i might be late to the party, maybe there's decades of fandom discourse on the ending of Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw and the ending of My Fair Lady by Lerner & Lowe, and which ending is the better one?
i've been saying this for years, i am definitely in camp Shaw here. Eliza deserves better than Henry Higgins: they should NOT end the play as a couple.
and i recently realized that My Fair Lady, with its romantic ending, actually furnishes a good, musical example of HOW Eliza's character growth surpasses Higgins
act I, "Just You Wait," sings Eliza menacingly. The song evolves from malicious daydreams into this grand fanfare when Eliza imagines the King of England doting on her, and arranging for Henry Higgins' gruesome execution. talk about a power fantasy. talk about infantile.
now cast your mind forward. act II, "You Did It." Pickering slathers on praise of Professor Higgins' ingenuity and the triumph at the ball. Higgins laps it all up. His army of servants come out and sing a paean of praise. infantile doesn't begin to describe it.
so both of the characters get a whole song where they dream about power and fulfillment, getting to crush all those who doubted and spurned them--- Eliza's dream comes at the beginning of her story, and it never really comes true. For Henry, that fantasy comes true and he takes it for reality.
Eliza over the course of act II comes to realize her own smallness in the world, she realizes how foolish her initial dream was, she realizes there's nowhere she really fits in, now. That's a journey, that's character development. Henry Higgins starts the play self-inflated. In the middle, he's lording over all Creation. And Shaw wrote him at the end of his journey, realizing what a little creature he is, stuck in a shell, listening to dead recordings.
Eliza? She got her stupid power fantasies out of her system, and realizes her dream for what it was. She finds the courage to go into the world. She leaves him behind. She should not go back to him.
Shaw truther, OUT.
