"PYGMALION" AS NARRATIVE BRIDGE BETWEEN THE CENTURIES

Author(s): Vicki R. Kennell

Source: Shaw , 2005, Vol. 25 (2005), pp. 73-81
Published by: Penn State University Press

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 Vicki R. Kenneil

PYGMALION AS NARRATIVE BRIDGE

BETWEEN THE CENTURIES

From My Fair Lady and Educating Rita to the critical theoriz

J. M. Miller and John Fowles, the tale of Pygmalion, with some re-visi
has permeated much of the twentieth-century narrative scene. Perh
best-known version of Ovid's tale is Shaw's Pygmalion,1 which dea
overtly with the shaping of a self in relationship to social construction
expectations. Shaw's version of the original tale merges internal an
nal aspects of identity formation, a move that places Shaw solidl
center of the transition from nineteenth- to twentieth-century under
ings of identity and its creation. Shaw's Higgins and Eliza set the s
to speak, for later narrative writers such as John Fowles, Muriel Spark
Ian McEwan to explicate and eventually to problematize the const
by a Pygmalion, such as Higgins, of the identity of a Galatea, such
At the core of Shaw's play is the tension between the fiction of rea
the fiction of the fictive that later writers examine.

Shaw's version of the Pygmalion tale offers two basic revisions of Ovid's
story: the change from supernatural agency to natural explanations, and
the replacement of physical creation by linguistic transformation. The rela-
tionship between the supernatural and natural in Shaw's play is evident at
the beginning as the scene opens in a storm possessing, as Errol Durbach
points out, "all the portents of supernatural awe,"2 with lightning and thun-
der to accompany the meeting of Eliza and Freddy, which initiates all that
is to come. Yet Durbach also notes that the play itself does not sustain this
mythically auspicious beginning: "[Shaw] empties the process of all its mys-
tery and insists upon the commonplace nature of the transfiguration" (23).
Durbach sees this emptying as reason enough to ignore the classical roots
and search elsewhere for influence. Irrespective of influence, Shaw's
revision of the story allows him to collapse the distinction between the cre-
ator-god and the creator-artist, between the supernatural and the natural.
By replacing Ovid's Pygmalion-Venus duo with Higgins alone, Shaw raises

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74 VICKI R. KENNELL

issues of morality and ethics relevant

haps, be forgiven for meddling in hum
whim of one petitioner by manipulating
essarily follow that a Higgins can receive
potentially could result from Higgins's
well as individual ones, exacting a high
ple than just Eliza. By providing natur
Ovid's supernatural interventions, Shaw
of absolute morality, from questions
and instead situationalizes the morality
with natural, Shaw forces the tale squa
century society, making Pygmalion more
it an indictment of stratified, class-based
for thought.
Shaw's attempt to place the tale in a f
audience resulted in the need to shift t
ation, since physical creation is impossi
focus becomes language, rather than s
endeavor. Just as physical creation gave
ation gives Eliza social life. In this,
novelists. Tony Crowley notes that in
bitterness and dangers which surroun
portrayed."3 Shaw uses this nineteenth
Crowley 's words, "crucial to the making
tions of selfhood. As Jean Reynolds p
popular belief that every human p
essence, or self."5 Such a social-constru
the gap between the Victorian concern
world of which a character was a part,
individual and subjectivity, with the th
ter who realizes his or her separateness
level, between self and other, between
becomes one that examines not only th
ken English at odds with a speaker's b
that the formation of Eliza's new ident
factors outside Higgins's control as it
Eliza's own observations, for instance, o
ple differs from Higgins's provide her wi
interactions than do Higgins's directive
In essence, Shaw's revisions of Ovid co
(Galatea's physical creation) to epist
Eliza's identity was formed) , a movement
handling of identity between nineteen

