Pickering tells her she must not think of herself as an experiment, and she expresses her gratitude to him. She says that even though Higgins was the one who trained the flower girl to become a duchess, Pickering always treated her like a duchess, even when she was a flower girl.
His treatment of her taught her not phonetics, but self-respect. Higgins is speaking incorrigibly harshly to her when her father reappears, surprising her badly.
He tells her that he is all dressed up because he is on his way to get married to his woman. Pickering and Mrs. Higgins are asked to come along. Higgins and Eliza are finally left alone while the rest go off to get ready. They proceed to quarrel. Higgins claims that while he may treat her badly, he is at least fair in that he has never treated anyone else differently.
He tells her she should come back with him just for the fun of it--he will adopt her as a daughter, or she can marry Pickering.
She swings around and cries that she won't even marry Higgins if he asks. She mentions that Freddy has been writing her love letters, but Higgins immediately dismisses him as a fool.
She says that she will marry Freddy, and that the two will support themselves by taking Higgins' phonetic methods to his chief rival. Higgins is outraged but cannot help wondering at her character--he finds this defiance much more appealing than the submissiveness of the slippers-fetcher. Higgins comes in to tell Eliza it is time to leave.
As she is about to exit, Higgins tells her offhandedly to fetch him some gloves, ties, ham, and cheese while she is out. She replies ambivalently and departs; we do not know if she will follow his orders. This concern will also prove to be the essence of the comedy in the next scene, when Eliza will narrate a story about the death of her aunt with impeccable pronunciation, but her choice of subject matter will be deliciously low and vulgar.
The original Pygmalion theme is now fully introduced. The creator, Higgins Pygmalion has found his stone Galatea in the person of Eliza this sack of baggage, this squashed cabbage — whom he will "carve" and mold into a great duchess, someone whom he can control and command.
When Mrs. Pearce takes Eliza away, we are hardly prepared for the immediate appearance of her father. The audience and Higgins alike expect an irate father, anxious over the safety of his youthful daughter; we expect him to demand honorable protection for his offspring.
Alfred Doolittle, however, is just the opposite — and he is also one of Shaw's most delightful creations. At the time of Doolittle's appearance, Mrs. Pearce has been lecturing Higgins on manners and etiquette: If Eliza is to be in the house, Higgins must watch his language, stop appearing in house robes, cease wiping his hands on his clothes, refrain from cursing, and begin performing other acts of proper manners.
With the appearance of Doolittle, the questions of social manners become parodied. The subject is replaced by the idea of social morality and especially middle-class morality or low-class morality.
As noted above, when Doolittle first appears, we expect the virtuous father, and we see the hypocritical blackmailer.
When the blackmail plot is obviously going to fail, we are exposed to Doolittle's supposedly righteous indignation, and then we see it fade, and he becomes an unscrupulous and ingratiating pimp, willing to sell off his daughter's virtue for a mere pittance. Again, his bumbling attempts fail. But by now, Higgins is attracted to the resourcefulness of this intended blackmailer and to Doolittle's picturesque language; when Higgins demands an answer from Doolittle, the old man's rhetorical retort pleases Higgins.
Doolittle says: "I'm willing to tell you. I'm wanting to tell you. I'm waiting to tell you. When all else fails, thus, Doolittle resorts to speaking the plain truth, but it is a truth so original that it captures the imagination of both Higgins and Pickering.
Whereas most charity goes to the "deserving poor," Doolittle dispenses with traditional morality and charity; he argues for some consideration of the undeserving poor.
In a fanciful flight of philosophical oratory, Doolittle maintains that his type of people has been ignored, and it is now time to contribute money to someone like him who will take the money, go out on a weekend binge, spend it all on booze, and then be ready to go back to his miserable job on Monday.
He maintains that he too has a right to this type of debauch, and yet he has been denied it by the narrow-minded prejudices of middle-class morality. Higgins is so taken aback by this unique, bizarre logic that he offers to give Doolittle ten pounds, but Doolittle rapidly rejects this offer because that large a sum would entail middle-class responsibility, whereas the smaller sum would be just enough to go out on a binge with no regrets and no responsibilities.
The irony of Doolittle's logic is that at the end of the play, Doolittle will be forced to accept middle-class responsibilities and morality because by then he will have inherited enough money that he will be encumbered for the rest of his life and will have to forever abandon his free and easy ways as a member of the "undeserving poor. With Eliza's re-entry on the stage, Shaw returns to his social criticism. Elias father doesn't recognize his daughter because he "never thought she would clean up as good looking as that.
She's a credit to me, aint she? This scene emphasizes the basic difference between Eliza and her father: Doolittle likes being a part of the "undeserving poor," while Eliza yearns, above all, to escape from this class and to join the respectable middle class.
This is the reason why she has come to Higgins: to take lessons in order to escape the stigma of her class. We are now able to review what we have read and see the significance of Eliza's howling when Higgins says that if Eliza misbehaves they will simply throw her in the dustbin — that is, her father's job is collecting the ashes and refuse of dust bins, and since he has already thrown Eliza out many years ago, she has no desire to be "collected" by him again.
In fact, at the end of the drama, one of the options that is open to Eliza is that she can return to her father, but she resolutely refuses to do so.
And at the end of this particular act, Eliza shows her first bit of humorous class snobbism: now that she is clean, she would like to ride back to her old district and parade in front of her old cronies and lord it over them now that she "has risen in the world. Previous Act I. Next Act III.
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When Eliza leaves Higgins he is furious and tells his mother, that he needs her, because he can't find anything and wouldn't even know his dates without Eliza's help. Henry Higgins is not worried about her, or disappointed that she left him and that she can live without him, he just thinks about the practical "use" of Eliza.
For the first time she finds revenge and "got a little back of her own". Later Higgins explains to Eliza, that he has behaved to her like to everybody else. He would never have behaved differently, because she was just a flower girl. Having the same manner for all human souls, Higgins made no differences. But now, he has grown accustomed to her voice and appearance. Eliza is rather offended by his words and thinks that he lies and just tries to change her mind, so that she comes back to him and be his housemaid again.
In the end, after another quarrel, Higgins has gained back the full control of the situation, because he is sure that she will come back to him and even says so to Eliza.
He is satisfied, because he won the bet and Eliza will stay with him.
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