My Fair Lady story
My Fair Lady is a 1964 American musical comedy drama film adapted from Lerner and Loewe's 1956 stage musical based on George Bernard Shaw's 1913 stage play Pygmalion. With a screenplay by Alan Jay Lerner and directed by George Cukor, the film depicts a poor Cockney flower-seller named Eliza Doolittle who overhears a phonetics professor, Henry Higgins, as he casually wagers that he could teach her to speak English so well she could pass for a duchess in Edwardian-era London, or (better yet, from Eliza's viewpoint) secure employment in a flower store.
20 total · 2 choice · 12 major · 6 minor
| Theme | Level | Motivation |
|---|---|---|
| character metamorphosis | choice | The story is about Eliza undergoing a transformation from a poor flower girl with a Cockney accent to someone who passed for a duchess. |
| social inequality | choice | At the center of the story was the poor working girl Eliza. She was introduced to social circles of the upper-classes, and in the end she passed for a princess. In this and other ways, compared were the destinies of poor working people, like Eliza, with upper-class people, like Professor Higgins. |
| belonging | major | Eliza Doolittle struggled with where she truly belonged after her transformation from a Cockney flower girl into a refined lady left her caught between the working-class world she came from and the upper-class society into which she did not fully fit. |
| human aspiration | major | Eliza Dolittle, a lowly flower girl, aspired to make something out of herself. For example, she entertained ideas of one day owning her own flower shop. It was this desire to advance her life that led her to Henry Higgins for speech lessons. |
| infatuation | major | The story left things deliberately vague but suggests that some sort of romantic entanglement between Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle was imminent. Eliza had a suitor, Freddy, who was besotted with her. |
| language and society | major | The story explores the close relationship between linguistic dialect and social class. Henry Higgins was determined to prove his hypothesis that Eliza Doolittle, a flower girl with a strong Cockney accent, could be transformed into a woman capable of passing as upper-class person simply through training in refined speech and manners. |
| learning languages | major | Eliza struggled to learn what was considered proper English, a challenge that was likened to learning an entirely foreign language such as French. |
| linguistics | major | Accents, dialects, and the art of speaking was discussed in a fairly scientific way with relation to social status. |
| man vs. woman | major | The plot centers on the strained relationship between Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle, with Higgins treating Eliza as little more than a social experiment to be molded according to his own ideals. Their clashes highlight the imbalance of power between men and women in Edwardian society, as Eliza struggled to assert her dignity and independence against Higgins' domineering attitude. |
| manners | major | Eliza was taught aristocratic manners and an upper-class style of speech. |