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The Yale Journal of Criticism 13.2 (2000) 321-341



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Parodying the £5 Virgin: Bernard Shaw and the Playing of Pygmalion

Celia Marshik

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Although fifteen years would pass before he realized his intentions, Bernard Shaw conceived of the plot of--and cast for--Pygmalion in 1897. In September of that year, he informed Ellen Terry that he wanted to write a play for Mrs. Patrick Campbell in which the popular actress would star as "an east end dona in an apron and three orange and red ostrich feathers." 1 Pygmalion--starring Mrs. Campbell--did not debut in England until 1914, when it quickly became Shaw's most popular work to date. In the decades that followed, Shaw's tale of a young flower girl turned "duchess" through the exertions of a phonetic expert achieved widespread circulation through revivals, publication, musical adaptation (My Fair Lady), and film. It became a popular version of the Cinderella story, with a message about personal transformation that seems to transcend the historical distance between Shaw's era and our own.

If Pygmalion's ongoing popularity demonstrates the comedy's appeal to contemporary tastes and concerns, the play and its initial performance are closely tied to the 1880s and 1890s, decades when Shaw was mainly known as a political speaker and critic of late-Victorian drama. The seeds of Pygmalion's central joke were planted as Shaw saw the political power of social purity movements, which he initially championed, turned against the theater. When Shaw finally wrote and helped to produce Pygmalion, he used the play to parody the social movements that had, he felt, assumed hysterical proportions and hampered his early career. The comedy engages in a critique of the "Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon," a founding document of the purity movement, as it mocks Shaw's old opponents. This parody has, however, escaped the attention of audiences and critics, partly because of the passage of time and partly because Mrs. Patrick Campbell hyper-eroticized the role of Eliza Doolittle in the play's English and American debuts. Shaw may have hoped that his leading lady would sharpen his critique of social purity; instead, Campbell compromised Shaw's spoof as she brought her previous roles with her onto the stage.

Pygmalion has received considerable scholarly attention because it demonstrates Shaw's interest in the role of language in the English [End Page 321] class system. It has also drawn the attention of psychoanalytic critics, who see Higgins as a figure for Shaw. The comedy has not, however, been considered in dialogue with the efforts of nineteenth- and twentieth-century purity movements. 2 By contextualizing the play within the Victorian climate that inspired it, I demonstrate that Shaw's early battles with stage censorship and social purity linger in works that seem preoccupied with other concerns. Moreover, I argue that Shaw's casting choice powerfully influenced how Pygmalion would be understood by audiences of the 1910s and 1920s, audiences that might otherwise have recognized Shaw's play with moralists' myths.

In July of 1885, the editor and journalist William T. Stead shocked the British public with his "Maiden Tribute," a series of articles in the Pall Mall Gazette. After declaring that "the most imperious sense of duty" impelled his pen, Stead documented how working-class girls were

snared, trapped, and outraged, either when under the influence of drugs or after a prolonged struggle in a locked room, in which the weaker succumbs to sheer downright force. Others are regularly procured; bought at so much per head in some cases, or enticed under various promises into the fatal chamber. 3

Stead interviewed prostitutes, madams, johns, policemen, and others to unveil systemic efforts in the nation's capital to deprive young, vulnerable females of their virginity, which he asserted a "woman ought to value more than life" (3).

The highlight of Stead's work, "A Child of Thirteen Bought for £5," chronicled the purchase of young "Lily" from her parents. According to Stead, Lily's drunken mother knew that her daughter...

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