Pygmalion Bernard Shaw The power of romantic love

Pygmalion
Bernard Shaw
The power of romantic love
By Sayed Ibrahim Abuelmagd
Pygmalion was a sculptor who made such a lifelike statue of a beautiful woman that he fell in love with it.
Because of his great passion Venus, the goddess of love, caused the statue to come to life so that the artist and his creation could marry.
In the play, we can be delighted at the power of romantic love to accomplish the unexpected.
We can also interpret the artist’s love for his creation as pride: to love one’s creation is in some measure to love one’s own talent, to love oneself rather than the one who seems to be beloved.
From such a point of view, this particular version of romantic love is a delusion which merely enriches the lover’s ego.
It is a measure of Bernard Shaw’s greatness that he presents all these sides of the story, while adding to them sympathy for the person who is transformed.
Romantic love however attractive and delightful it may occur, brings more destruction than happiness.
Romantic love is a tremendous power that attracts. If we can learn how to use it in a constructive, not a destructive way… may be the society can change for the better!
But, I believe, if men and women will understand the psychological dynamics behind romantic love and learn to handle them consciously, they will find a new possibility of relationship, both to themselves and to others.
When we “fall in love” we feel completed, as though a missing part of ourselves has been returned to us; we feel uplifted, as though we were suddenly raised above the level of the ordinary world. Life has an intensity, a glory, an ecstasy and transcendence.
Pygmalion seeks in romantic love to be possessed by his love, to soar to the heights, to find ultimate meaning and fulfillment in his beloved. He seeks the feeling of wholeness.
When we look for something greater than our egos, when we seek a vision of perfection, a sense of inner wholeness and unity, when we strive to rise above the smallness and partialness of personal life to something extraordinary and limitless, there is spiritual aspiration. Here we are confronted with a paradox that baffles us, yet we should not be surprised to discover that romantic love is connected with our religious instinct –
We only need to look at the love story of Pygmalion and we find that man-in-love has made of woman a symbol of something universal, something inward, eternal, and transcendent. He sees a special reality revealed in her; he feels completed, ennobled, refined, spiritualized, uplifted, transformed into a new, better, and whole man. The romantic Pygmalion does not hide this fact; he proclaims it. Why is it that modern men won’t admit what earlier men openly proclaimed and even idealized? It is because we won’t consciously give a place to spiritual aspiration in our modern lives.
We aren’t consciously interested in wholeness – only in production, control, and power; we don’t believe in the spirit – only in what is physical and sexual.
When a man’s projections on a woman unexpectedly evaporate, he will often announce that he is “disenchanted” with her; he is disappointed that she is a human being rather than the embodiment of his fantasy, He acts as though she had done something wrong…
One of the great needs of men is to learn the difference between human love as a basis for relationship, and romantic love as an inner idea, a path to the inner world…
So, we see that Pygmalion who is disgusted by the loose and shameful lives of the women of his era, decides to live alone and unmarried. With wondrous art, he creates a beautiful statue more perfect than any living woman. The more he looks upon her, the more deeply he falls in love with her, until he wishes that she were more than a statue. This statue is Galatea. Lovesick, Pygmalion goes to the temple of the goddess Venus and prays that she gives him a lover like his statue; Venus is touched by his love and brings Galatea to life. When Pygmalion returns from Venus' temple and kisses his statue, he is delighted to find that she is warm and soft to the touch--"The maiden felt the kisses, blushed and, lifting her timid eyes up to the light, saw the sky and her lover at the same time"
Myths such as this are fine enough when studied through the lens of centuries and the buffer of translations and editions, but what happens when one tries to translate such an allegory into Victorian England? That is just what George Bernard Shaw does in his version of the Pygmalion myth. In doing so, he exposes the inadequacy of myth and of romance in several ways. For one, he deliberately twists the myth so that the play does not conclude as euphorically or conveniently, hanging instead in unconventional ambiguity. Next, he mires the story in the sordid and mundane whenever he gets a chance. Wherever he can, the characters are seen to be belabored by the trivial details of life like napkins and neckties, and of how one is going to find a taxi on a rainy night. These noisome details keep the story grounded and decidedly less romantic. Finally, and most significantly, Shaw challenges the possibly insidious assumptions that come with the Pygmalion myth, forcing us to ask the following: Is the male artist the absolute and perfect being who has the power to create woman in the image of his desires? Is the woman necessarily the inferior subject who sees her lover as her sky? Can there only ever be sexual/romantic relations between a man and a woman? Does beauty reflect virtue? Does the artist love his creation, or merely the art that brought that creation into being?
