SOURCE: Reynolds, Jean. “Deconstructing Henry Higgins, or Eliza as Derridean ‘Text.’” In Shaw: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 14 (1994): 209-17.

[In the following essay, Reynolds deems the power of language to be the main theme in Pygmalion and links the ideas of Shaw and the French linguist Jacques Derrida.]

Language is central to Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion: scarcely a minute of the play is without some reference to words. The plot is built around a phonetics experiment, and two of the main characters are language experts. Act II takes place amid speech paraphernalia—a phonograph and wax cylinders, a laryngoscope, and a life-size diagram of the vocal organs. The characters themselves are preoccupied with words: both Mrs. Pearce and Mrs. Higgins complain about Higgins's bad language, and Eliza insists that she cannot talk to him at all. The Eynsford-Hills are both appalled and fascinated by Eliza's “new small talk,” and Alfred P. Doolittle worries that he will “have to learn to speak middle class language … instead of speaking proper English.”¹ And there is an abiding interest in the stage, itself a world of words. Higgins, Pickering, the Eynsford-Hills, and Eliza enjoy the theater—just as we in Shaw's audience do.

But actors and directors often miss the language emphasis in Pygmalion, preferring to make the play into a conventional love story between Higgins and Eliza—a problem that plagued Shaw from the first British production in 1914. Fortunately, Shavian scholars have been more open to the deeper issues in the play. Eric Bentley has described Pygmalion as a “battle of wills and words.”² Daniel Dervin observes, “So powerful is the word for Shaw that Henry Higgins can create practically ex nihilo a living person through speech exercises. The word made flesh is Liza. …”³ And Timothy G. Vesonder has declared, “Even a superficial examination of Pygmalion will show that the main focus of the play is not erotic involvement but the power of language. …”⁴

In the relatively recent part of the last hundred years, French philosopher Jacques Derrida (born 1930) has analyzed language in ways congruent with the insights of these three critics. If Dervin is correct in calling Eliza “the word made flesh,” we can also say that she is a Derridean “text.” And if Bentley and Vesonder are correct in making language the main focus of the play, we are not far from Derrida's assertion that “the problem of language has never been simply one problem among others.”⁵ This suggestion of a link between Shaw and Derrida is not new: Richard F. Dietrich has convincingly argued that Shaw anticipated deconstruction in The Quintessence of Ibsenism and elsewhere.⁶

Derrida investigated language issues most extensively in Of Grammatology, where he “deconstructed” the Platonic hierarchy of values that favors naturalness over performance, reality over representation, and speech over writing. Platonists ascribe to speakers the advantage of presence, arguing that speech is trustworthy because it seems to come straight from the heart. Writing, by contrast, connotes absence: it is unnatural and unreal, voiceless and inert, lacking the warm breath of a living speaker. The biggest obstacle between Higgins and Eliza is neither his attachment to his mother nor his obsession with the Universal Alphabet, but this Platonic philosophy, which Derrida calls “the metaphysics of presence.”⁷

For Higgins, Eliza exemplifies all the negative features that Platonists ascribe to writing. As we have already seen, she is a “text” that Higgins has created through the medium of language. Eliza tells Higgins, “I have forgotten my own language, and can speak nothing but yours” (770). Higgins, too, recognizes her origins in language: “[You] have no idea,” he excitedly tells his mother, “how frightfully interesting it is to take a human being and change her into a quite different human being by creating a new speech for her” (734). But although he boasts to his mother about his linguistic creation, fashioned from “the squashed cabbage leaves of Covent Garden” (767), Eliza will never be anything to him but an “artificial duchess” who “pretends to play the fine lady” (767). Despite her dazzling performance at the embassy reception, Higgins calls her a “heartless guttersnipe” (753). When his mother insists that Eliza deserves better treatment, he sulkily submits: “Let us put on our best Sunday manners for this creature that we picked up out of the mud” (765-66). Because Eliza lacks the living aristocratic core that would validate her elegant speech and manners, Higgins regards her as “absent” and deficient.

