Shaw, Subjective Inequality, and the Social Meanings of Language in Pygmalion

Author(s): Lynda Mugglestone

Reviewed work(s):
Source: The Review of English Studies, New Series, Vol. 44, No. 175 (Aug., 1993), pp. 373-385
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/517281 .
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 SHAW, SUBJECTIVE INEQUALITY, AND THE
SOCIAL MEANINGS OF LANGUAGE
IN PYGMALION

By LYNDA MUGGLESTONE

The London work-girlis rarely capableof raising herself, or

being raised,to a placein life abovethat to whichshe was born;
she cannotlearnhowto standandsit andmovelikea womanbred
to refinement,any more than she can fashion her tongue to
gracefulspeech.
WITH these words George Gissing stressed his conviction that social
transformation, whether passive or active ('raising or being raised'),
was still, for a member of the London underclass in the late nineteenth
century, a virtual impossibility; twenty-one years later, however,
George Bernard Shaw was resolutely to prove him wrong in the
person of Eliza Doolittle, the Lisson Grove flower-girl who, trans-
planted to the social environs of Wimpole Street, is turned into an
'artificial duchess'2 by means of the science of phonetics. Gissing's
emphasis on nature, and the sense of innate inequality which this
implies, is thus displaced by Shaw's belief in nurture, and the
conditioning effects of social circumstance; Eliza indeed proves
herself more than capable of 'being raised' and of being educated in
the social and linguistic mannerisms of 'a woman bred to refinement',
perhaps most notably in the way in which she can, and does, 'fashion
her tongue to graceful speech'.
The Pygmalion myth in Shaw's hands, predictably endowed with
social meaning, becomes therefore not only a paradigm of social
mobility, but also a paean to inherent equality, with its thesis, as
Nicholas Grene has pointed out, that 'a lady is only a flower-girl plus
six months phonetic training, a gentleman only a dustman with
money'.3 Eliza's education in the behavioural norms of the English
upper classes, and in the markers, and particularly the linguistic
markers, of superior social status, is as a result used as a means of
exploring not only the potential for individual advancement in an 'age
1 G.
Gissing, New Grub Street (London, 1891), 154.
2 G. B. Shaw, Androcles and the Lion, Overruled, Pygmalion
(London, 1916), Pygmalion,
IV. 162 (unless otherwise specified, this edition of Pygmalion will be used throughout).
3 N. Grene, Bernard Shaw: A Critical View (London, 1984), 108.
RES New Series, Vol. XLIV, No. 175 (1993) ? OxfordUniversityPress 1993
374 MUGGLESTONE
of upstarts',4 but also, and more importantly, the very foundations of
social equality and inequality, and the values and value judgements,
the perceptions of worth and status, which come in turn to surround
them.
The nature of social equality, as well as its importance, are of course
prevailing Shavian themes, attributable in a number of ways to his
childhood education in the sensibilities of social class ('No Shaw could
form a social acquaintance with a shopkeeper nor with a Roman
Catholic; and naturally the Shaw parents impressed that fact on their
children and thereby made arrantsnobs of them').5 The legacy of such
social consciousness was, however, soon overlaid by the more over-
riding preoccupations of a (Fabian) social conscience; alreadyin 1873,
Shaw's loathing of the estate agent's office where he worked derives
from the way in which it was 'saturated with class feeling',6 and his
conversion to socialism in the early 1880s was only to give a firmer
intellectual framework for such already ingrained perceptions. The
social consciousness of his early years and the social conscience of his
later ones unite, however, in the writing of Pygmalion, and in his
treatment of social illusion and social reality Shaw produces a text
which combines the seemingly divergent spheres of socialist parable
and social comedy of manners.
Its success as both socialist parable and social comedy depends
nevertheless not only upon some understanding of Shaw's own social
and egalitarian preoccupations, but also upon some consideration of
