OF FAIR LADIES

“The beauty of a woman is not the clothes she wears, the figure she carries or the way she combs her hair…. (It) must be seen from in her eyes because that is the doorway to her heart, the place where love resides..” 

“…for beautiful eyes, look for the good in others.” 

– the late Audrey Hepburn, UNICEF ambassador and humanitarian

So the story goes…..

In 1912 London outside the Covent Garden Opera House professor of linguistics and phonetics Henry Higgins develops a morbid fascination with the accent of a common flower girl, following her and taking notes as she speaks, until she clocks him and makes a scene. He then goes on a self-righteous (if poetic) rant, “Why Can’t The English Teach Their Children How To Speak? This verbal class distinction should by now be antique… …By right (flower girl) should be taken out and hung, for the cold-blooded murder of the English tongue….” 

Thus is born the wager between Professor Higgins and fellow linguistics enthusiast Colonel Pickering, himself only just having returned to London, from studying Indian dialects: That manner of speech is the single most powerful factor in defining social class, and a simple lack of proper speech deters one from finding better station in life. Higgins wagers that in 6 months he can take a girl of the lowest societal class imaginable, successfully teach her to speak properly and thereby pass her off as high-born.

(*Pygmalion was the Greek sculptor who fell in love with his most perfect creation. When Aphrodite overhears Pygmalion wishing at a party to find a wife who most closely resembles his sculpture, she brings his statue to life.

Now, the gods and goddesses of Greek and Roman mythology are notably flawed, known for their all-too-human judgements and pettiness, but I do consider Pygmalion’s statue an act of kindness on the part of the Greek goddess of love – she saved some hapless woman from potentially falling for someone and being in a relationship where she would be held to an impossible standard. (Like, how’d you like to compete with a statue for compliance and agreeability 😀 Of course, a partner whose judgement is so biased is not exactly “perfect” himself <shrugs> yet if no one compromised ever, we as a species would be extinct, and oh how entertaining are the fictitious works of yore, how welcome their distractions….)

The general Stepford Wives storyline goes a bit further, husbands replacing their wives with robots. NOT AI. Robots that cook and clean and dress nice and wear the Wives’ faces. 

Compare this with Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, famously made into a 1967 Rom-Com starring Dame Elizabeth Taylor (Katarina) and Richard Burton (Petruchio):

(In real life btw, the on-screen “feuding” carried into the two leads’ marriage – from passive-aggressive publicity posters bickering over who is the more famous, to getting married, divorced, remarried, with some very large diamonds involved… Including a 33ct engagement diamond that was bought in 2011 by a South Korean businessman)

The story of Shakespeare’s Shrew goes, that a father has a fiery older daughter no one wants to marry, and a sweet, gentle younger one with many suitors. The father decrees the younger isn’t allowed to marry before the older, and so the younger girl’s many suitors find someone to fall on the sword for them to step up. That’s in the form of Petruchio, who makes no secret of the fact he’s in town to obtain a rich wife. Katarina is not dubbed the “shrew” simply for speaking her mind, however – she hurls furniture, breaks windows and courting her is like being inna WWF championship match.

“Sweet and obedient” younger sister Bianca (who turns out to be self-absorbed and manipulative) on the other hand conforms to “every man’s ideal” on the face of it, including her father’s – he runs to protect her at every turn, and also almost predatorily negotiates her dowry with her suitors – something he does not inflict on Katarina’s husband. Petruchio is seen to almost be doing everyone a public service by “taming the shrew” (to do this btw, he will deny her food and rest, saying he “loves” her too much and the food and bed in his home are not good enough… TBC at end of the post)

For now, back to My Fair Lady. Prof Higgins goes from “Why Can’t The English – ” to Why Can’t A Woman – (see a pattern here? 😀 ) and something about What Happens To Men Who Let A Woman In Their Life

https://youtu.be/iQGH9zereFc

So the story goes Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle, sent out to fend for herself in the markets by her alcoholic ne’er-do-well father, volunteers for Higgins’ experiment in the hopes that with a better accent and manners, she will be able to secure a job in a florist’s shop. Which means she’s basically cooped up with Anal-retentive Jughead of the Academic World who, to be fair, points out he is equally rude to most people regardless of their station in life (but in reality is a little less so to his household staff, colleagues and his reluctantly supportive mother who might’ve preferred grandchildren, to Yet More Social Experiments With Linguistics :D)

What ensues is a hilarious yet surprisingly real 8 Academy Awards-worthy adventure where the incredibly fierce taskmaster seeks to make good on his boast. Some critics have accused the character of “emotional abuse” in his methods (please ignore Youtube title):

Rex Harrison’s portrayal of Professor Higgins is deliberately callous and chauvinistic, but you will also find articles like Time magazine’s about how that was a chauvinistic era, and the movie therefore portrays this accurately.