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 PYGMALION AS NARRATIVE BRIDGE BETWEEN THE CENTURIES 75

narratives. Nineteenth-century fiction dealt largely with the social world; it

tended to portray the everyday, often excising the supernatural in favor of
the credible.6 Both Patricia Waugh and Charles Glicksberg note similar
ideas prior to Alexander's work. "The individual," Waugh writes," is always
finally integrated into the social structure,"7 a state of affairs that results in
the self being, in Glicksberg's words, "conveyed in terms of its social coor-
dinates."8 Higgins's assessment of Eliza provides an excellent example.
Social identity, class, education, manners, socioeconomic background,
accent - these are the pedigree by which a Higgins can "know" an Eliza.
Identity is merely breeding, a "realist" understanding of self that suffers
from an inability to resolve paradox. What, for instance, should be done
with an Eliza Doolittle whose new accent contradicts her economic status
and her parentage? In such a situation, it becomes easier to ignore the
duality than to address it; Clara embraces Eliza's "bad speech" as the new
small talk because she cannot otherwise assimilate it into the understand-
ing of Eliza she has formed based on Eliza's sophisticated, upper-class
appearance and physical location at Mrs. Higgins's at-home day. The
nineteenth-century mind-set of characters such as Clara suffers from the
"confident belief that there is a true self to be found 9 - with self as notably
singular and "real."
At the opposite extreme from this fiction of reality, the fiction of the fictive
sees the self as "stripped of ontological truth."10 Rather than a singular "real-
ity," the self is a multiplicity of tenuous and easily discarded roles. Even the
social identity of the fiction of reality lacks continuity when seen through the
lens of twentieth-century understanding. As linguist and semiotician M. A. K.
Halliday explains, "social roles are combinable, and the individual, as a mem-
ber of society, occupies not just one role but many at a time, always through
the medium of language. . . . Here the individual is seen as the configuration
of a number of roles defined by the social relationships in which he enters;
from these roles he synthesizes a personality."11 The only "real" self in the
twentieth century is this multiply created one. Cedric Watts claims that the
importance of literature as a field of study rests on this very fact: "We all, in
our lives, are partly fact and partly fiction. We are partly independent selves
. . . and partly inscribed selves, inscribed by social custom, tradition, the
media; we make stories of our lives and try to live stories."12 Watts 's assess-
ment of humanity's penchant for storytelling applies to the characters in
narratives as well. They tell stories about their lives and try to live stories,
much as Eliza longs to live the "flower shop story."
Watts's notion of inscription is an important one for Shaw and the twen-
tieth century. Linguists such as Elinor Ochs emphasize the role played by
language for "construct [ing] not only [one's] own identit[y] but the social
identities of other interlocutors,"13 while novelists such as John Fowles
complain of characters writing lives of their own rather than living the one

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 76 VICKI R. KENNELL

their author tries to write for them.

send characters out searching for an au
point of agreement among the three i
their own identities and those of othe
"People are not only playwrights, becau
their own roles and scripts in life, but
these plans of social behavior. In additi
socially edits their performance, and the
St. Clair 's metaphor of the drama is an a
As Pygmalionesque creators, individual
performative acts. They create "selves
that allow them to celebrate, exonerate,
really are. For others, they create selv
trol, or even mere dismissal. The Shavian combination of the two
fictions - the real and the fictive- joins this inner role-scripting and role-
playing with outer societal impacts. Shaw's play asks, for instance, what is
to be done with Eliza once she moves to a higher linguistic class without
the corresponding financial means?
Eliza's plight highlights Shaw's joining of the two fictions. Ovid's version of
Pygmalion deals largely with identity as physical self. Shaw and the twentieth
century have refocused toward other conceptions of selfhood. Beyond the
physical self, there exist other ways of thinking about identity or personhood.
People have psychological selves, sociological selves, philosophical selves,
and linguistic selves. Identity in twentieth-century narratives is formed of a
composite of these selves. Higgins may change Eliza's linguistic and even
physical selves so that she passes as a duchess, but Eliza herself changes her
psychological and philosophical selves, largely through the auspices of her
sociological self interacting with others such as Mrs. Higgins and Colonel
Pickering. Shaw's work takes the concern with the external sociological self,
common to much nineteenth-century literature, and merges it with other
elements of selfhood, with the interior selves that concerned Modernists and
the multiple selves emphasized in postmodern views. Shaw's handling of self-
hood thus offers an ideal framework with which to analyze later narratives
filled with "fictive" as well as "real" selves.