the wider social, linguistic, and perhaps more particularly, socio-
linguistic, contexts upon which it draws. The century into which
Shaw was born, for example, was witness to the rise of entirely new
conceptions of social identity, the class distinctions with which
Pygmalion deals coming into being only along its course; the working
classes in which Eliza is firmly located in Act I hence receive lexico-
graphical recognition in OED only in 1816, the upper classes to which
she aspires appear only from 1826. Reflecting fundamentally different
perceptions of social labelling and social hierarchies, the nuances of
class, first recorded in 1772,7 were to create the major social preoccu-
pations of the nineteenth century. Class consciousness, first recorded
in 1887, is, in effect, the issue which was to dominate Pygmalion,
mirrored most obviously in the linguistic signals of social identity
which provide the key to Eliza's transformation.
4 Pygmalion, I. 114. 5 G. B. Shaw, Sixteen Self Sketches (London, 1949), 91.
6 Cited in M.
Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, i, The Search for Love 1856-1898 (London, 1988),
53.
7 OED dates the use of the word class in its modern sense ('a division or order of society
according to status; a rank or grade of society') to 1772, citing Hanway's Observations on the
Causes of Dissoluteness which reigns among the lower classes of the people in illustration.
 PYGMALION 375
'It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without
making some other Englishman hate or despise him', states Shaw in
his Preface,8 stressing the social meanings subsumed within language,
and especially spoken language. In this context, however, it becomes
additionally important to recognize that the stratified social meanings
which accent now encompasses, and with which Pygmalion deals, are,
like class and its attendant ramifications, themselves largely products
of the nineteenth century alone.
These recent changes in social structure in fact seem to bring the
new and socially connotative values surrounding accent in their wake,
the escalation in its social significance being more than apparent in
contemporary comment; whereas for Joseph Priestley in 1762 pro-
nunciation had been merely an 'ornament' of correct speech,9 for
William Savage writing in 1833 its role as determiner of social identity
is clearly well established. Pronunciation is 'the talisman that will
enforce admiration or beget contempt; that will produce esteem or
preclude friendship; that will bar the door or make portals fly open'.10
This role of accent as a determiner not only of social status but also
of social acceptability is thus in turn adopted as the major vehicle for
Shaw's social critique in Pygmalion. Presented in terms of Eliza's
metamorphosis in the hands of the phonetician, Henry Higgins, it
reflects Shaw's sensitivity not only to the way in which doors may be
barred by details of language, but also, and more fundamentally, to
the way in which divisions of social inequality had come in turn to be
mirrored by determinants of linguistic inequality, by systems of
markers superficial in themselves but endowed with great and
potentially divisive social significance.
Higgins's basis in the real phonetician, Henry Sweet, Reader in
Phonetics at Oxford from 1901, but known personally by Shaw from
the late 1870s, can in consequence be seen to take on additional
significance. As Shaw and Sweet were aware, for example, phonetics,
though still a 'new science', was in fact potentially far more than the
mere study of articulation and voice production, and it was precisely
its potential for playing a social role which was, in strikingly similar
ways, to interest them both. As a result Sweet can in a number of ways
be seen to provide not only the model for Higgins, but also the
impetus for the entire play. As he wrote in his Handbook in 1877,
'When a firm control of pronunciation has thus been acquired,
8
Pygmalion, Preface, 99.
9 J.
Priestley, A Course of Lectures on the Theory of Language and Universal Grammar
(Warrington, 1762), 250.
10 W. H. Savage, The Vulgarismsand Improprietiesof the English Language (London, 1833),
pp. iv-v.
376 MUGGLESTONE

