Why We Should Celebrate Eliza Doolittle Day

Hi readers! It’s Co-editor Gail again. You may not be aware of this but today, the twentieth of May, is a special holiday. It’s Eliza Doolittle Day! The day that celebrates the character of the same name from Lerner and Loewe’s 1956 musical My Fair Lady adapted from the 1913 stage play Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw. The date originates from the lyric in Eliza’s song “Just You Wait” as she pretends to be the king of England.

“Oh, Liza, old thing,

I want all of England your praises to sing.

Next week on the twentieth of May

I proclaim Liza Doolittle Day!

All the people will celebrate the glory of you”

Eliza had been played by such greats as Julie Andrews, Audrey Hepburn and most recently Lauren Ambrose and Laura Benanti. When I realised my biweekly blog was scheduled for this day, the theatre geek in me knew I had to take the opportunity to write about it. But if I’m being honest until now I had never really thought too hard about why we should celebrate it. I had seen live productions at my local theater a couple times over the years and it’s not one of my favorites. It’s an old “classic” musical and though it has some excellent music and hilarious moments, it is mostly very problematic due to it’s leading man’s behavior and treatment of our heroine Eliza. 

Both My Fair Lady and Pygmalion take place in England around 1912 and tell the story of poor cockney flower girl Eliza Dootlittle and much older wealthy phonetics professor Henry Higgins who makes a wager that he can teach Eliza to speak properly and present her as a high society lady at an upcoming ball.

The problem is that not only is Higgins classist and elitist in his work, he is also horribly sexist and abusive towards Eliza. In the first scene where they meet he calls her a “squashed cabbage leaf” and describes her way of speaking as an “incarnate insult to the english language”. As Eliza becomes his pupil, the insults only escalate. They get harsher, crueler and specifically targeted at the fact that she is a woman. He even has two songs throughout the show, in act one he sing-rants about never letting a woman in his life due to all the stereotypical things he deems women do and care about and how they would affect him. And in act two asking the question “why can’t a woman be more like a man?” Even when he has fallen for her in the song “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” he claims he’s happy she is a woman because it makes her “so easy to forget”.

Meanwhile, all Eliza wants out of this deal is to better her standing in life and rise to a higher but still modest station of selling flowers in a real shop rather than on the streets. She wants the nice and simple things of life. Not riches. In the song “Wouldn’t it be Loverly” Eliza sings 

“All I want is a room somewhere,

Far away from the cold night air.

With one enormous chair,

Aow, wouldn’t it be loverly?

Lots of choc’lates for me to eat,

Lots of coal makin’ lots of ‘eat.

Warm face, warm ‘ands, warm feet,

Aow, wouldn’t it be loverly?

[…]

Someone’s ‘ead restin’ on my knee,

Warm an’ tender as ‘e can be. ‘ho takes good care of me,

Aow, wouldn’t it be loverly?”

Shelter, warmth, a comfy chair, chocolate, and a nice man who will take care of her and treat her well. All except for the last Henry Higgins could provide her.

With Higgins help, Eliza works extremely hard to learn to speak genteel and eventually has a breakthrough and is able to do it. While her small talk could use some work, she is able to pass herself off as a proper lady. 

However, when they arrive back at Higgins office after the ball, Higgins takes complete ownership of Eliza’s transformation giving her none of the credit and goes on to be relieved that the experiment is over because it was so boring.

At this, Eliza finally goes to commiserate with another woman for the first time; Rosemary Higgins, Henry’s mother. Eliza vents her feelings about Henry’s behavior to her and his mother validates them ashamed of her son’s treatment of her and all other women. Henry of course crashes this conversation and sits on the sidelines as Eliza makes her point that I would argue is the crux of the entire narrative of the show.

“The difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she is treated”.

This is the point the show should be trying to make. That Eliza, whether she be a cockney selling flowers or genteel at a ball, she is due equal respect and decency from everyone at all walks of life because she is a human being.

After this she has an entire song telling Henry that her life and the world will thrive without him and though he interrupts her, she leaves on a strong and confident note.

Unfortunately this is not the end of the show. As it is written. Henry goes back to his office singing his song about how he’s fallen in love with Eliza despite his annoyance at her existence as a woman. He plays a recording of her voice thinking he’s lost her when suddenly, Eliza comes back to him. At this he says “where the devil are my slippers?”

And the lights fade to black.

This was the ending that the theater industry decided a late 50’s early 60’s audience would find appealing. While I hate that they end up together I can see how some people can read it as romantic. There is a long lived trope in our media of toxic opposites-attract love-hate relationships and that line of “where the devil are my slippers?” can be read as how Henry says “I love you” despite its inherent misogyny.

I would personally read it as Henry, despite his feelings for Eliza, being given one last chance to change and ultimately choosing not to. Because I don’t believe Henry loves Eliza, he loves the idea of possessing her to do his bidding. 

What Eliza wants and deserves however, is freedom from such men. He may have helped her better herself immensely, but that does not mean he now owns her.

This is why I am thrilled that the 2018 revival of My Fair Lady gave her that chance by staging the ending with Eliza gently touching Henry’s face and then leaving him behind for good.

This ending is actually truer to the ending of Shaw’s Pygmalion. Shaw hated the Henry-Eliza match and wrote an epilogue in which Eliza opens her own flower shop and marries Freddy Hill, a more age appropriate man who falls in love with her for who she is. Based on the Greek myth of Pygmalion and Galatea in which a sculptor has the gods bring his clay sculpture of a woman to life, Shaw always intended his play to subvert that narrative to be about the fact that women are of full bodies and minds all their own. That despite the impact a man might have on her life, he is not her creator.

 It is a shame but also not a surprise that the creative team behind the original production of My Fair Lady were products of their time and chose romance over feminism or to be more frank, money over feminism.

The ultimate truth however is that regardless of what ending she got written into, Eliza doesn’t need any man. She always had the independence, fortitude and tenacity within her to take charge and change her own life. She seized her moment and the right opportunity when she saw it. 

We assume that the “my” in My Fair Lady is supposed to belong to Higgins. But I think it actually belongs to Eliza herself. She is her own fair lady.

This is why this Eliza Doolittle Day and every Eliza Doolittle Day from now on, I will honor its namesake as a symbol and celebration of the liberation women’s bodily autonomy from the patriarchy. 

While My Fair Lady can be hard to watch, it was worth the revisit to remind myself of how times have changed and the progress we have still yet to make.

Eliza Doolittle, you are “abso-bloomin’-lutely still” an icon we need and should rejoice in.

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Gail Bello is a poet and playwright from Waltham, Massachusetts. She graduated in 2019 with a BFA in Creative Writing and a minor in Theatre from The University of Maine at Farmington. Find her previous publications at https://thaumaturgedramaturge.wordpress.com and follow her on Twitter @AquajadeGail