Eliza and Covent Garden Flow(e)rs: A much-belated info-post

[loverlyviolets]

 
All I Want Is A Room Somewhere: My Fair Lady

My Fair Lady is a 1964 musical film based on Pygmalion, a 1913 play by George Bernard Shaw. Though there are plot differences between versions, the main elements, including the Edwardian setting, remain the same:

A working-class Cockney girl by the name of Eliza Doolittle (played by Audrey Hepburn in the film) selling flowers in London's Covent Garden encounters two upper-class gentlemen with a passion for phonetics and dialects: Professor Henry Higgins and Colonel Hugh Pickering. Higgins, who's brilliant but overbearing and chauvinistic, is appalled by her murder of the English language, and tells Pickering that it's the girl's speech that keeps her in the lower class, not her dirty clothes and poor birth. He brags that with six months of training, he could convince people she was a duchess at an embassy ball.


Eliza, who has aspirations to working in a proper flower shop instead of carrying a basket around the cold streets of London, remembers this and takes the initiative to track Higgins down at his home (where Pickering is staying as his guest), offering to pay for him to give her speech lessons. Pickering bets Higgins that he can't in fact do what he boasted: turn the flower-girl into a lady in six months. Eliza's not keen on the idea after the mocking treatment she's received from Higgins, but she's finally convinced by a combination of bullying, chocolate, and Rex Harrison's sexy, sexy cardigans.


Cue musical montage of tongue twisters, painfully mangled vowels and accidental swallowing of marbles, during which Henry Higgins displays both his brilliance and his impatience, and Eliza her infuriating stubbornness steady determination to learn, until finally there's a Eureka moment, and she Gets It, by George. Along the way, she and Higgins come to a grudging, tetchy fondness and admiration for each other.


Despite a few snags ("Move yer bloomin' arse" is inappropriate language for a lady at the races no matter how beautifully it's pronounced; who knew?) Eliza makes it to the embassy ball and is a resounding success, even fooling a former student of Higgins who now makes a living as a blackmailer by detecting class fakery amongst the rich.


When Eliza, Higgins, and Pickering return home, however, the two men spend the entire evening congratulating each other and completely ignoring Eliza's contribution, until she finally realizes how much Higgins takes her for granted. (It's uncharacteristic behavior for Pickering, but typical of Higgins.) Now that his bet is over, he's not at all worried about what will become of her- he's made her a lady, but she doesn't know where she's supposed to go to be one. When he doesn't openly ask her to stay, or even seem to understand her concerns, she throws his slippers at him and storms out of his house.


On her way out, she bumps into Freddie, a smitten but silly young man who fell for her during the earlier debacle at the races, and gives in to the idea of somebody who actually demonstrates his affection for her, unlike Higgins. They take a trip back to her old haunts in Covent Garden (meeting up with her good-for-nothing father, now come into money due to an offhand prank by Higgins) but when people don't recognize her, she realizes she has no place in that life now, either.


Eliza sees Higgins the next morning while she's having tea with his mother, and during their subsequent argument she comes into her own, realizing that whatever she's become, she doesn't need him to give her a purpose. She clearly has feelings for him (how romantic they might be is left ambiguous) and vice versa, but she's not going to go back to a life of fetching his slippers and being taken for granted.

She claims that she'll marry Freddie, who loves her (though there's not much indication that she feels more than friendship for him), and leaves saying Higgins won't see her again, just as he realizes how much he admires the woman she's become. Henry (after a beautiful verbal bitchslap by his own mother) wanders home muttering that Eliza will come crawling back, but then admitting, only to himself, that he's gotten used to having her around and will miss her.


Which is more or less where George Bernard Shaw ended Pygmalion; he hated the idea of a "happy" ending with Higgins, partly because he didn't think a romantic relationship between them would be happy. The writers of My Fair Lady (and several prior stage incarnations): "Hahaha whatever, Shaw."

So in the film Higgins goes home alone, but while he's listening wistfully to his gramophone recordings of her voice, Eliza does indeed come back, realizes he values her in his own way, and quietly turns off the record, saying in her old accent, "I washed my face and hands before I come, I did." Henry slides down in his chair, pushes his hat down over his face and says "Eliza, where the devil are my slippers?"

The screen fades to pretty flowers and I throw my combat boots at the closing credits because WTF, Eliza, WTF?


So. Fandom's Eliza, to forestall boot-throwing, comes from just before the end of the film. Instead of going back to fetch Henry's slippers or marrying Freddie Eynsford-Hill as she threatened, she strikes off on her own to open the flower shop that she used to only dream of assisting in. She's not currently speaking to Higgins, but is still in contact with Colonel Pickering, who's helping her finance the venture. She's considering it an investment, not a gift, and will be paying it back.




Blahblahblah TL;DR. What about the new chick?

Eliza is a scrappy flower-girl off the streets of London who got turned into a proper lady by two experts in phonetics. She can still be snarky on occasion, but she's learned to express it in a ladylike manner. Since she's more self-confident now, she's less defensive and confrontational, and tends to be quite gentle with those who treat her the same way. In a pinch, though, she can screech like a banshee, and probably take out an eye in a catfight.

She speaks BBC Costume Drama English unless she's using her old Cockney accent deliberately. However, her vocabulary and breadth of knowledge isn't as refined as her accent. She can pass when it counts, but her phrasing is still sometimes uncultured, especially if she's upset, and she has the kind of gaps in her education that you might expect in a girl trained for six months by two confirmed bachelors. (Higgins/Pickering, their love is so "If I forgot to bring you flowers, you wouldn't fuss, would you? Why can't a woman be more like a man?")


Covent Garden Flow(e)rs

It's a flower shop. That needs an E. It's open... I'm working on that. Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, definitely, possibly the rest of the weekdays depending on how many employees Eliza ends up with.

It also offers weekday morning deliveries, in the time-honored (and long-missing) manner of Jack's Roses and Kiki's Deliveries (except the delivery posts will be in fandomtownies, not the dorms comm). There's a more in-depth description and an order-form here, but the short version is: send someone flowers! You know you want to!




Thank you for your kind attention. *curtsies* All deliveries of questions, comments, or double-fudge bonbons will be happily accepted.

Comments

[loverlyviolets]

I even still ship them pretty hard from my rose-coloured childhood days and because they do spark well off each other, yet can't get away from wanting to smack him upside the head with his slippers for... being him, and then smack Eliza for settling.