provincialisms and vulgarisms will at last be eliminated and some of

the most important barriers between the different classes of society
will thus be abolished.'ll Pygmalion can, in effect, be seen as Shaw's
response; as Higgins himself phrases it in the play-thereby closely
echoing Sweet in his perceptions-pronunciation, no longer merely an
ornament, is instead 'the deepest gulf that separates class from class
and soul from soul'.12
The 'deep gulf' separating Eliza and Higgins in the beginning of the
play is thus initially established in linguistic terms, Eliza's phonemic
and grammatical divergence from the norms of standard English
working as a concise symbol of her social unacceptability, just as
Colonel Pickering's social and linguistic location in 'Cheltenham,
Harrow, Cambridge and India'13 establishes the converse. Eliza's
social identity, and attendant social ostracism, is hence determined by
the linguistic shibboleths of Ih/ dropping and double negation, by her
realizations of paying as pyin, and of flowers as flahrz, and by the
connotative values which had come to attend such usages. Though she
is acknowledged as 'a human being with a soul and the divine gift of
articulate speech',14 the separation of 'soul from soul' by matters of
pronunciation is nowhere clearer than in Higgins's eloquent range of
synonyms for Eliza's social identity; she is 'a squashed cabbage leaf',15
'a draggle-tailed guttersnipe', 'a baggage', 'deliciously low' and
'horribly dirty'.16 Rendered scarcely more than animate by such
epithets, their use nevertheless serves to emphasize that fusion of
social and linguistic judgement which had come to prevail by the end
of the nineteenth century and which was, moreover, to extend into our
own.
As David Crystal noted in 1987, 'We . . . only have to speak, to
provide . . . innumerable clues about our personal history and social
identity',17 but Shaw stresses in Pygmalion that such clues, in an era
unduly sensitized to the social import of language, may indicate not
only our past, and our present, but may also determine our future:
Eliza's 'kerbstone English', whilst graphically describing her present
social location, is also 'the English that will keep her in the gutter to
the end of her days',18 and Eliza herself recognizes that even the minor
transition to employment within a flower-shop is impeded by percep-
tions of her linguistic infelicities-she states, thereby compounding
I H. Sweet, A Handbook of Phonetics (Oxford, 1877), 196. 12 Pygmalion, III. 157.
13 Ibid. I. 112. 14 Ibid. I. 114.
15 This additional epithet appears in the film version of Pygmalion (London: Penguin, 1941),
27.
16
Pygmalion, II. 123, 120, 123.
17 D.
Crystal, The CambridgeEncyclopaedia of Language (London, 1987), 17.
18 Pygmalion, I. 115.
 PYGMALION 377
such infelicities by the use of a flat adverb, 'they wont take me unless I
can talk more genteel'.19
Language, and especially pronunciation, as Shaw presents it, may
therefore combine to work not only as a social determiner, but also,
and more dangerously, as a social determinant, preventing the 'equal
rights and opportunities for all' which Shaw gave as his definition of
socialism in 1890.20 Fabianism and phonetics thus achieve parallel
aims in Pygmalion, the solution to such linguistic, and attendant
social, determinism being shown to rest in the possibilities of linguis-
tic, and hence social, transformationas worked by Higgins upon Eliza
by means of her education in the nuances of phonemic propriety.
Shaw's point here, however, is less a recommendation of remedial
phonetics for the problems of a class-based society than a consider-
ation of the nature of equality in itself, and of the superficial issues
which may obscure such knowledge.
Equality, and the nature of social identity, in fact come to provide
dominant motifs within Eliza's conversation; 'My character is the
same to me as any lady's',21 she stresses to Higgins in Act I, and,
though 'wounded and whimpering' in Act II, she continues to assert
the Fabian truth that money alone leads to rank: 'I wont be called a
baggage when Ive offered to pay like any lady';22just as, in the tumult
and confusion of the opening scene, she states, albeit 'with feeble
defiance', 'Ive a right to be here if I like, same as you'.23 Such
comments are used to point the difference between the undeniable
facts of innate equality, and the social, including the linguistic,
fallacies which nevertheless may inhibit its recognition.
Such discrepancies are underlined further by Shaw himself in his
stage directions; though 'comparedto the ladies, she is very dirty', this
first description of Eliza makes the salient point that she is, however,
'as clean as she can afford to be'.24 Cleanliness, like accent, becomes
yet another trapping of social circumstance, an accident of birth and
class. Like accent also, cleanliness, or rather its converse, initially
constitutes a marker of Eliza's social ostracism, and is likewise to be
subject to transition during Eliza's social transformation. The ease
with which it is removed, however, serves to stress the way in which
markers of class may have their significance overstated as determi-
nants, as well as determiners, of individual identity; though Eliza was,
for example, deemed entirely unworthy of discourse by Clara
19 Ibid. II. 121.
20 G. B. Shaw, What Socialism Is (Fabian Tract No. 4, 1890). Cited in Holroyd, Shaw, i.
182.
21 22 Ibid. II. 120. 23 Ibid. I. 114.
Pygmalion, I. 113.
24 Ibid. I. 107.