But Eliza also exemplifies the Derridean arguments against the Platonic “metaphysics of presence.” Having put Lisson Grove behind her, she has little use for pure essences and much appreciation for artifice and performance. Take away Miss Doolittle's articulate and elegant speech, and little is left of the dazzling apparition at the embassy reception. As Derrida says, “There is nothing outside of the text.”⁸ Lacking an authentic, inborn essence of her own, Miss Doolittle is a supplement, in Derridean terminology, to Higgins's original. Derrida uses this term to explain both the advantages and disadvantages of writing.

In its negative aspect, a supplement is an inferior copy, a superfluous addition, or an afterthought. “Inferior” is how Higgins sees his pupil, and he rejects Eliza as a second-rate imitation of himself. When she tries to charm him in his mother's drawing room, he reprimands her: “Dont you dare try this game on me. I taught it to you; and it doesnt take me in” (767). To his mother, he says, “You will jolly soon see whether [Eliza] has an idea that I havnt put into her head or a word that I havnt put into her mouth” (767). Eliza's dependency reinforces his disdain: she tells him, “You know I cant go back to the gutter, as you call it, and that I have no real friends in the world but you and the Colonel” (779).

But Derrida argues that a supplement can also be an improvement upon the original. Even enemies of writing, including Rousseau and Plato, have found writing indispensable for expressing and disseminating their ideas. In his Confessions, Rousseau admitted that he preferred writing to speech as a mode of self-expression: “The part that I have taken of writing and hiding myself is precisely the one that suits me. If I were present, one would never know what I was worth.”⁹ Similarly, Eliza cannot show her true worth until she hides her cockney origins beneath the artificiality of cultured speech. Only in “absence” can she truly be “present.” Her mature and articulate speeches in Act V demonstrate that her “supplemental” relationship with Higgins is positive as well as negative. Evaluating her own accomplishments, she tells him: “You cant take away the knowledge you gave me. You said I had a finer ear than you. And I can be civil and kind to people, which is more than you can” (780).

A more conventional playwright than Shaw might have been satisfied to pit Eliza and Higgins against each other in this way throughout the play. But Shaw, interested in the ambiguities of their relationship, makes Eliza herself ambivalent about her “supplemental” status. Having jettisoned her Lisson Grove identity, she feels like an exile. As she tells Higgins, “I am a child in your country” (770). We get a glimpse of her inner emptiness when she wistfully says, “I only want to be natural” (778). That heartfelt wish can never be granted, for Eliza—with no past and no peers—will never again feel the naturalness and belonging that Higgins finds among the moneyed classes. His is the favored position, for he is the source rather than the supplement in their relationship.

But Shaw, still exploring ambiguities, placed negatives as well as positives on Higgins's side. In a reversal of Platonic values, “presence” is a disadvantage to Higgins, for his habitual mode of self-expression is inferior to Eliza's artificial speech: “You damned impudent slut, you!” he shouts in one of the last speeches of the play (781). Even worse, Higgins believes himself incapable of improvement. His language habits are not much different from Eliza's Lisson Grove speech, as she observes: “I was brought up to be just like him, unable to control myself, and using bad language on the slightest provocation” (768). But while Eliza undergoes a powerful transformation, Higgins stubbornly clings to his Platonic belief in unalterable essences: “I cant change my nature; and I dont intend to change my manners” (773). He has freed Eliza from the prison of her former existence, but he refuses to do the same for himself.

And so, at the end of the play, the student surpasses her teacher, and writing—the living text named Eliza—triumphs over speech. Or so it seems. Actually, Eliza's victory is only part of Shaw's purpose. Similarly, Derrida never intended to “reconstruct” the speech-versus-writing hierarchy with writing on top. Derridean deconstruction aims instead to dismantle the hierarchy altogether by uniting speech and writing. (We have already seen that Eliza's “new speech” has two characteristics of writing: absence and artifice.) In the same way, Shaw's artistic intention is to unite Higgins and Eliza, although not in the wedding ceremony that many theatergoers have wished for. Having unwittingly declared war on the “old speech” at the foundation of British class structure, the two are co-conspirators in an assault upon the British establishment.

