes his
character to critical appraisal as Shaw’s play does, Eliza’s compliance – stated
simply in her presence – has the effect of supporting his “rightful” position
of dominance.
George Cukor directed My Fair Lady, an American musical version of
Shaw’s play, itself adapted from the Broadway musical that premiered in
1956. The film adaptation appeared in 1964 – just as movement politics
would give birth to second-wave feminism and at the point when the male-
dominated Hollywood studio system, as it had operated for decades, was
itself in crisis and undergoing radical transition, factors that directly or
indirectly may have shaped approaches to the adaptation. This adaptation,
like the 1938 film, confirms the “rightful” position of Henry Higgins (Rex
Harrison) as “master” of Eliza Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn), though
Harrison’s Henry is rather more repentant than Howard’s was. Here, on
his way home after Eliza has gone off with Freddy, he sings in melancholy
tones, “I’ve grown accustomed to her face,” a line from Shaw’s play
that the musical team of Alan Jay Lerner, as lyricist, and Frederick
Loewe, as composer, have greatly elaborated upon with the effect of
more fully humanizing Henry (“Her joys, her woes, her highs and her
lows, are second nature to me now”), thus inviting the audience to
sympathize with his sense of loss and (modest) contrition. At the same
time, however, the lyrics have him angrily speculate upon her marriage to
Freddy (with snippets borrowed from Shaw’s Sequel). He confidently
concludes (unlike in Shaw’s Sequel) that she’ll be knocking on his door
in only a year or so, and he “shall never take her back,” until he once again
faces the fact that her every word, gesture, and movement are now inex-
tricably part of him – so that in the process of transforming her, he also has
been transformed.
As he enters his house, long shot framing emphasizes his isolation and the
emptiness now that she is gone. He smashes no records as his character in
the 1938 film had, and he consciously, rather than accidentally, turns on the
phonograph replaying their first conversation. The camera slowly tracks
toward him as he sits pensively, clearly distraught. In this version, his back is
to the door, as a cut reveals Eliza’s entrance before Henry is aware of her
presence. She lifts the needle from the phonograph and, this time adopting
her former cockney dialect, repeats, “I washed my face and hands before
I come, I did.” With his back still toward Eliza, Henry says her name, softly,
expectantly. With broader gestures perhaps conveying a degree of self-
conscious parody to temper the display of arrogance that informed Leslie
Howard’s performance, Rex Harrison slouches in his chair, pushes his
hat down over his eyes, and speaks the same final words, asking for his
slippers. In this version – with the camera positioned in front of Henry – we
see Harrison’s “performance” as just that. Howard, by contrast, initially
faces Eliza, and they exchange glances before he turns away from her (and
from us) and requests his slippers. Howard’s turning away in Pygmalion
also, to some extent, draws reflexive attention to his “performance” as male
and (therefore) as master. In never having Higgins turn to face Eliza while
allowing him to face us, My Fair Lady simultaneously humanizes him,
stressing his vulnerability as the earlier song had, yet places the reins of
power just as unambiguously in his hands – through the “control” he
exhibits in his performance.
The expression of masculine power in Howard’s performance is more
coldly depersonalized with the close-up of his turned head and hat filling the
frame, an image that lends visual weight to his earlier words in response to
Eliza’s request for “a little kindness”:
208 CYNTHIA LUCIA
If you can’t stand the coldness of my sort of life, and the strain of it, go back
to the gutter. Oh it’s a fine life, the life of the gutter. It’s real, it’s warm, it’s
violent. Not like science, literature and classical music and philosophy and
art. You find me cold, unfeeling, selfish, don’t you? Very well. Then marry
some sentimental hog or other.
His words very nearly echo those of the play.65
The final shot in My Fair Lady allows us to see not only Henry but also
Eliza as she slowly and affectionately takes two steps in his direction, with
his back still turned to her. Costumed in a diaphanous pink dress, with
sheer petals of fabric framing her face, Eliza and her forward movement
close the film in highly romanticized terms, lending even less doubt as to the
future of their relationship than the 1938 version did. At the same time, the
elaboration through song and choreographed movement of Henry’s loss
and longing for Eliza, and his vulnerability at the prospect of her absence,
provides the necessary groundwork for audience investment in this happy
ending – Harrison’s Higgins has more fully “earned” a life with Eliza than
Howard’s Higgins has.
My Fair Lady thus manages to play it both ways, to paraphrase Thomas
Schatz in his discussion of Hollywood genre films that typically appear to
question dominant ideology while simultaneously reinforcing it.66 The film
both registers and pushes back against Betty Friedan’s claims in The
Feminine Mystique, a groundbreaking feminist book published a year before
the film’s release. Often credited with sparking second-wave feminism in
the US, Friedan’s book convincingly counters the dominant cultural belief
that women are fulfilled in lives of domesticity, devoted exclusively to
serving the needs of their husbands and children. The book illustrates the
ways in which the male-dominated media and consumerist culture over
decades helped to shape the myth of domestic fulfillment – one that very
few of the housewives she interviewed actually confirmed. In presenting and
elaborating upon Henry’s character and his affection for Eliza, the 1964 film
works much as Schatz and Friedan claim the mainstream media, including
Hollywood genres, function: My Fair Lady implies that Eliza will be more
than happy in her life devoted to fetching Henry’s slippers and doing things
on his terms. This works in opposition to the image Shaw had envisioned in
his screenplay of her future as a businesswoman running a flower shop, with
Freddy the more submissive partner in the marriage. Costuming in My Fair
Lady transforms Eliza into the feminine ideal – soft, beautiful, and implic-
itly compliant. The sumptuous visuals work to endorse the film’s conclu-
sion that married life with Henry will be fully gratifying for Eliza, though we
also expect that verbal sparring will continue – a mere tip of the hat here,
while in the 1938 film a more decided generic alliance consistent with the
verbal and intellectual strength of women in screwball comedy. The more
austere look, performance choices, and costuming of the 1938 film lend
(unwittingly perhaps) a more layered, interesting, and complicated air to the
resolution. Both films nevertheless conform to the standardized happy
endings that Shaw reviled – even in the context of romance and comedy.
Adapting Rita and cinematic choice

