My Fair Lady: A Voice for Change

Introduction

Makeover dramas in which the central female character is transformed from “blah to beautiful” have a long tradition in cinematic history.¹ The “Cinderella” fairytale of Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, as well as the much older creation myths from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, often provide source material and staple tropes for makeover films. These adaptations, focused on female beauty and romance, fashion the myth of the perfect woman and typically feature a male protagonist who helps remake an imperfect leading lady into an idealized vision of femininity. Each new version of the makeover story reveals the changing standards of physical attractiveness and women’s status in the cultural imaginary, and emphasizes the distance a “defective” heroine must travel to reach a dominant ideal.

Producer Gabriel Pascal’s film Pygmalion (1938) is just one example of this long fixation on reinventing women. It is not only indebted to George Bernard Shaw’s play of the same name (1914), but also to Ovid’s Metamorphoses.² Unlike most makeover films, this story does not recount an archetypal romance. In Ovid’s version of the story, the sculptor Pygmalion is so disgusted by women that he resolves to carve a flawless female out of ivory.³ Desire for his beautiful creation softens the sculptor’s misogyny; he becomes so enamored that he appeals to Venus, the goddess of love, to have a companion just like his statue. Soon thereafter, with Venus’s aid, the ivory maiden comes to life in the artist’s arms and they are married.

The story of Pygmalion has inspired numerous iterations in several literary and musical genres including poetry, novels, plays, and operas. Probably the best known to audiences today are movies, including the film adaptation of Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s musical My Fair Lady (Warner Brothers, 1964), but also (to name only a few) Pretty Woman (1990), She’s All That (1999), and most recently Ruby Sparks (2012).⁴ Taken to the extreme, the manufacture of the perfect woman became The Stepford Wives (1975 and 2004).

This essay investigates how the plot and music of My Fair Lady’s cinematic adaptation constructed normative femininity for mid-century American audiences. Although the motion picture remains set in early twentieth-century London, like Shaw’s play, it nevertheless portrays an early 1960s American ideal. I assert that this film registers an important shift in femininity’s construction at a moment when (white, middle-class) females began to question their oppressive conditions in the domestic economy. Indeed, the differences between the 1956 stage musical and the 1964 film adaptation reveal momentum toward second-wave feminism’s emergence.

Stacy Wolf has already delineated crucial distinctions between musicals of the 1950s and 1960s in her feminist study of the genre. She observes that heterosexual love plots structured musicals of the 1950s, but as second-wave feminism gained traction, some musicals employed the single girl character to depict the changing nature of (white) female sexuality.⁵ This new protagonist responded to Helen Gurley Brown’s advice in Sex and the Single Girl (1962), as well as women’s changing social terrain. Eliza of the stage musical My Fair Lady is suspended between these two types of characters. While she does not marry Professor Higgins at the end (nor can he be considered Prince Charming), her story hints of love, since Lerner and Loewe left romance ambiguous between the professor and his pupil. The musical’s film adaptation, however, poised as it was at the beginning of second-wave feminism, forecasts a much larger metamorphosis for women. Informed by the writings of Raymond Williams and Jacques Attali, this essay argues that the heroine’s vocality becomes an expression of women’s progress—a voice for change.

Unlike other scholars, I disagree that Eliza’s transformation into a “duchess” reinvents the Cinderella fairytale. This article exposes numerous reasons why this interpretation has appealed to scholars and audiences alike. Mainly, the fairytale reading attempts to resolve a number of uncomfortable questions raised in the story, such as the absence of a typical love plot, and especially Higgins’s...