The central core of Shaw's Pygmalion project is this tension between the
fiction of reality and the fiction of the fictive. As far as Higgins is con-
cerned, Eliza's "reality" is merely her voice - initially "guttersnipe,"
eventually "duchess" - a diametrically opposed duality. Yet Shaw ensures
that readers see the error of this viewpoint by having the socially accom-
plished Eliza revert to guttersnipe speech in moments of stress or
excitement. As Lisa S. Starks asserts, "Eliza . . . learn [s] how to perform the
'feminine masquerade.'"16 The duchess "self is thus only one of the
assorted collections of stories that individuals, such as Eliza, can tell about

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 PYGMALION AS NARRATIVE BRIDGE BETWEEN THE CENTURIES 77

themselves, or that others can tell about them. Eliza's "reality" is Shaw's
postscript - marriage to Freddy, flower shop, and all. Her "fiction" involves
the entire collection of personae she has inhabited, whether or not they
occupied legitimate social space. Thus Shaw asserts the primacy of both
modes in locating a "real self," collapsing the artificial dichotomy in order
to include both external and internal factors in the piecing together of an
individual identity.
Twentieth-century critics and novelists seem willing to further Shaw's
project, exploring the nature of identity through narrative and theory. For
J. Hillis Miller, "prosopopoeia, Pygmalion's creative gesture, is the correct
name for what author, narrator, and reader do."17 In a sense, then, every
author, narrator, and reader is a Pygmalion, a Higgins, bringing to life or
giving identity to the various selves of the story. Twentieth-century novel-
ists, in their experimentation with narrative form and subject matter, have
gone beyond what Miller suggests. If, as Miller argues, "what Pygmalion
does is a usurpation of divine power,"18 then the Pygmalion project in the
hands of modern and contemporary novelists must be changed to reflect
their questioning of the omniscient, godlike role accorded to the Victorian
author.

Perhaps the most well known instance of this questioning is John

Fowles's novel The French Lieutenant's Woman.19 The novel is both a narra-
tive and a theoretical treatise on the nature of the creative process of
writing narratives. On the one hand, Fowles's narrator admits to being a
Pygmalion-figure, creating identities by virtue of his role as artist: "these
characters I create";20 on the other hand, as Silvio Gaggi points out, he also
admits that "his characters can achieve an autonomy that makes them inde-
pendent of his intentions and outside his control."21 Although Fowles's
narrator sets out to tell - and control - the story according to the identities
he creates, the characters may circumvent this by changing direction, as
Charles does when he "gratuitously turned and went down to the Dairy."22
Fowles admits that the idea of the novelist as "stand [ing] next to God"23 is
convention rather than fact, that the characters take on a life of their own.
Whatever identity an author or narrator gives to characters may thus be
superseded by identities characters create for themselves.
Many of Fowles's characters play the role of Pygmalion-Higgins to an
Eliza. Charles, for example, wears disguises to "conceal [his] true identity
and to control the situation in which he finds himself'24 - as when he plays
the perfect gentleman rather than displaying his own disappointment over
his disinheritance. More significantly, as Frederick M. Holmes asserts, he
also tries, much like Higgins does, "to possess [Sarah - his Eliza] by creat-
ing around her an explanatory fiction which he hopes to realize in
action."25 It is in the character of Sarah that we see the Pygmalion role col-
lapsed with that of Galatea. "Unlike the other characters," Holmes writes,