C
378 MUGGLESTONE

Eynsford-Hill in Act I, her acquisition of the right accent, plus the

elimination of the dirt, makes her instead an object of emulation by
Act III, irrespective of the fact that the substance of her conversation,
in terms of true social propriety, still lacks the conventions appro-
priate for polite conversation.25
This disjunction in terms of social meaning between superficial
markers and substantive difference is nowhere made clearer than in
the scenes detailing Mrs Higgins's 'At Home', where it is used to pro-
duce some of Shaw's richest comedy, as well as to exercise to the full
his talents as Fabian social critic. The scene unites (with the addition
of Mrs Higgins herself) the social grouping of the beginning of the
play: the Eynsford-Hills, Pickering, Higgins, and Eliza. Eliza, how-
ever, bereft of her basket of flowers, and equipped with a new set of
social markers, produces a completely different impression; rather
than falling over her as he did in Act I, Freddy Eynsford-Hill instead
falls in love with her, and his sister Clara is likewise fascinated, de-
scribed as 'devouring her [Eliza] with her eyes'.26
Nevertheless, it is important to remember that Eliza at this stage
still remains fundamentally the same, distinct only in superficial
details from 'the draggle-tailed guttersnipe'27of Act II. In modern
society, however, as Shaw illustrates, it is precisely these superficial
details which tend to be endowed with most significance, and upon
which acceptability and its criteria tend to depend; Eliza, upon
entering the room, 'produces an impression of such remarkable
distinction and beauty . . . that they all rise, quite fluttered'. Such
distinction is in turn reinforced by both her 'studied grace' and 'great
beauty of tone' but it is above all Eliza's 'pedantic correctness of
pronunciation', and the social meanings with which it is imbued, that
were to occupy Shaw primarily in this passage.28
Shaw plays heavily on the role of accent as the major social
determiner of identity and acceptability, producing a comic
dichotomy in Eliza's conversation between what she says, and how she
says it. Her manyfaux pas in terms of conversationalpropriety indeed
seem as a result to be transcended entirely by the social significance of
her adoptive RP and the social as well as phonemic prestige surround-
ing it. 'What become of her new straw hat that should have come to
me? Somebody pinched it; and what I say is, them as pinched it done

25 See
e.g. Eliza's discussion of the drinking habits of her father (III. 152): 'It never did him
no harm what I could see. But then he did not keep it up regular. On the burst, as you might say
... When he was out of work, my mother used to give him fourpence and tell him to go out and
not come back until he'd drunk himself cheerful and loving-like. There's lots of women has to
make their husbands drunk to make them fit to live with.'
26 Ibid. III. 150. 27 Ibid. II. 123. 28 Ibid. III. 150.
 PYGMALION 379
her in', expounds Eliza upon the untimely demise of her aunt,29
thereby uniting the idiom and expression of her social origins with the
new social status suggested by her enunciation. The connotative
values of class contained within the latter clearly dominate in terms of
social meaning, displacing the significance of non-standard tense
relations (and even the major solecism of swearing) and rendering
Eliza no longer a representative of 'kerbstone English' but instead the
epitome of linguistic fashion, and an exemplar of the 'new small talk'
for the impressionable Clara ('It's so quaint, and gives such a smart
emphasis to things that are not in themselves very witty. I find the
new small talk delightful and quite innocent').30
Higgins, as he promised, has in effect created a new social identity
for Eliza, bridging the 'gulf that separates class from class and soul
from soul' by an exercise in phonetics, and expenditure on her dress.
The presentation of the class divide in such terms is thus made to
reflect the many paradoxes and pretences which surrounded, and still
surround, questions of social worth and social acceptability. In this
context it is salient, as well as salutary, to remember that Higgins's
first reactions to Eliza's 'Lisson Grove lingo'31denied her social, and
indeed, individual worth at all: 'A woman who utters such depressing
and disgusting sounds has no right to be anywhere-no right to live.'32
Eliza's innate equality can thus only be seen, even by Higgins himself,
once she has gained access to symbols of social equality, and the
pattern is precisely the same for her father. As Alfred Doolittle gains a
fortune, so Eliza gains an accent (though losing another) and with
such trappings both become more than capable of playing the social
roles of lady and gentleman.
Equality and inequality in social terms are thereby proven to be
both extrinsic and subjective; this is clearly Shaw's thesis from a
socialist point of view. From a linguistic point of view, his thesis is
perhaps more striking. Long before the advent of sociolinguistics,
Shaw seems to have been aware not only of the marked co-variation of
accent and class, but also of the social side-effects of what R. A.
Hudson has termed the 'subjective inequality of language', or, in other
words, aware that 'linguistic inequality can be seen as a cause (along
with many other factors, of course) of social inequality, as well as a
consequence of it'.33 This fact, of language as both cause and conse-
quence of class divisions and class distinctions, is indeed at the heart
of Shaw's perceptions in Pygmalion, Eliza's 'kerbstone English' being
not only the product of her social deprivation, but also the factor

