The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [270]
At this point the two versions diverge. In My Fair Lady, the story ends with Higgins finally recognising, after she has fled the house, how much Eliza has come to mean to him. She, equally missing him, steals back into the house and finds him sadly listening to her recorded voice. There is a hopelessly unresolved, sentimental ending where it is conveyed that she will come back to live with him, but in a relationship left wholly vague and unspecified. Companion? Housekeeper? Daughter? Wife? We never know.
In Shaw's version, the ending is very different. Eliza, having finally declared her independence of Higgins, goes off with Freddie to get married. As Shaw explains in his Epilogue to Pygmalion, they then live more or less happily ever after. This may be at least the semblance of a fairy-tale ending for Eliza. But what if we look at it through the eyes of Higgins, who was, after all, a much more likely point of identification for the play's author? Shaw's name for the play was not Galatea, the ivory statue who was turned into a woman in the original myth, but Pygmalion, the name of her creator. Higgins, like Shaw when he wrote the play, is a man in early middle age. The Professor's `supernatural powers' are no more magical in their way than the gift for words which had made the mocking, iconoclastic Mr Shaw the most successful playwright of his day. And Shaw's inmost problem, like that of many men, was with his unresolved tie to his mother and therefore to his own anima, that elusive central component in the male psyche which in Shaw's case was never fully realised. This gave him endless trouble in his intimate relations with the opposite sex; not least in his embarrassingly public infatuation with Mrs Patrick Campbell, the commanding actress who played Eliza when Pygmalion was first staged in 1914, an affair which began in the wake of his mother's death when he was in his late 50s.1
This inability to relate securely to his inner feminine held Shaw back from ever being able to relate properly with the life-giving internal realm of the spirit; indeed from ever fully growing up and becoming a `whole' man. At root Shaw remained emotionally and spiritually retarded, a 'boy hero who cannot grow up, a rebellious puer aeternus, at odds with both the masculine and feminine parts of himself. And the repercussions of this were reflected in his political views, not least in his foolish `love affair' with Stalin's Russia, which he liked to portray as an idealised heaven-on-earth, a projected symbol of the Self, ruled by its benign Father-figure, just when the Soviet tyranny was at its murderous height. In Pygmalion, just as Eliza has developed to the point where she is capable of becoming an impressive woman in her own right, Higgins is quite unable to recognise it. The real reason is betrayed in his earlier remark to his mother: `oh, I can't be bothered with women. My idea of a lovable woman is someone as much like you as possible.' Just as the anima which could lead to wholeness emerges, the suffocating embrace of `Mother' intervenes; the age-old beguiling obstacle which stands in the way of a man who cannot go out into the world and become fully a man. Like a spoiled little boy, Higgins is thus left alone with Mother, oblivious to the end of how callously and selfishly he has behaved. A story which may seem, at first sight, to be a touching and rather funny fairy tale, complete with happy ending, turns out to have a rather darker side altogether.
Overcoming the Monster: The dark versions
It is revealing to see what the split between a storyteller's ego and the unconscious does to the plot of Overcoming the Monster,