A film that engages with the gender politics of its day, Educating Rita is,
nevertheless, conventional in style and structure, as with its source play. Just
as costuming, shot composition, and countless visual and sound devices
shape the ideological content of My Fair Lady and Pygmalion, so also is this
true of Educating Rita, thus prompting the question: is Rita as fully
reflective of female independence as its story and content would suggest?
The answer is both yes and no.
While far less elaborate a production than My Fair Lady, to be sure,
Educating Rita employs mise en scène, particularly Rita’s costuming and
hairstyle, as markers of her transformation, just as they are indicators of
social class. When she first appears, Rita is wearing short, tight skirts
(including some padding, it seems, to lend a fuller figure at the beginning
than is discernable later), and sandal heels that give her considerable trouble
on the campus cobblestones. Her hair is short, styled, and dyed blonde –
initially with an orange streak or two. As she transforms herself, as she
becomes more educated, her clothing generally shifts from primary colors to
more muted earth tones; her hair grows longer and more free-flowing, and
upon her return from summer university classes her hair has returned to its
natural brown. Director Lewis Gilbert and production designers were
careful to make these changes gradual and subtle. Rita’s dialect remains
consistent throughout the play and film, save for a moment when she
(poorly) affects upper-class diction, under the influence of her roommate
Trish, who has said, “there is not a lot of point in discussing beautiful
literature in an ugly voice.”67 This moment is a direct wink and a nod to
Pygmalion.
Frank and his colleagues are a ragtag bunch in the ivory-tower tradition,
dressed in frayed tweeds, fabrics drained of discernable color or style, and
hair that hasn’t seen a stylist for months, if not years. Rita’s perpetual motion
and costuming (even fully into her transition) provide commentary, to be
sure, on her energy, authenticity, and hunger for knowledge in contrast with
this uninterested and uninteresting group of academics – save for Frank. His
210 CYNTHIA LUCIA
outlook is jaded to be sure, but he retains a spark of humor, curiosity, and