29 Ibid. III. 151-2. 30 Ibid. III. 153-4. 31 Ibid. II. 120.

32 Ibid. I. 114. 33 R. A. Hudson, Sociolinguistics (Cambridge, 1980), 193.
380 MUGGLESTONE
which will ultimately reinforce it, and which, as Higgins is made to
stress, 'will keep her in the gutter to the end of her days'.34
Shaw himself recurs often in his writings to this notion of accent as
social impediment, though perhaps most pertinently in his 1906
comment that 'most Englishmen and women would almost rather die
than be convicted of speaking like costermongers and flower girls'.35
This comment, giving additional emphasis to Shaw's perceptions of
linguistic disadvantage and its social correlations, serves more signifi-
cantly, however, to underline the particular social resonance of the
cockney in then contemporary English society, a fact which is,
moreover, used by Shaw to add a further dimension to the social
meanings already evident in Eliza's transformation.
A knowledge of the underlying social and linguistic contexts is again
useful; the cockney, throughout the nineteenth century, is, for
example, not only seen as a kind of social pariah, but also becomes, in
terms of the prevailing prescriptive ideology, a butt for all the
linguistic sins of the age, the stereotype of every linguistic, and
particularly phonemic, infelicity. The strength of contemporary
feelings was indeed such that even Henry Sweet was drawn to remark
on the way in which 'The Cockney dialect seems very ugly to the
educated Englishman or woman because he-and still more she-lives
in a perpetual terror of being taken for a Cockney'.36A report on the
teaching of English in elementary schools, published in 1909, went
still further: 'Most dialects have their own distinctive charm and
historical interest; but Cockneyism seems to have no redeeming
features, and need only to be heard to be condemned.'37The linguistic
prejudice manifest in such statements was of course merely a marker
of attendant social prejudice, but nevertheless, for many in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such statements were
adopted as social facts, employed, as by Gissing, to reinforce percep-
tions of the inherent rather than imposed inequality surrounding the
cockney.38 Shaw's transformation of not only a flower-girl, but
moreover an undeniably cockney flower-girl, into a lady of such
distinction that she can be mistaken for a Hungarian princess thereby
takes on added social force. Few other things in fact could have
demonstrated his belief in underlying equality so well.
34 Pygmalion, I. 115.
35 G. B. Shaw, 'The Simplified Spelling Proposals', The Times, 25 Sept. 1906.
36 H.
Sweet, A Primer of Spoken English (Oxford, 1890), p. vi.
37 Cited in J. Franklyn, The Cockney: A Survey of London Life and Language (London,
1953), 223.
38 Gissing's description of Mrs Yule's accent in New Grub Street (1891) can be taken as
representative: 'Mrs. Yule's speech was seldom ungrammatical, and her intonation was not
flagrantlyvulgar, but the accent of the London poor, which brands as with hereditarybaseness,
 PYGMALION 381
In this, as Nicholas Grene recognizes, Shaw 'challenges the
assumption that there is anything more to gentility than money and
the arbitraryshibboleths of social behaviour. Socially we are what we
sound like, and if we can change our voices we change ourselves',39or
rather, and perhaps rather more accurately, we can change the way in
which others perceive us, even if we do happen to belong, at least
originally, to that social substratum of the cockney. The socialist
parable of Pygmalion is primarily made to reside, therefore, in Shaw's
analysis of the inherent superficiality of those symbols commonly used
to determine social acceptability; only Eliza's education in linguistic
manners and behavioural norms, together with the external trappings
provided by Pickering, can be said in any real sense to differentiate her
from the 'squashed cabbage leaf' of Act I. No longer 'giving herself
away as soon as she opens her mouth', the implications of this fact are,
however, extended by Shaw to provide yet another, and perhaps more
profound, kind of social education for the character of Clara in the
play.
Clara, presented throughout in terms of her undue reliance on the
markers of social status, undergoes, as we have seen, a comic
conversion on the subject of Eliza, recoiling from her in disgust in Act
I, revering her by Act III, unaware of course that the Miss Doolittle
of the latter, and the bedraggled flower-seller of the former are one
and the same. Forced to contemplate the difference between identity
and social identity, Clara thus receives a social education of a rather
different kind to that already experienced by Eliza-or, as Shaw puts
it in his Epilogue, 'Clara's snobbery went bang':
on being suddenly wakened to enthusiasm by a girl of her own age who ...
produced in her a gushing desire to take her for a model, . . . she discovered
that this exquisite apparition had graduated from the gutter in a few months
time. It shook her so violently, that when Mr H. G. Wells ... placed her at
the angle of view from which the life she was leading and the society to which
she clung appeared in its true relation to real human needs and worthy social
structure, he effected a conversion . . . comparable to the most sensational
feats of General Booth.40
'Worthy social structure' and 'real human needs' are of course the
substance of Shaw's message. Phonetics becomes the agent of Fabian
ideals in the consummate ease with which it levels class distinctions
and fills in class divides, providing, as a cancelled passage of