Shaw finds in Pygmalion a way to turn the talk into action, by hinging the fairy tale outcome of the flower girl on precisely how she talks. In this way, he draws our attention to his own art, and to his ability to create, through the medium of speech, not only Pygmalion's Galatea, but Pygmalion himself. More powerful than Pygmalion, on top of building up his creations, Shaw can take them down as well by showing their faults and foibles. In this way, it is the playwright alone, and not some divine will, who breathes life into his characters. While Ovid's Pygmalion may be said to have idolized his Galatea, Shaw's relentless and humorous honesty humanizes these archetypes, and in the process brings drama and art itself to a more contemporarily relevant and human level.
Professor of phonetics Henry Higgins makes a bet that he can train a bedraggled Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, to pass for a duchess at an ambassador's garden party by teaching her to assume a veneer of gentility, the most important element of which, he believes, is impeccable speech. The play is a sharp lampoon of the rigid British class system of the day and a commentary on women's independence.
In ancient Greek mythology, Pygmalion fell in love with one of his sculptures, which then came to life.
Shaw narrates that two old gentlemen meet in the rain one night at Covent Garden. Professor Higgins is a scientist of phonetics, and Colonel Pickering is a linguist of Indian dialects. The first bets the other that he can, with his knowledge of phonetics, convince high London society that, in a matter of months, he will be able to transform the cockney speaking Covent Garden flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, into a woman as poised and well-spoken as a duchess. The next morning, the girl appears at his laboratory on Wimpole Street to ask for speech lessons, offering to pay a shilling, so that she may speak properly enough to work in a flower shop. Higgins makes merciless fun of her, but is seduced by the idea of working his magic on her. Pickering goads him on by agreeing to cover the costs of the experiment if Higgins can pass Eliza off as a duchess at an ambassador's garden party. The challenge is taken, and Higgins starts by having his housekeeper bathe Eliza and give her new clothes. Then Eliza's father Alfred Doolittle comes to demand the return of his daughter, though his real intention is to hit Higgins up for some money. The professor, amused by Doolittle's unusual rhetoric, gives him five pounds. On his way out, the dustman fails to recognize the now clean, pretty flower girl as his daughter.
For a number of months, Higgins trains Eliza to speak properly. Two trials for Eliza follow. The first occurs at Higgins' mother's home, where Eliza is introduced to the Eynsford Hills, a trio of mother, daughter, and son. The son Freddy is very attracted to her, and further taken with what he thinks is her affected "small talk" when she slips into cockney. Mrs. Higgins worries that the experiment will lead to problems once it is ended, but Higgins and Pickering are too absorbed in their game to take heed. A second trial, which takes place some months later at an ambassador's party (and which is not actually staged), is a resounding success. The wager is definitely won, but Higgins and Pickering are now bored with the project, which causes Eliza to be hurt. She throws Higgins' slippers at him in a rage because she does not know what is to become of her, thereby bewildering him. He suggests she marry somebody. She returns him the hired jewelry, and he accuses her of ingratitude.
The following morning, Higgins rushes to his mother, in a panic because Eliza has run away. On his tail is Eliza's father, now unhappily rich from the trust of a deceased millionaire who took to heart Higgins' recommendation that Doolittle was England's "most original moralist." Mrs. Higgins, who has been hiding Eliza upstairs all along, chides the two of them for playing with the girl's affections. When she enters, Eliza thanks Pickering for always treating her like a lady, but threatens Higgins that she will go work with his rival phonetician, Nepommuck. The outraged Higgins cannot help but start to admire her. As Eliza leaves for her father's wedding, Higgins shouts out a few errands for her to run, assuming that she will return to him at Wimpole Street. Eliza, who has a lovelorn sweetheart in Freddy, and the wherewithal to pass as a duchess, never makes it clear whether she will or not.
Higgins is what you might call a bundle of contradictions. He's a woman-hating mama's boy; an incredibly talented, educated whiny little baby of a man; a personable misanthrope; a loveable jerk. Shaw says it best in his initial description of Higgins:
His manner varies from genial bullying when he is in good humor to stormy petulance when anything goes wrong; but he is so entirely frank and void of malice that he remains likeable even in his least reasonable moments. (2.05)