goodwill, confirmed through his ability to appreciate and find amusement in
and with Rita – and in some ways confirmed, if counter-intuitively, through
his attachment to alcohol, which, however self-destructive, speaks of a
conscious commitment to something. Among the many literary works refer-
enced in the play and film is T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock,” which seems especially relevant to the character of Frank, whose
drinking is a response to a life drained of meaning and commitment.68
Willy Russell’s screenplay derives much humor from Frank’s colleagues.
Most amusing is the literature professor Brian (Michael Williams), who is
carrying on an affair with Frank’s partner Julia (Jeananne Crowley).
Whether in their offices on campus or at Frank’s home when Brian and
his wife Elaine (Dearbhla Molloy) are there for dinner, Brian inevitably
begins groping Julia just as Frank makes an entrance, with Brian’s response
always to pick up a nearby telephone, feigning a contentious and preten-
tious conversation with his publisher. His squat build and ill-fitting toupee,
along with his condescending manner, form an amusing type. One might
see the faintest of echo of Eliza’s father Doolittle in Brian, in his comic turns
and his blustery self-presentation, but beyond these qualities the resem-
blance ends, given the much larger role and thematic import of Doolittle,
his acute self-knowledge, and his declamation on middle-class morality.
While Brian in many ways embodies the hypocrisy of middle-class morality,
Russell’s screenplay makes him largely a figure of fun. Brian’s wife Elaine
appears nothing if not catatonic, planted in a chair in Frank’s living room
and uttering barely a word.
More poignantly, Russell creates the character of Denny, Rita’s husband,
a good-natured chap, for the most part, whose sense of self is entirely tied to
preserving his masculine pride, which is limited to the power he can exert in
his home over Rita and the unborn children he wishes to father. Russell and
Gilbert first present Denny as he’s knocking down a wall, combining two
rooms to “improve the house.” Shot composition emits a bit of light from
the room he’s breaking into, conveying the constraints imposed on his
worldview by limited money, imagination, and opportunity. When Rita
asks him to join her at the theatre, he reminds her of their plans to meet
friends at the pub, saying, “I don’t like ya doin’ this so just leave me outta
it.” When Rita capitulates and takes a clumsy and comic hand in the
demolition, agreeing also to go to the pub, Denny tries to reassure himself:
“You’re still my girl, aren’t ya?”
Their home is shot in muted light with images composed through hall-
ways, doorways, or on the staircase, positioning Rita in entrapping,
claustrophobic spaces. Whereas she moves freely in Frank’s office, in her
home Rita’s movements are confined – she typically remains static, sitting
or standing in one spot. Denny has greater freedom of movement in the
house, but even his movements are constrained – prompted usually by
frustration or anger, as when he discovers Rita’s hidden birth-control pills
and reacts by burning her books.
At the wedding reception for her younger sister, Rita’s sense of displace-
ment is made palpable. Editing patterns highlight small details – a young
boy surreptitiously sipping a glass of Guinness, a little girl stealing a taste of
cake, and Rita’s father still fuming at his older daughter’s rejection of
motherhood and patriarchal rule. On the dance floor, Denny orders Rita
to stop attending the university and to quit taking the pill. She responds that
she “loves” learning because it makes her feel that she’s “in the land of the
livin’,” words that prompt Denny to walk out. The camera slowly tracks
backward from a close-up of Rita to a long shot emphasizing her isolation as
couples around her continue to dance to the upbeat music. As in several
other scenes, the tracking camera here conveys the larger contingencies of
family, friends, and their values with which Rita must negotiate. Shot
composition in the scene that follows, when Rita tells Frank about the
split-up with Denny, likewise conveys her dislocation. Unlike earlier scenes
shot from inside as Rita stands at Frank’s window, the camera now is placed
outside the window, with the effect of further isolating her – we hear
Frank’s voice but we do not see him in the frame, implying that, in spite
of his tutelage and support, Rita must make it on her own.
At the airport in the closing scene, Frank and Rita embrace as close-ups
reveal Frank’s unrequited longing and Rita’s sincere affection for Frank, as
well as the difficulty of separating and making independent choices. The last
words of the film are Rita’s – “Frank, thanks” – words that acknowledge
both his role in having helped her and her commitment to freedom and
continued growth. As Rita walks down a long corridor, she pauses for a
moment to turn in Frank’s direction before more purposefully walking
forward – a long take capturing the mixture of independent resolve,
isolation, and the seemingly infinite distance still to be traveled. This
“happy ending” involves both uncertainty and possibility – and confirms
the value of friendships like the one with Frank that would never have
developed had Rita not taken the first steps toward independence. In