still clung to her words, rendering futile such propriety of phrase as she owed to years of associ-
ation with educated people' (p. 154).
39 Grene, A Critical View, 102. 40 Pygmalion, Epilogue, 199-200.
382 MUGGLESTONE

Pygmalion made clear, the means for 'the regeneration of the human
race through the most difficult science in the world'.41
Clara'sregeneration, together with that of Eliza, thus stands as part
of the myth of re-creation employed in the play. Alongside this,
however, must also be considered the parallel social transformationof
Alfred Doolittle, gaining money rather than modifications of accent in
his role of natural philosopher to the Wannafeller Moral Reform
World League. Like Eliza, his original social location is determined
merely by the superficial rather than the innate; his occupation as
dustman heightens the dirt which had been prominent in the early
social definitions of his daughter, but its greater abundance never-
theless makes it no more difficult to remove. Like Eliza, Alfred
Doolittle was 'as clean as he could afford to be' and the acquisition of
?3,000 a year rapidly effects a transition within such necessary
markersof acceptability, their repercussions readily perceptible in the
parlourmaid's responses when he presents himself at Mrs Higgins's
Chelsea apartment:
Mr Henry: a gentleman wants to see you very particular.
THE PARLOR-MAID.
Hes been sent on from Wimpole Street.
HIGGINS.Oh, bother! I cant see anyone now. Who is it?
THE PARLOR-MAID. A Mr Doolittle, sir.
PICKERING. Doolittle! Do you mean the dustman?
THE PARLOR-MAID. Dustman! Oh no, sir: a gentleman.42
The parlour-maid's incredulity when Colonel Pickering suggests
that the 'gentleman' may in fact be a 'dustman' is all too self-evident.
Self-evident also is Shaw's point about the nature of social perceptions
and social class, made more pertinent by its consideration of the role
of money within a capitalist society, and the fact that though accent
may operate as a dominant social determiner, money may at times
work still better. Class is after all based primarily on the divisions of
socio-economic status, and, as Shaw comments in Sixteen Self
Sketches, it is only 'sufficient equality of income [that] . . . will break
down class segregation'.43 As other contemporary commentators
stressed, however, not only will sufficient money break down the
barriers of class, it will also break down those of accent; 'the
deliberate, cold-blooded omission of an "h" is abhorrent to educated
ears', noted G. Hill in 1902 with reference to that most obvious
shibboleth of social and linguistic convention, but 'the possession of a
very large income' will nevertheless 'ensure forgiveness'.44 Alfred
41 This
appears on p. 72 of the Hanley Collection typescript, held in the library of the
University of Texas. Cited in L. Crompton, Shaw the Dramatist (London, 1971), 249 n. 10.
42 43 Shaw, Sixteen Self Sketches, 24.
Pygmalion, v. 170-1.
44 Revd. G. Hill, The Aspirate (London, 1902), 7.
 PYGMALION 383
Doolittle, though addressing himself to 'Enry Iggins'45 rather than
Henry Higgins, is still therefore to be given entirely unquestioning
acceptance as a gentleman.
As all this goes to prove, the virtues of gentlemen and ladies do not
necessarily have anything to do with the ramifications of social status
and social identity, though their social trappings, whether in terms of
phonemes or property, do. Even Alfred Doolittle, however, feels the
pressure of the social expectations which accompany the acquisition of
worldly wealth, lamenting to Higgins: '11 have to learn to speak
middle class language from you, instead of speaking proper English.
Thats where youll come in; and I daresay thats what you done it
for.'46
As David Crystal makes clear, 'More than anything else, language
shows we "belong", providing the most natural badge, or symbol, of
public and private identity'.47 Eliza sheds the language of her social
origins, and even her father acknowledges some sense of what is more
appropriate for 'belonging' to his new social location; the public
identity of both has changed. In such changes, however, both are, as
Alfred Doolittle realizes, 'disclassed',48and this, in effect, poses the
more serious problems for their ultimate social identity. Bearing the
social symbols of the upper classes, they can no longer 'belong' to
those from which they came. The problems are less for Alfred
Doolittle himself: wielding his dustmanship 'like a banner', he
becomes, as Shaw describes in his Epilogue, 'extremely popular in the
smartest society' by means of 'a social talent which triumphed over
every prejudice and every disadvantage'.49
Eliza's case is different; she gains not only the social advantages of
her accent, but along with it, as Mrs Higgins warns early in the play,
'the manners and habits that disqualify a fine lady from earning her
own living without giving her a fine lady's income'.50 In effect, once
Higgins's bet is completed, Eliza belongs nowhere; no longer possess-
ing her 'kerbstone English' she is ill-equipped to return to the gutter,
and though possessing in abundance the social markersof a 'lady', she
lacks the financial means to give them social reality. Her role in
Wimpole Street ends with her victory at the ambassador's garden
party,51 after which it, and she, are redundant: 'What am I fit for?
What have you left me fit for? Where am I to go? What am I to do?

