A New Look at Pygmalion: Alfred Doolittle and Henry Higgins as Absent (Substitute) Fathers

Abstract

Scholarship of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion (1912), despite Shaw's protestations that Eliza and Higgins can never marry, has for a century debated whether the play's content and structure imply so. A less analysed route to resolving this issue is to more closely consider Eliza's father, Arthur Doolittle. Some critics read Doolittle as largely a comic diversion meant to ironize her social transformation. Yet the marital question and Alfred Doolittle's role are integrated strands, for Eliza's emotions toward Higgins might be better understood as filial ones, as she attempts and fails to find fatherly love and acceptance from Higgins. Doolittle's character helps establish this daughter-substitute father relationship by his role as an absent and emotionally unavailable parent.