refusing romantic coupling, the film lines up with what Shaw had hoped
to present in the stage and screen productions of Pygmalion.
While both versions of Educating Rita admirably intervene in presenting
an unambiguous image of female independence as Shaw’s play and Sequel
212 CYNTHIA LUCIA
do – with the clear sense that Frank and Denny in Rita, like Henry and
Pickering in Pygmalion, will simply have to adjust to life without Rita and
Eliza – one can’t help but wonder about the potentially more progressive
statements the play and film might have made. While wishing to examine
Russell’s work primarily on its own terms, I find it of some interest to
imagine how both versions of Rita could more strongly and richly have
approached a power similar to that of Shaw’s work in its day. What if, for
instance, Rita had retained her original costuming and hairstyle after her
transition as a serious student of literature was complete? Had the film
expressed the full courage of its own thematic convictions, it might have
suggested that intelligence and learning are not limited to those who display
the outward signs.
At the same time, as well, we might question Russell’s adherence to the
male tutor/female pupil model in Pygmalion. What if he had chosen to
explore the relationship between two women of differing classes and levels
of education as tutor and student? Positioning a woman to intervene in
authoring or revising institutional discourse could conceivably have promp-
ted a deeper, more complicated and nuanced look into the possibilities and
challenges inherent in female negotiation and struggle with patriarchal
cultural authority. Early in the play and film, Rita announces that her
favorite novel is Rubyfruit Jungle. So strongly does the novel speak to her
that she has changed her name from Susan in honor of its author, Rita
Mae Brown – a woman who fought against numerous barriers in her
radical feminism and in her assertion of sexual freedom as a lesbian.
Russell failed to mine the potential implications of his own intriguing
allusion – whether in allowing Rita’s larger politicization, beyond seeking
freedom and choice for herself alone; in exploring her degree of solidarity
with other women, particularly those working-class women who are her
friends and who seek transformation at the beauty parlor where she works;
or in questioning her own sexual orientation. Such lost opportunities define
Educating Rita as most conventional in expressing feminist issues of its day –
when feminism was defined largely in terms of white and/or middle-class
women. While, to be sure, Russell as an artist should certainly be seen as free
to have chosen those questions that would and would not inform his
project, the potential for a more radical intervention, like that of Shaw, is
undeniable.
In the film adaptation – for all of its strengths – one stylistic choice
continues to nag and also situates the film firmly within cinematic con-
vention insofar as female representation is concerned. Whether because
Julie Walters was perceived as too old to play the twenty-six-year-old Rita
onscreen or was viewed as not quite pretty enough a female object in the
grand screen tradition, her close-ups were consistently shot with soft-focus
effects, creating an odd spatial incongruity, especially in dialogue sequences
with Frank, who was photographed without these same techniques. The
soft-focus feminism of Rita’s film adaptation serves as an unwitting
reminder that, regardless of content or stated themes, the “Pygmalion
effect” remains in place within this male-driven production and within
the larger male-dominated film industry that – to greater or lesser degrees –
continues to sculpt woman as “an illusion cut to the measure of [male]
desire,” as Laura Mulvey so famously observed.69 While not as extreme as
the alterations imposed on productions of Pygmalion, this cinematic
choice – in a most subtle, perhaps barely discernable way – mutes, modifies,
and softens the proclaimed themes of freedom and choice and, in its own
way, contributes to a lingering sense of female displacement.
Notes
1. George Bernard Shaw, “Pygmalion,” in Bernard Shaw: Complete Plays with
Prefaces, vol. i (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1962): 271.
2. Willy Russell, Educating Rita: A Comedy (New York: Samuel French, 1981): 33.
3. Ibid., 35.
4. Laura Grindstaff, “The Pygmalion Tale Retold: Remaking La Femme Nikita,”
Camera Obscura, 16.2 (2001): 166.
5. Russell, Educating Rita: 5.
6. Ibid., 9.
7. Vicki R. Kennell, “Pygmalion as Narrative Bridge Between the Centuries,”
SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies, 25 (2005): 76.
9. Grindstaff, “The Pygmalion Tale Retold”: 166.
10. Shaw, “Pygmalion”: 286.
11. Dudley Andrew, Concepts in Film Theory (Oxford University Press, 1984): 99.
12. Although it would be impossible to provide an exhaustive list of film adaptations,
the most frequently cited as direct adaptations include Pygmalion (1938, adapted
by Shaw), My Fair Lady (George Cukor’s 1964 musical), Pretty Woman (Garry
Marshall, 1990), and She’s All That (Robert Iscove, 1999). Among those films
often cited as indirect versions of the Pygmalion story are Fritz Lang’s Metropolis
(1927), All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950), Alfred Hitchcock’s master-