Eliza’s father soon shows up at Higgins’ door to “collect”:

Doolittle: So, what’s a 5-pound note to you, and what’s Eliza to me?

Colonel Pickering (Higgins’ colleague): I think you ought to know Doolittle, Mr Higgins’ intentions are entirely honourable.

Doolittle: Well of course they are – if I thought they wasn’t, I’d ask for 50.

(Higgins had instructed his (female) housekeeper to clean Eliza up and burn all her clothes off the street, buying her all the clothing items needed for her stay, is what Eliza’s father is referring to below when he makes a fuss about the inappropriateness of her not asking for any of her clothes from home):

https://youtu.be/-qHDYU1-viM

OK I can’t resist mentioning this – Higgins says no more about the meeting with Doolittle Sr and appears to carry on with huge preoccupation with his “experiment”, even as Eliza imagines doing away with her accursed tutor by firing squad:

https://youtu.be/2-eVcI2veK0

At the end of the movie however, she will return to the market largely unrecognisable and discover that Professor Higgins has set her father up to be moderately provided for, for life. (Roughly, what Higgins did was to write in his professional capacity to recommend Doolittle receive a small portion of a deceased wealthy man’s estate (said rich man having consulted the good prof on how to put his surplus funds to good use) – professor Higgins makes the recommendation as an injection of spending into Doolittle’s community, and the idea is sometimes dubbed “Doolittle Economics”. Doolittle is not exactly miserly, and is shown generously spending his new income on clothing and eating out, and tipping restaurant owners etc.)

But back to where Eliza is still working on lessons. Eventually at 3am one night:

https://youtu.be/uPSG3QcZanM

All stoked by this, Prof Higgins makes a first attempt to fool the English gentry at his socialite mother’s box during the Ascott races (yes the dubious Mrs Higgins agrees to play along though she mildly disapproves. She is also aware in the scene below that as yet Eliza can only speak about Health and the Weather.. It goes horrendously wrong (but with the perfect accent), and then of course there is the coup de grace at the end:

(My Absolute Favourite Part as a child was not of the elegantly dressed Eliza screaming at the horse, it was when the lady standing nearby “tastefully faints” at the screaming 😀 (Like, is that not just the funniest thing?))

The Golden Retriever-esque Freddie Eynsford-Hill (from the clip above) who has led a privileged but sheltered life quickly falls for the “refreshingly different” Eliza. Absolutely smitten, he will go on to write her pages and pages of letters every day. Eliza briefly considers marrying him, when she chafes at Higgins’ egotistical crowing after his own success in winning his wager (6 months to successfully pass her off as high-born, which he does at the Embassy Ball, pictured at the beginning of this post. She is pronounced by “experts” to be a Hungarian princess, because her English is now “too good,” too schooled, to be native).

When at the end of the 2-hour movie Eliza chooses to return to Higgins, finding him listening to her old Cockney-accent audio tapes, it is an indication he misses all of her – including the crude-speaking flower girl part. When caught, he then welcomes her back with, “Where are my slippers?” and critics are dissatisfied with the way the show ends. Yet here are two people who know themselves well, do not hide who they are to each other, and have chosen partners who know and accept their failings.

No Bull.

End.

 

Audrey Hepburn spent the final decade of her life working with UNICEF in poverty stricken African and Asian countries. Her deeply personal reason for doing so, detailed on UNICEF’s blog, is that she herself was a former hunger-stricken child in Holland who survived malnutrition due to UNICEF aid.

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*Re Taming of the Shrew.. Interpretations for the “taming” are varied, reflective of interpretator’s own biases and dispositions – transformed by marriage (and apparently love) into the most cooperative and “obedient” of the three wives being discussed, much to the astonishment of her many detractors including her own father, Katarina (particularly the Elizabeth Taylor version) appears to give a swoonsome speech about the duties of a wife in obeying her husband. (THE Elizabeth Taylor, bowing before her husband, humbly asking for his hand to hold and dressing the other two wives to be more obedient and supportive because husbands work hard to provide! Now it’s the men’s turn to swoon 😀 )

One Man’s Meat….. I first came across The Unicorn In Captivity via the Metropolitan Museum of Art (they sell merch like the journal below btw). It is something that first defined my idea of marriage as a young adult, before I became a Christian. See, the unicorn of the European medieval ages was depicted as invincible, with medicinal properties in its magical horn (leading to market sellers doing things like passing off narwhal horn for unicorn).