He calms down Eliza, then proceeds to show off his skills by telling people where they're from just by listening to the sound of their voice.
Right from the beginning we can tell he's a bit of a braggart and a bit of a preacher – he can't help but tell Pickering all about his trade, his life philosophy, and his ability to turn flower girls into duchesses – but as far as first impressions go, he makes a pretty good one. He comes off as one heck of a cool cat.
Things have become more complicated. Turns out he treats women like trash sometimes, and his motives for taking on Pickering's bet seem less than sincere. He begins bossing Eliza around rather quickly, telling her what to do, manipulating her with big promises and chocolate – he is quite suave, you have to give him that. He even pays Eliza's father so that he can take her into custody. All of this happens before he calls her an idiot and a slut and almost assaults her…twice.
After Eliza accuses him of treating her unfairly, he tells her,

The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls: in short, behaving as if you were in Heaven, where there are no third-class carriages, and one soul is as good as another. (5.197)
Thus, one of Higgins' claims to equality is not that he doesn't have manners (it is a foregone conclusion that he has none), but that he treats all people alike. However, he only thinks that he does; he is not as egalitarian and democratic as he likes to think that he is. When Higgins first meets Eliza in Covent Garden and is taking down her vocal sounds, he is extremely clever — so clever, in fact, that his horribly bad manners are accepted by the audience as being clever. In his tirade against Eliza, when he vents his wrath against her, we tend, on first hearing his tirade, to forgive him because he has such an admirable command of the English language as he simply rips to pieces a "guttersnipe" and "a squashed cabbage leaf." Note his superb language: "A woman who utters such depressing and disgusting sounds has no right to be anywhere — no right to live.
“Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech . . . don't sit there crooning like a bilious pigeon." Anyone who can deliver such splendid invective is admired for his or her brilliant, spontaneous use of the English language, and especially when it is directed against so lowly a person as this flower girl from the slums. But in a play dealing with manners, no proper gentleman would utter such condemnations.
In spite of Higgins' claiming to treat all people with the same manners, he certainly does not treat Mrs. Eynsford-Hill and Clara with such a display of invective, and both of these characters represent everything that Higgins abhors; they represent the worst sort of upper-middle-class hypocrisy that both he and Doolittle despise. But in spite of his bad manners, Higgins is clever, and we do admire his cleverness, even at the expense of a flower girl.
We see this cleverness through the Pygmalion-Galatea theme in which a crude piece of marble is transformed into a beautiful statue. It is not until the third act, when Eliza makes her appearance at Mrs. Higgins' house, that we know that Eliza possesses a great deal of native intelligence, that she has a perfect ear for all sorts of sounds, an excellent ability at reproducing sounds, a superb memory, and a passionate desire to improve herself.
Eliza who was a low, vulgar creature — totally without manners and totally violates the English language is seen as a completely transformed person, outwardly. She is poised, dignified, in control of her once spitfire temper, and she has rejected all of the old common vulgarity of her past life. She is no longer willing to be Higgins' creation; she now asserts her own independence.
The romantic love between Henry Higgins and Eliza
The play ends with big argument between Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle. We're not talking about a little quarrel here, but a heck of a fight. Eliza's already made Higgins plenty angry by leaving his house, and then proceeding to act all cheery and nice the next day. She's already given Pickering most of the credit for her transformation from flower girl to lady, and now, to top it all off, she's refusing to come back and live with Higgins. You see, Eliza doesn't know what to do with herself now that she's got an upper class accent, but no money, and no place to go.
Higgins doesn't seem too fazed by this. He tells her that, no, he doesn't mean to treat her poorly. He treats everyone poorly. It's just his way of being fair. Now, it's easy to be cynical and write Higgins off as a jerk. He does call Eliza a liar, a fool, an idiot, and (worst of all) a "damned impudent slut" (5.263); oh, and he almost strangles her too. But it's hard not to buy into what he's saying, at least a little bit, since he has such a beautiful way of putting things.