piece Vertigo (1958), The Stepford Wives (Bryan Forbes, 1975; Frank Oz, 2004),
The French Lieutenant’s Woman (Karel Reisz, 1981, adapted from the John Fowles
novel), Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982, adapted from the Philip K. Dick novel
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), Trading Places (John Landis, 1983), The
Little Drummer Girl (George Roy Hill, 1984, adapted from the John le Carré
novel), La Femme Nikita (Luc Bresson, 1990), Point of No Return (John Badham,
214 CYNTHIA LUCIA
1993), Mighty Aphrodite (Woody Allen, 1995), and Atonement (Joe Wright, 2007,
adapted from the Ian McEwan novel). For a more extensive list of film and
literary adaptations, see Grindstaff, “The Pygmalion Tale Retold,” Kennell,
“Pygmalion as Narrative Bridge,” and http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?
title=Pygmalion_(mythology).
13. Jane O’Sullivan, “Virtual Metamorphoses: Cosmetic and Cybernetic Revisions
of Pygmalion’s ‘Living Doll’,” Arethusa, 41.1 (2008): 134.
15. Ibid., 17.
16. Russell, Educating Rita: 1. On his website, Russell identifies the setting as
Liverpool (www.willyrussell.com/rita2.html).
17. Educating Rita departs from patterns common to so many Hollywood films of
the period that simultaneously celebrate and undermine female autonomy in
narratives that expose limitations of the “new,” liberated woman and position
her as a threat to individual men and the patriarchal institutions they uphold,
most particularly branches of the law (see Cynthia Lucia, Framing Female
Lawyers: Women on Trial in Film [Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005]
and Yvonne Tasker, Working Girls: Gender and Sexuality in Popular Cinema
[London and New York: Routledge, 1998].)
19. Ibid., 51.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid., 9.
23. Ibid., 275.
24. Ibid., 221.
25. Ibid., 225.
26. Ibid., 256.
27. Ibid., 256–257.
28. Ibid., 257.
29. Ibid., 270.
30. Shaw explores responses to changing conventions through the character of
Clara in Pygmalion.
33. Ibid., 279.
35. Ibid., 22.
36. Ibid.
37. Ovid, Metamorphoses, book 10, accessed online at Poetry Archive (www.
poetry-archive.com/o/pygmalion_and_the_statue.html).
39. Ibid., 30.
40. Ibid., 17.
41. Ibid., 26.
42. Ibid., 18.
43. Ibid., 54.
44. Ovid, Metamorphoses.
46. L. W. Conolly, “Introduction,” in Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw
(London: Methuen Drama, 2008): xxv.
47. Ibid., xxv–xxvi.
48. Ibid., xxv.
49. Shaw, “Pygmalion”: 281–282.
50. Conolly, “Introduction”: xxxiv–xxxv.
51. Ibid., xxxv.
53. Ibid., 284.
54. Conolly, “Introduction”: xxxv–xxxvii.
55. Although women were attending medical schools as early as 1910 and were
accepted into other educational institutions, it was not until 1918 that first-
wave feminists in the UK succeeded in winning voting rights for female property
owners aged twenty-nine or older, and not until 1928 that all women over twenty-
one were granted suffrage (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-wave_feminism).
57. Ibid., 279.
58. Ibid., 286.
59. Conolly, “Introduction”: xxvii.
60. Ibid., 128.
61. Ibid.
62. Ibid.
63. Ibid., xxviii.
64. Ibid., xxxviii.
65. Shaw, “Pygmalion”: 278–279.
66. Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio
System (New York: Random House, 1981): 35.
68. An entire essay could and should be written on the many literary allusions in
Educating Rita and how they function in both the play and the film.
Interestingly, in his review of the film, Roger Ebert aptly observes: “If only I’d
been able to believe they were actually reading the books, then everything else
would have fallen into place. But I didn’t believe it.” As a result, he explains that
what “might have been a charming human comedy, disintegrated into a forced
march through a formula relationship.” (http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/
pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19831028/REVIEWS/310280301/1023). While the film has
its wonderful moments, I would tend to agree with Ebert that the majority of
literary references seem gratuitous rather than thematically integrated.
69. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Film Theory and
Criticism, 6th edn., ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2004): 847.

Educating Rita and The Pygmalion Effect: Gender, Class, and Adaptation Anxiety

Uploaded by

Document Informationclick to expand document information

Copyright:

Available Formats

Educating Rita and The Pygmalion Effect: Gender, Class, and Adaptation Anxiety

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Educating Rita and The Pygmalion Effect: Gender, Class, and Adaptation Anxiety

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

chapter 10

Educating Rita and the Pygmalion eﬀect: gender,

Eliza Doolittle – the cockney “guttersnipe” turned acceptable bourgeois

the outset in Educating Rita, Frank does understand the implications of

Educating the master: lessons in gender, class, and identity

Incapable of comprehending the meaning of her remark that equates

Decades later, Rita echoes Eliza’s understanding that identity is a complex

Masculine dominance, female independence,

Adapting Rita and cinematic choice

outlook is jaded to be sure, but he retains a spark of humor, curiosity, and

You might also like