Eliza is unworthy to enter the upper class because she is illegitimate both socially and linguistically. Her lack of legitimate parentage is first hinted at in Act II, when Eliza says, “I aint got no parents. They told me I was big enough to earn my own living and turned me out” (694). Even as a child, she received little parental care. Her father tells Higgins, “I never brought her up at all, except to give her a lick of a strap now and again” (715). And in Act V, we learn from Doolittle that he never married Eliza's mother although he has avoided telling Eliza the truth: “She dont know: I always had a delicacy about telling her” (772).

But Eliza's illegitimacy is linguistic as well. Plato, notes Derrida, “assigns the origin and power of speech … to the paternal position.”¹⁰ Writing, by contrast, is “fatherless,” for writers express ideas they would not ordinarily speak and invent experiences they have not themselves had. When language breaks away from its rightful origins—as it does with Eliza's “new speech”—it subverts the authority that engendered it. Derrida explains that Platonists see writing as “the orphan [that] is already half dead.”¹¹ Eliza is fatherless in more ways than one.

Although Derrida's analysis sounds theoretical and abstract, Eliza's linguistic illegitimacy causes serious difficulties for her. Lacking a “father”—an aristocratic origin—she shocks the guests in Mrs. Higgins's drawing room with her unorthodox “new small talk”: “Not bloody likely!” she blurts when Freddy proposes a walk through the park (730). Even though Higgins has provided two safe topics for her—the weather and everyone's health—Eliza's attempts at conversation miss their mark. Higgins promised that “the streets will be strewn with the bodies of men shooting themselves for [her] sake” (693) and boasted that he had made her “a consort for a king” (780). But even when her verbal skills match Higgins's, “a flower girl who had become disclassed,” as Shaw described her in his sequel (787), is too “notorious” for proper British society.

Higgins, by contrast, basks in all the benefits of the “paternal position” described by Derrida. He is powerful enough to legitimize Eliza's status: “I'll adopt you as my daughter and settle money on you if you like”—an offer she refuses, preferring her independence (777). But if Higgins's social position is above reproach, his profession is not, for the upper-class speech and manners that he teaches are the rightful possessions of a privileged minority, not the “upstarts” (679) he accepts as pupils. In effect, Higgins is a thief, and his whole teaching enterprise is a questionable one.

Even Higgins's passion for phonetics separates him from his moneyed peers, who regard speech as little more than a device for sorting out class differences. Colonel Pickering's denunciation of the aristocracy after the embassy reception reflects Higgins's attitude as well:

I was quite frightened once or twice because Eliza was doing it so well. You see, lots of the real people cant do it at all: theyre such fools that they think style comes by nature to people in their position; and so they never learn. Theres always something professional about doing a thing superlatively well.

(746)

In his reply, Higgins affirms Pickering's judgment: “Yes: thats what drives me mad: the silly people dont know their own silly business” (746-47). It is here that Higgins most powerfully distances himself from his wealthy counterparts, but without renouncing his membership in their moneyed class, so that he subjects himself to the charge of hypocrisy.

And it is here that Higgins decisively, if unconsciously, departs from his Platonism. Like Plato, Higgins claims to value speech only as a signifier of a deeper truth beyond—“written on the soul.”¹² Higgins proudly tells his mother, “I know I have no small talk” (721), and he does not waste words on obvious facts. When Mrs. Higgins reproaches him for not congratulating Eliza on her success at the embassy reception, Higgins is nonplussed: “But she knew all about that” (765).

Yet Higgins also departs from this Platonism to savor effective speech for its own sake. With his professional appreciation for compelling discourse, Higgins is not only a phonetician, but a rhetorician—anathema to Platonists. Compounding the offense, he is also a sophist, skilled at twisting arguments to suit himself. Eliza complains to him, “I cant talk to you: you turn everything against me: I'm always in the wrong” (779). So we must add the charge of self-deception to Higgins's other failings. If Eliza is a pretender, so is he.

But monism so shapes Higgins's thinking that he cannot recognize any such contradictions within himself. Believing himself to be “a shy, diffident sort of man” (705), he is incapable of hearing his own outbursts of bad temper. He wonders where Mrs. Pearce got the idea that he is “an arbitrary overbearing bossing kind of person” (705). And he is genuinely amazed when she confronts him about his swearing. “I detest the habit,” he tells her; “What the devil do you mean?” (703).