Eliza, herself, doesn't buy a lot of what he's saying. She doesn't seem convinced by the whole "I treat everyone like garbage" excuse. She's insulted by Higgins's offer to arrange a marriage with somebody rich. She's so annoyed by the whole thing that she starts making threats of her own. She tells Higgins that she'll marry Freddy if she has to (Higgins doesn't want his "masterpiece" wasted on such a lout). She even threatens to use her knowledge against him, to teach one of Higgins's competitors the methods she learned or – and this really ticks him off – to go into business for herself.

Strangulation nearly ensues before Higgins has a great realization. By finally learning to treat him poorly, Higgins believes that Eliza has finally become his equal. Again, this all seems a bit off, and Eliza herself isn't convinced. And why should she be? Hasn't Higgins been having these little realizations the whole time? (Recall his reaction to her arrival at Wimpole Street: "Oh, not this one again. Throw her out. No, wait, she'll be a wonderful little guinea pig. Let's have some fun, Pickering.") She has plenty of reasons not to trust him. Would you listen to someone talk like that if he or she had just tried to wring your neck? We know we wouldn't. She's got all these memories swirling around in her head now.

Eliza turns around to leave, telling Higgins "I shall not see you again. Good-bye" (5.270). Higgins isn't one to give up, however. He calls after her and tells her to pick up some groceries and fresh clothes. Higgins's mother, who's just come in to get Eliza, thinks he's crazy, but Higgins himself is sure. "She'll buy em all right enough," he tells his mother, "Good-bye."

Now, it seems like everything's up in the air at this point, right? Higgins is sure Eliza will come back but, well, he's been wrong before. Eliza seems to doubt the sincerity of Higgins's arguments, but on the other hand, he can be pretty persuasive. She, herself, has threatened to do a lot of things, like marry Freddy. Eliza is still left in a difficult position: she can't go back to selling flowers, but she doesn't want to sell herself, to marry into money. And Higgins won't meet her halfway…at least not yet. Is there romance hiding somewhere? And if not, why not?

Higgins and Eliza aren't reunited. Instead, she marries Freddy and they open a flower shop and they pretty much live happily ever after.
The romantic love between Pygmalion and Galatea
As for the story of Pygmalion and Galatea is found in Greek Mythology, and in the famous work "Metamorphoses", by the great Roman poet Ovid, their love was so unique that it is difficult to define it. But from this legendary love story, one thing is clear, man can never love an inanimate object with as much passion as he loves a living, breathing being. Love gives rise to desire and without this passion any love remains unfulfilled.
Pygmalion himself was a fine and handsome young man.
Many women loved him for his great skill and looks.