45 This pronunciation of Higgins's name is specified in the text of the film version of
Pygmalion (1941), 120.
46 47 Crystal, Encyclopaedia of Language, 17.
Pygmalion, v. 174.
48 Pygmalion, Epilogue, 196.
49 Ibid. 50 Ibid. III. 158.
51 In the revised text of 1938, this is changed to the Embassy Ball.
384 MUGGLESTONE
Whats to become of me?'52 The social consequences of linguistic
change, and the new public identity which it comports, are made still
clearer in the final Act of the play; as Eliza stresses to Higgins: 'when a
child is brought to a foreign country, it picks up the language in a few
weeks, and forgets its own. Well, I am a child in your country. I have
forgotten my own language, and can speak nothing but yours.'53
The solution is of course in terms of Eliza's original social ideal, the
'lady in the flower shop', a role uniting her new social abilities with
those more pragmatic ones gained earlier beneath the auspices of
Covent Garden. Replacing the corner of Tottenham Court Road with
Kensington,54 Eliza is able to 'belong' once more, linguistically,
socially, and, perhaps more importantly, materially, no longer con-
demned to feeling 'a child' in a 'foreign country'.
Shaw's study of the social markers which make up the seemingly
insurmountable divisions of class is therefore none the less valid, or
far-reaching, for all the apparent lightheartedness of the play. Its
social meaning can be seen above all to reside in the stress placed on
innate equality, against the arbitrary values placed on the symbols
which obscure it, on the differences of income and enunciation which
may spuriously suggest acceptability or otherwise. The social, and
linguistic, manners in which Eliza receives her education belong of
course only to the latter, or at least superficially, but, as Higgins tells
her at the end of the play, a true social education may ultimately
combine to give them another and altogether different value: '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.'55In a
typically Shavian paradox, the manners on which Pygmalion's comedy
has primarily been based are themselves used to convey Shaw's
socialist convictions about the insubstantiality of class and its distinc-
tions: Higgins, intolerant and ultimately oblivious of social conven-
tions, treats all duchesses as flower-girls; Pickering, with the
politeness which makes him address Eliza as 'Miss Doolittle' even in
the beginning, treats all flower-girls as duchesses. In the final count, it
is this sense of social behaviour which matters most: 'Really and truly,
apart from the things anyone can pick up (the dressing and the proper
52
Pygmalion (1941), 106. In the 1916 text of Pygmalion, this reads, 'What'sto become of me?
What's to become of me?' (IV. 163).
53 Ibid. v. 180.
54 Eliza's eventual social location, as Shaw stresses in a letter to Gabriel Pascal (24 Feb. 1938),
'is not a Bond Street shop, but a South Kensington one: half florist's, half greengrocer's and
fruiterer's'(Collected Letters 1928-1950, ed. Dan H. Lawrence (London, 1989), 494).
55 Pygmalion, v. 184.
 PYGMALION 385

way of speaking, and so on), the difference between a lady and a

flower girl is not how she behaves, but how shes treated', says Eliza,56
giving final expression to the 'real human needs' and 'worthy social
structure' which, as Shaw has always been aware, continue to lie
behind the superficialities of social disguise.

56 Ibid. v. 180.