More seriously, Higgins cannot see that he is an artist as well as a scientist. Bragging about his “Miltonic mind” (776), he clearly harbors aesthetic sympathies beneath his practical outlook. Near the end of the play, he boasts about his “creation of a Duchess Eliza” (776). But in Act II, he saw Eliza's education only as an exhilarating game: “What is life but a series of inspired follies? The difficulty is to find them to do. Never lose a chance: it doesnt come every day” (691). And in Act V, when Eliza asks why he accepted her as a pupil, he answers, surprised, “because it was my job” (776).

Because he is unaware of the artist within his breast, he fails to see how often he leaves Platonic “seriousness” to enter the realm of creativity and play. “You certainly are a pretty pair of babies, playing with your live doll,” says Mrs. Higgins to him and Pickering (734). But Higgins argues with her: “Playing! The hardest job I ever tackled: make no mistake about that” (734). The result of this self-deception—as any psychologist could tell us—is a loss of control, for human will governs only those inner forces that are allowed to come to consciousness. Thus, Higgins fails to acknowledge the negative side of the games he is playing—the hoax at the embassy reception and his scornful treatment of Eliza. “Does it occur to you, Higgins, that the girl has some feelings?” Pickering asks. Higgins's reply is disdainful: “Oh no, I dont think so. Not any feelings that we need bother about” (694-95).

If Higgins acknowledged these complexities and contradictions, the Life Force could accomplish much with the vital energy that flashes between him and his pupil. Eliza, who knows firsthand how it feels to be an “upstart,” would make a valuable teaching assistant for Higgins. Working together, they could challenge Britain's outmoded class structure.

But Higgins is incapable of these changes. Besides, any alteration in the ending would violate Shaw's purpose. In a sense, he indeed intended for Eliza to serve “as a warning to other presumptuous flower girls” (697). As its mythical name suggests, Pygmalion is about the chaos that inevitably follows any attempt to create “a quite different human being” through education, social reform, or self-improvement. Looking back on the change that Higgins wrought in her, Eliza feels anger rather than gratitude: “You never thought of the trouble it would make for me,” she tells him (776). Higgins, too, feels abused: “I waste the treasures of my Miltonic mind by spreading them before you” (776). Not surprisingly, the two finally separate.

But the matter does not end there, for others are capable of greater vision—ourselves, the audience. The first people on stage in Act I of Pygmalion are theatergoers, suggesting that we onlookers are also participants in the play. And as we ponder the different Elizas we see in Act I and Act V, the distinction between “natural” and “unnatural” begins to break down. What we learn from Eliza is that all language is invented and acquired. Despite Higgins's pride in his authenticity—“I cant change my nature” (773)—Eliza shows us that his crude speech is as much an affectation as the evening clothes he wears to the theater and the embassy reception. “I was brought up to be just like him,” she says, “using bad language on the slightest provocation” (768). Unlike Higgins, Eliza recognizes that “bad” and “good” language are acquired in the same ways.

Speech, as Derrida has insisted, is neither instinctive, simple, lucid, nor pure. Rather, it is complex, obscure, equivocal, and performative—like writing. Eliza wants “only to be natural” (778), but there is nothing admirable about her inarticulate “ah-ah-ah-ow-ow-ow-ow-oos” and “garns” in Act I. Her father has “a certain natural gift of rhetoric” that Henry Higgins appreciates, but Doolittle's character is also marred by “mendacity and dishonesty” (707). Both Eliza and her father refute the widespread belief that humans have a pure, predestined identity within themselves. And Eliza's transformation demonstrates the futility of seeking a mystical language “written in the soul”: human nature is complex, offering us a multitude of potential personalities rather than a singular soul.

As Barbara Johnson has said, “To mean … is automatically not to be.” Yet we always yearn for what Johnson calls “self-presentation”—a system of symbols so perfectly attuned to the purer self within that manipulation and deception are impossible.¹³ Our Platonic tradition teaches us to expect that perfection from speech—a hope that will never be satisfied. But, throughout our lives, we struggle against these half-understood, never-fulfilled longings, just as Eliza and Higgins do in their relationship.