But Pygmalion never paid attention to any of these women. He saw so much to blame in women that he came at last to abhor the sex, and resolved to live unmarried. He was a sculptor, and with his with wonderful skill he sculpted a beautiful ivory statue which was so lifelike that it was difficult to believe that it was lifeless at the first glance. The beauty was such that no living woman could compete with it. It was indeed the perfect semblance of a maiden that seemed to be alive, and only prevented from moving by modesty. His art was so perfect that it concealed itself and its product looked like the workmanship of nature. Pygmalion spent hours admiring his creation.

By and by Pygmalion's admiration for his own sculpture turned to love. Oftentimes he laid his hand upon it as if to assure himself whether it were living or not, and could not, even then, believe that it was only ivory. He caressed it, and gave it such presents as young girls love - bright shells and polished stones, little birds and flowers of various hues, beads and amber. He adorned his ivory maiden with jewels. He put rainment on its limbs, and jewels on its fingers, and a necklace about its neck. To the ears he hung earrings and strings of pearls upon the breast. Her dress became her, and she looked not less charming than when unattired. He laid her on a couch spread with clothes of Tyrian dye, and called her his wife, and put her head upon a pillow of the softest feathers, as if she could enjoy their softness. He gave the statue a name: "Galatea", meaning "sleeping love'.

But what will be the consequence of falling in love with a lifeless ivory maiden?

The festival of Aphrodite was at hand - a festival celebrated with great pomp at Cyprus. Victims were offered, the altars smoked, and the odor of incense filled the air. When the festivities of Aphrodite started, Pygmalion took part in the ceremonies. He went to the temple of Aphrodite to ask forgiveness for all the years he had shunned her.

When Pygmalion had performed his part in the solemnities, he hesitantly prayed for a wife like his ivory virgin statue. He stood before the altar of Aphrodite and timidly said, "Ye gods, who can do all things, give me, I pray you, for my wife" - he dared not utter "my ivory virgin," but said instead - "one like my ivory virgin."

But Goddess Aphrodite understood what the poor man was trying to say. She was curious. How can a man love a lifeless thing so much? Was it so beautiful that Pygmalion fell in love with his own creation? So she visited the studio of the sculptor while he was away.

What she saw greatly amazed her for the sculpture had a perfect likeness to her. In fact, it would not have been wrong to say that the sculpture was an image of Aphrodite herself.

Goddess Aphrodite was charmed by Pygmalion's creation. She brought the statue to life.

When Pygmalion returned to his home, he went before Galatea and knelt down before the woman of his dreams. He looked at her lovingly, with a lover's ardour. It seemed to him that Galatea was looking at her lovingly too.

For a moment, it seemed to Pygmalion that it was just a figment of his imagination. He rubbed his eyes and looked again. But no. There was no mistake this time. Galatea was smiling at him.

He laid his hand upon the limbs; the ivory felt soft to his touch and yielded to his fingers like the wax of Hymettus. It seemed to be warm. He stood up; his mind oscillated between doubt and joy. Fearing he may be mistaken, again and again with a lover's ardor he touches the object of his hopes. It was indeed alive! The veins when pressed yielded to the finger and again resumed their roundness. Slowly it dawned on Pygmalion that the animation of his sculpture was the result of his prayer to Goddess Aphrodite who knew his desire. At last, the votary of Aphrodite found words to thank the goddess. Pygmalion humbled himself at the Goddess' feet.

Soon Pygmalion and Galatea were wed, and Pygmalion never forgot to thank Aphrodite for the gift she had given him. Aphrodite blessed the nuptials she had formed, and this union between Pygmalion and Galatea produced a son named Paphos, from whom the city Paphos, sacred to Aphrodite, received its name. He and Galatea brought gifts to her temple throughout their life and Aphrodite blessed them with happiness and love in return.

The unusual love that blossomed between Pygmalion and Galatea enthralls all. Falling in love with one's creation and then getting the desired object as wife- perhaps this was destined for Pygmalion. Even to this day, countless people and young lovers are mesmerized by this exceptional love that existed between two persons at a time when civilization was in its infancy.