In Unicorn in Captivity, the “captive” mythical creature is sitting contentedly within a fence that is obviously low enough to jump over, and with a “collar” round its neck that is not secured. The idea is that the unicorn chooses to be there, that its “captivity” is a happy one 🙂 The image is an analogy for happy marriage.

“Happiness,” “joy,” can be very personal to define. Too often we see people in seemingly “bad” situations we think we would never want to be in, and yet they somehow find joy in their circumstance (such people are the kind you want to be around! Don’t ever let em go…! 😀 ) On the flip side are people who are never happy.

My personal interpretation is the crafty Petruchio succeeds in making Katarina fall for him because he has understood her core nature – she initially chafes at the traditional role expected of her. Shakespeare’s writing of it includes Petruchio slowly injecting the most ridiculous demands, like insisting Katarina agree with him that the sun is the moon, and Katarina eventually hides the beginnings of a smile. And so they go from the roof-destroying, leg-sweeping, window-pane shattering, deprivation of food, sleep and well, reason that is their “courtship” and “honeymoon”, to the shrew deciding that other role in this role-playing game is intriguing as well. The one of the obedient wife. Some notable directors had the actress playing Katarina wink wryly at her husband while bowing to him and declaring her undying obedience and loyalty. (It’s a part of Eliza Doolittle that sadly for Freddie, he would not easily know how to speak to, and why the unicorn may have chosen to return to Higgins.)

Did playing Shrew Vs Rogue spill over into the Taylor-Burton marriage, or did the Taylor-Burton union make for a very entertaining performance of Shakespeare’s work? Pr-obably a bit of both. They were pretty batshit crazy tempestuous. They were, after all, movie stars. Performers. The rest of us mere mortals can surely watch 🙂

There is a high school romance flick from the ’90s that is loosely based on Shrew:

(It gets fun from min 1:25):

Unlike in the original Shrew storyline, in the modernised 10 Things, Kate (above pic in red, aged 18) started off popular just as Bianca (in green) now is. (It doesn’t come out until close to the end why Kate is “shrewish” and then only very briefly in the sisters’ conversation, so I’ll mention – newly coming of age, Kate made a mistake she terribly regretted – as The Popular Girl In School, she succumbs to peer pressure, sleeping with with The Popular Boy as the rather socially expected thing to do if you were part of that cool crowd, y’know? (Uh, not.) She then really, really regrets it, deciding that the price is too high to pay for remaining “popular” to fit in (not to mention Popular Boy turns out to be self-absorbed, shallow and insincere). She becomes so disillusioned with the pursuit of popularity that she vows never to do it again, over-compensates (including picking colleges particularly far away) and becomes the Anti-Popular Girl. To the cool kids, “The Shrew.” The same shallow Popular Boy then tries to date her newly popular little sister……

Want more? Some verbal sparring with Popular Guy (no, he’s not “Petruchio”, that’s the long-haired Heath Ledger who comes in late, hears Kate’s rant, and promptly leaves)…

And Mr Morgan’s rapping Shakespeare’s Sonnet 141

(He follows the above with “Now, I know Shakespeare’s a dead white guy, but he knows his sh*t. So we can overlook that…” The rap was his intro to an assignment for the kids to write their own version of said Sonnet – Kate’s will be titled 10 Things I Hate About You.)

*Actor Daryl Mitchell who played Mr Morgan sustained an injury that left him paralysed from the waist down when his motorcycle skidded on gravel, 2 years after 10 Things.

Mitchell continued to receive steady acting work with the support of fellow actors like Denzel Washington and Chris Tucker, started the Daryl Mitchell Foundation to raise awareness of spinal cord injuries, and is also a spokesperson for the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation (Yes, Christopher Reeve who played Superman, fell off his horse and was paralysed from the neck down… then becoming even more of a Superman in his real life).

Mitchell has said, “It isn’t about my skill, it’s about my personality.” He has 2 sons and a daughter, all high school athletes.