Although they share the same confusion, Eliza and Higgins vent their frustrations differently. Eliza is wistful—“I only want to be natural”—while Higgins prefers cynicism: “Lord forbid!” he responds when Clara Eynsford-Hill sighs, “If people would only be frank and say what they really think!” (726).

In spite of his cynicism, however, Higgins believes that he has discovered a magic formula for “natural” speech: rudeness. But Eliza hears rejection rather than authenticity when he raves at her: “damn my own folly in having lavished my hard-earned knowledge and the treasure of my regard and intimacy on a heartless guttersnipe” (753). Although Higgins may well have “regard and intimacy” for Eliza, his boorish language does not communicate his feelings. And Eliza is just as unsuccessful in her attempts to talk to him, for Higgins rejects both her “Lisson Grove lingo” (687) and her elegant “new speech”: the first is uncivilized, the second is fake. Instead of drawing them closer, words trigger tantrums and blame.

This stormy relationship confirms Derrida's assertion that “the problem of language has never been simply one problem among others.” Language is central, engendering all the rest. But if words create difficulties for Shaw's characters (and us), they are also instruments of empowerment. As Jane Tompkins has said, “the world itself is discourse.”¹⁴ Eliza, the “quite different human being” created in Higgins's laboratory, is a kind of social revolutionary—a pioneering member of the rising British middle class. Having mastered the art of self-expression, Eliza is ready to leave 27A Wimpole Street to take her place in society.

But here she again clashes with her teacher. She rejects Higgins's lighthearted offer to stay on “For the fun of it” (777), feeling compelled to acquire a husband and find a means of supporting herself. Although Higgins professes a philosophy of Platonic seriousness, it is Eliza, not he, who takes life seriously—and she, rather than he, intuitively grasps the complexity of the world around her. Higgins's worldview is egalitarian but simplistic: heaven is a place “where there are no third-class carriages, and one soul is as good as another” (774). His high-minded appreciation for the human race is admirable, but it impedes any meaningful connection to the individuals around him. “I care for life, for humanity,” he tells Eliza, “and you are a part of it that has come my way and been built into my house. What more can you or anyone ask?” (775).

To his surprise, Eliza indeed asks for more—an acknowledgment that he recognizes her uniqueness and cares for her in a special way. But as before, Higgins cannot—or will not—free himself from the limitations of his belief system. His view is logocentric rather than phenomenological, unable to perceive reality through the shifting similarities and distinctions that Derrida calls differance. Higgins sees people as he thinks they should be, not as they are, and he uses that discrepancy as a pretext for rejecting them.

Shaw being Shaw, however, the tables are turned at the end. Higgins, having repudiated the “quite different human being” he created, is finally rejected himself. But somewhere a new set of theatergoers is waiting to discover him behind the classical pillars of St. Paul's Church, Platonism intact, ready to flex his phonetic muscles for them. Perhaps life as a text—for Higgins, too, is a creation of language, as are we in the audience—has its compensations after all.

Notes

1. Bernard Shaw, Collected Plays with Their Prefaces, ed. Dan H. Laurence (London: Reinhardt, 1970-74), 4:730, 762. Subsequent Pygmalion quotations are from this edition, and references to page numbers appear in the text.

2. Eric Bentley, Bernard Shaw (New York: Limelight-Proscenium, 1985), p. 87.

3. Daniel Dervin, Bernard Shaw: A Psychological Study (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1975), pp. 86-87.

4. Timothy G. Vesonder, “Eliza's Choice: Transformation Myth and the Ending of Pygmalion,” in Fabian Feminist, ed. Rodelle Weintraub (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1977), p. 42.

5. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), p. 6.

6. Richard F. Dietrich, “Deconstruction as Devil's Advocacy: A Shavian Alternative,” Modern Drama 29 (1986): 431-51.

7. Of Grammatology, p. 309.

8. Ibid., p. 158.

9. Quoted in ibid., p. 142.

10. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 76.

11. Dissemination, p. 77.

12. Quoted in ibid., p. 148.

13. Barbara Johnson, “Translator's Introduction,” ibid., p. ix.

14. Jane Tompkins, “A Short Course in Post-Structuralism,” College English 50 (1988): 744.