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 78 VICKI R. KENNELL

"[Sarah] is aware that the fiction she c

to move herself beyond the pale of co
Rather than attempting either to const
or to assign herself a single role behind
ions her own identity as a shifting ma
by encouraging them to "see through
[and to] separate their real identities fr
which in this case equal society's ploys.
tale hinted at: the full flowering of the c
formative multiplicity.
Fowles theorized overtly about these
twentieth century have also followed S
mology of the self. Ford Madox Ford's
words "This is the saddest story I have
diately casts Dowell, who claims to be
artist and thus Pygmalion-figure. Ironi
acknowledge what his readers see quit
characters is inconsistent. On the one hand, he claims to render them real-
istically, using facts, family histories, descriptions, adjectives, and images.
Their identities, he seems to argue, are stable, the composite of all the lit-
tle sociological details he provides. On the other hand, Dowell acknowledges
that human nature is a "queer, shifty thing"29 and questions whether or not
anyone can know "anything of any other heart - or of his own,"30 a more
modernist attitude toward the self. Through Dowell, Ford's rendering of a
Pygmalion's role shows it as an escape, an excuse or justification for one's
actions, and thus negative rather than creative and positive. Unlike Ovid's
Pygmalion, who creates a woman surpassing human beauty, or Shaw's
Higgins, who improves Eliza's speech and provides the milieu that enables
her to improve her thought-life, Dowell uses his creator prerogative to
whitewash the truth, that he lacks the qualities his characters possess: pas-
sion, control, and a seeing eye.
Muriel Spark's novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie also offers a picture of
the tension between reality and fiction and between the external and inter-
nal aspects of a twentieth-century Pygmalion's work.31 Miss Brodie, a
teacher at a girls' school, chooses a group of girls to be hers "for life."32 She
assigns them identities based on externals - math, vowel sounds, beauty -
which they further with such externals as the way in which they wear a hat.
These are balanced by internals - "training them up in her confidence"33
or enlisting their support against the "gang" that opposes her. The result-
ing group identity exists as a way for Miss Brodie to control the situation
but more important as a way for her to define herself. Her methods for cre-
ating her "set" in fact construct for the girls her own identity in two ways.
By telling stories of her past - and especially ones that change to fit the new

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 PYGMALION AS NARRATIVE BRIDGE BETWEEN THE CENTURIES 79

situations of daily life - she sets herself up as a character in a story. Thus

"Miss Brodie" floats around as a person in her own right, beyond merely
her physical identity as "teacher," useful for thought and full of creative
potential. Sandy and Jenny, two of her "girls," invent both the true love
story of Miss Brodie and her correspondence, for example.
Miss Brodie constructs herself most fully, however, through constructing
the girls' individual identities. The identity she desires for herself - that of
a woman in her prime - is the composite of the identities she creates for
her girls. In splitting the girls into one-dimensional selves - Sandy has
insight and Rose has instinct, for example - Miss Brodie dissects her
"prime," each girl representing one aspect of it. The identities she has
given to them are really also parts of her own identity, so that, taken
together as a "set," the girls form one Miss Brodie. The reader learns, far
before Miss Brodie does, that her methods will fail, as the girls variously
betray her or shake off her influence. Ultimately, in Spark's novel, identity
involves some tension between inner and outer and between real and fic-
tive. Like Shaw's Higgins, Miss Brodie shapes identity; as does Shaw's
Pygmalion, she creates something unpredictable and ultimately beyond
her control - girls with minds of their own, each an Eliza-Galatea who
would choose to move out and marry Freddie rather than fetch slippers for
the rest of her life.
Such instances of Pygmalionism persist in more recent narratives as well.
John Le Carre's The Little Drummer Girl offers the story of one person living
a theatrical part scripted in order to catch a terrorist.34 After the terrorist
is caught at the novel's end, when the heroine Charlie's several fictions col-
lide, her leading man in the theater invents lines to cover her lapse on
stage. Charlie's unspoken reply highlights the Pygmalion role played by
Joseph, her agent-runner in what Le Carre called the "theater of the real":
'You need a Joseph," Charlie thinks, "Our Jose here will do you lines for all
occasions."35 The novel as a whole deals with the question of whether an
individual can wear another identity, can act as a Galatea under the com-
mand of a Pygmalion, without actually becoming that identity, without
adding that role as one more aspect of her self.
More recently still, Ian McEwan's Atonement, published in the twenty-first
century, offers a glimpse of how current novelists may view Pygmalion's
acts.36 Although it is too early in the century to state definitively, it seems
that narrative writers' current view of Pygmalion ascribes (in McEwan's
novel, to Briony) a self-awareness of the problems caused by playing with
another's identity, and the inability to refrain from it nonetheless.
McEwan's book initially just tells a story, that of a young female author-to-
be; partway through we learn that she is writing what happened as an
atonement for the problems caused by her earlier Pygmalionesque activi-
ties. This section of the novel claims to be the "real" story, but a second

