Skip to main content

The Middle Class and the Outliers


“What is middle class morality?  Just an excuse for not giving me anything,” says Alfred Doolittle, a character in Bernard Shaw’s play, Pygmalion [which became the celebrated movie, My Fair Lady.]  Doolittle thinks that the middle class deprives people like him of many things like good food or some pleasures of life.  So Doolittle is an outlier.  An outlier, according to the dictionary, is “a person or thing situated away or detached from the main body or system.”

Professor Higgins in the same play is also an outlier.  If Doolittle is below the middle class in hierarchy, Higgins is above it.  Doolittle needs the middle class for his financial needs. He needs the job provided by the middle class even if it means carrying the trash of that class.  He is only happy to receive charities from the middle class organisations.  Higgins does not care for the middle class any more than he would care for people like Doolittle.  In fact, Higgins wouldn’t care for the King or the Queen him-/herself.

Some familiarity with the play or the movie will be necessary to understand what I’m going to discuss.  Let me summarise the plot in brief.  Eliza Doolittle [Alfred’s daughter] is a flower seller who speaks a crude version of English.  Higgins, a phonetician, rather carelessly and callously remarks that he could make a duchess of her by teaching her to speak properly “the language of Shakespeare and Milton and The Bible.”  Eliza rises to the occasion and wants to raise her social status by entering the middle class.  Higgins proves his word; Eliza becomes as good as a duchess in about 6 months.  At least she has learnt the lingo and the deportment of the middle class.

Like the other people of the middle class, Eliza has ambitions and aspirations.  “I want to be a lady in a flower shop stead of selling at the corner of Tottenham Court Road,” she tells Higgins when asked what she wanted?  She has the moral scruples of the middle class; “I always been a good girl.”  She follows the power structures in relationships that are typical of the middle class; either be a slave to the other or enslave the other.  She will happily fetch Higgins’ slippers for him provided he is ready to accept her in his life; she will also equally happily make Freddy (a silly young man) carry her slippers if she can’t have Higgins.  Higgins thinks that that kind of relationship is “commercialism”. Eliza thinks that’s life; she judges the world in correlation to herself, just as all the middle class people do. 

Power structures and egos play vital roles in the middle class relationships.  One-upmanship is the fundamental characteristic of the class’s behaviour.  Alfred Doolittle doesn’t belong there.  Even when he is put there by a conspiracy of circumstances, he is ill at ease.  Higgins doesn’t belong there; he lacks the hypocrisy and moral scruples of the class.  “A woman who utters such depressing and disgusting sounds has no right to be anywhere – no right to live,” he has no qualms about uttering such opinions.  He knows that life is “but a series of inspired follies.” He is a totally disagreeable person in any middle class gathering.  He has little feelings and emotions; he is driven more by his brain.  For him there is little difference between a duchess and a flower girl: “The greatest secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls; in short, behaving as if you were in Heaven, where there are no third-class carriages, and one soul is as good another.”

Higgins invites Eliza to live with him in the end, not as his wife but as a friend: a bachelor and a spinster.  Good friends who don’t make use of each other.  No power structures in that world.  Don’t come back to me for fetching my slippers, he tells Eliza.  “No use slaving for me and then saying you want to be cared for: who cares for a slave?  If you come back, come back for the sake of good fellowship...” 

Eliza doesn’t understand that; she belongs to the middle class that can’t ever understand fellowship.

Eliza belongs to the middle class.  Her father, Alfred, doesn’t.  He is inferior to it; he has no sense of morality.  Higgins is superior; he has transcended morality.

Alfred Doolittle and Professor Higgins are both outliers as far as the middle class is concerned.  Let the middle class reign supreme.


PS: In the movie, My Fair Lady, Higgins marries Eliza.  In Shaw’s drama, Higgins leaves the door open like a silly child!


Top post on IndiBlogger.in, the community of Indian Bloggers






Comments

  1. Very deep analysis.I saw the picture long back.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks, Indu. When I read the play for the first time, some 20 years ago, I didn't understand even a fraction of what I've written here. Age makes the difference, I guess.

      Delete
  2. "Higgins invites Eliza to live with him in the end, not as his wife but as a friend: a bachelor and a spinster." Is this really possible?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Shaw was a confirmed bachelor to the end, Pankti. He was a teetotaler, a vegetarian, and non-smoker... He could have done that!- live with a woman who would have been nothing other than a friend!

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Second Crucifixion

  ‘The Second Crucifixion’ is the title of the last chapter of Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’s magnum opus Freedom at Midnight . The sub-heading is: ‘New Delhi, 30 January 1948’. Seventy-three years ago, on that day, a great soul was shot dead by a man who was driven by the darkness of hatred. Gandhi has just completed his usual prayer session. He had recited a prayer from the Gita:                         For certain is death for the born                         and certain is birth for the dead;                         Therefore over the inevitable                         Thou shalt not grieve . At that time Narayan Apte and Vishnu Karkare were moving to Retiring Room Number 6 at the Old Delhi railway station. They walked like thieves not wishing to be noticed by anyone. The early morning’s winter fog of Delhi gave them the required wrap. They found Nathuram Godse already awake in the retiring room. The three of them sat together and finalised the plot against Gand

The Final Farewell

Book Review “ Death ends life, not a relationship ,” as Mitch Albom put it. That is why, we have so many rituals associated with death. Minakshi Dewan’s book, The Final Farewell [HarperCollins, 2023], is a well-researched book about those rituals. The book starts with an elaborate description of the Sikh rituals associated with death and cremation, before moving on to Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and finally Hinduism. After that, it’s all about the various traditions and related details of Hindu final rites. A few chapters are dedicated to the problems of widows in India, gender discrimination in the last rites, and the problem of unclaimed dead bodies. There is a chapter titled ‘Grieving Widows in Hindi Cinema’ too. Death and its rituals form an unusual theme for a book. Frankly, I don’t find the topic stimulating in any way. Obviously, I didn’t buy this book. It came to me as quite many other books do – for reasons of their own. I read the book finally, having shelv

Vultures and Religion

When vultures become extinct, why should a religion face a threat? “When the vultures died off, they stopped eating the bodies of Zoroastrians…” I was amused as I went on reading the book The Final Farewell by Minakshi Dewan. The book is about how the dead are dealt with by people of different religious persuasions. Dead people are quite useless, unless you love euphemism. Or, as they say, dead people tell no tales. In the end, we are all just stories made by people like the religious woman who wrote the epitaph for her atheist husband: “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.” Zoroastrianism is a religion which converts death into a sordid tale by throwing the corpses of its believers to vultures. Death makes one impure, according to that religion. Well, I always thought, and still do, that life makes one impure. I have the support of Lord Buddha on that. Life is dukkha , said the Enlightened. That is, suffering, dissatisfaction and unease. Death is liberation

Cats and Love

No less a psychologist than Freud said that the “time spent with cats is never wasted.” I find time to spend with cats precisely for that reason. They are not easy to love, particularly if they are the country variety which are not quite tameable, and mine are those. What makes my love affair with my cats special is precisely their unwillingness to befriend me. They’d rather be in their own company. “In ancient time, cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this,” Terry Pratchett says. My cats haven’t, I’m sure. Pratchett knew what he was speaking about because he loved cats which appear frequently in his works. Pratchett’s cats love independence, very unlike dogs. Dogs come when you call them; cats take a message and get back to you as and when they please. I don’t have dogs. But my brother’s dogs visit us – Maggie and me – every evening. We give them something to eat and they love that. They spend time with us after eating. My cats just go away without even a look af