Upward Mobility and the Common Good by Robbins Bruce;

Author:Robbins, Bruce;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2008-05-05T04:00:00+00:00

“YOU'RE A TOWN HALL WALLAH, AREN'T YOU?”: PYGMALION AND ROOM AT THE TOP

Thanks to its musical sequel My Fair Lady, Shaw’s Pygmalion is probably one of the twentieth century’s most famous narratives of upward mobility.Not quite as well known, but hardly a secret either, is the role Shaw played, along with his friends and fellow Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb, in formulating the principles of what was to become the welfare state. It is puzzling, therefore, that readers are not more in the habit of combining these two pieces of information and thus treating the argument of the present book as a commonplace: that is, considering the upward mobility story against the backdrop of the welfare state.

Like The Silence of the Lambs, Pygmalion might be described as a Cinderella story that ends without the expected marriage. Eliza’s father is married, but Eliza herself is not. Since the play first appeared, readers and audiences have demanded to know why the happy ending announced in advance by the title, the amorous joining of the mentor/benefactor and the flower girl whose upward mobility he has made possible, is withheld. The quick answer is Mrs. Higgins, Henry Higgins’s mother.32 Higgins is reminded—and reminded by his mother—that he never falls in love with “anyone under forty-five” (70). He replies: “My idea of a lovable woman is somebody as like you as possible” (70). In his concluding remarks to the play, Shaw explains: “If an imaginative boy has a sufficiently rich mother who has intelligence, personal grace, dignity of character without harshness, and a cultivated sense of the best art of her time to enable her to make her house beautiful, she sets a standard for him against which very few young women can struggle, besides effecting for him a disengagement of his affections, his sense of beauty, and his idealism from his specifically sexual impulses” (141–42).

In terms of her wit and other graces, Eliza Dolittle would seem to meet Mrs. Higgins’s standard quite nicely. If Higgins doesn’t love her as Pygmalion loved Galatea, it is perhaps because of what he calls “the coldness of my sort of life” (136)—an emotional temperature reading that has scrolled across our screens before. Mentors, like mothers, often encourage “the disengagement of . . . affections” and “idealism” from “specifically sexual impulses.” Some such disengagement has accompanied and re-channeled upwardly mobile desires since the chilly idyll of Rousseau and Madame de Warens.33 There is reason to suspect that something similar is happening here. Another important clue is the phrase “sufficiently rich.”With so much else going for them, why do mothers need this added embellishment? The seemingly needless qualification suggests that, like Gissing, Shaw has given his hero something less avowable than filial devo-tion: not just a love of the mother, the older woman, or the genteel woman, but a love of the genteel woman who has an independent income.

Higgins makes his own living, he says, by exploiting the fact that “[t]his is an age of upstarts. Men begin in Kentish Town with £80 a year, and they end in Park Lane with a hundred thousand.

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