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 80 VICKI R. KENNELL

first-person ending supposedly wri

character-novelist's return to a godl
ending to that "real" story. McEwan
occur when a Pygmalion figure sees
she knows and understands the in
observes Cecilia and Robbie making
Robbie is attacking Cecilia rather than
identity of rapist, and goes on to ha
nessed crime he did not commit. J
Briony reshapes the course of Robb
becomes aware of it as a failing or
Robbie's story even after his death.
The period from Shaw's Higgins
almost one hundred years, yet toda
cerned with issues that Shaw broug
identity is something more than sim
there is a process by which identitie
ramifications in the reshaping. Alth
largely on external details in his iden
formation transcends the superfi
becomes self-aware- of her past, her
Higgins's social structures. In literat
creative, experiencing beings . . . w
their own identities"37 as well as in att
others. At times debased, at times r
creation of a living being - neverth
The twentieth-century novelist is a
Pygmalions, each one unable- or mer
identity. Just as Higgins meddled in
dling in Higgins's, even as she rea
becomes someone's Galatea; each G
the once godlike author has perhaps
run by too many creative fingers in th

Notes

1. George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion, ed. Dan H. Laurence (1913; London: Penguin Books,
1957). All references are to this edition.
2. Errol Durbach, "Pygmalion: Myth and Anti-Myth in the Plays of Ibsen and Shaw,"
English Studies in Africa 21 (1978): 23.

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 PYGMALION AS NARRATIVE BRIDGE BETWEEN THE CENTURIES 81

3. Tony Crowley, "Uniform, Excellent, Common: Reflections on Standards in Language,"

Language Sciences 19.1 (1997): 18.
4. Ibid., p. 19.
5. Jean Reynolds, Pygmalion's Wordplay: The Postmodern Shaw (Gainesville: University Press
of Florida, 1999), p. 29.
6. Marguerite Alexander, Flights from Realism: Themes and Strategies in Postmodern British and
American Fiction (London: Edward Arnold, 1990), p. 13.
7. Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (London:
Methuen, 1984), p. 10.
8. Charles I. Glicksberg, The Self in Modern Literature (University Park: Penn State
University Press, 1963), p. 146.
9. Ibid., p. 13.
10. Ibid., p. xi.
11. M. A. K. Halliday, "Language and Social Man," Language as Social Semiotic (University
Park, 1978), p. 15.
12. Cednc Watts, "The Truth ot Fiction," Critical Survey 2.1 (lyyO): 70.
13. khnor (Jens, Constructing social Identity: A Language ot Socialization Perspective,
Research on Language and Social Interaction 26.3 (1993): 289.
14. Luigi Pirandello, "Six Characters in Search of an Author," Eight Modern Plays, ed.
Anthony Caputi (1925; New York: Norton, 1991), pp. 210-56.
15. Robert N. St. Clair, "Language and the Social Construction of Reality," Language Sciences
4 (1982): 224.
16. Lisa Starks, "Educating Eliza: Fashioning the Model Woman in the Pygmalion Film,
Post Script 16.2 (1997): 45.
17. J. Hillis Miller, Versions of Pygmalion (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990),
p. 49.
18. Ibid., p. 9.
19. John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969; New York: Signet, 1970).
20. Ibid., p. 104.
21. Silvio Gaggi, "Pirandellian and Brechtian Aspects of the Fiction of John Fowles,"
Comparative Literature Studies 23 (1986): 327.
22. Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman, p. 1U5.
23. Ibid., p. 104.
24. Ellen McDaniel, "Games and Godgames in The Magus and The French Lieutenant's
Woman" Modern Fiction Studies 31.1 (1985): 34.
25. Frederick M. Holmes, "The Novel, Illusion, and Reality: The Paradox of Omniscience
in The French Lieutenant's Woman," Journal of Narrative Technique 11 (1981): 194-95.
26. Ibid., p. 195.
27. McDaniel, "Games and Godgames," p. 37.
28. Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (1915; New York: Signet Classic, 1991), p. 15.
29. Ibid., p. 16.
30. Ibid., p. 141.
31. Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961; New York: HarperPerennial, 1994).
32. Ibid., p. 164.
33. Ibid., p. 15.
34. John Le Carre, The Little Drummer Girl (New York: Bantam Books, 1983).
35. Ibid., p. 14.
36. Ian McEwan, Atonement (London: Jonathan Cape, 2001).
37. Marjorie Woods Lavin and Fredric Agatstein, "Personal Identity and the Imagery of
Place: Psychological Issues and Literary Themes," Journal of Mental Imagery 8.3 (1984): 66.
38. Shaw, Pygmalion, pp. 109-19.

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