Pygmalion

Shaw uses clothes to symbolize a social class. On the portico in Act I, Pickering’s “evening dress” (Act I, Page 15) allows Eliza to identify his class and target him for a sale. Higgins’s shoes reveal that he is not a “copper’s nark” (Act I, Page 17) but a gentleman. Yet clothing is also revealed to be a marker that is superficial and may be unreliable in pinpointing one’s social position. In the first social test, Mrs. Higgins still sees Eliza as a street woman, despite her new elegant dress. At the end of the play, Doolittle may be “resplendently dressed” with a “flower in his buttonhole, a dazzling silk hat, and patent leather shoes” (Act V, Page 110), but he is still a coarse, crude man. Clothes are presented as useful tools for creating a costume or a disguise.

Eliza demonstrates a keen awareness of the role clothing plays in the perception of class. When she arrives at Higgins’s home to buy lessons, she uses the items available to her to attempt to create the costume of a lady. Eliza wears “a hat with three ostrich feathers, orange, sky-blue, and red,” a “neatly clean apron,” and a “shoddy coat [that] has been tidied a little” (Act II, Page 32). By dressing as a lady, Eliza hopes to show that she can be transformed into one. Higgins acknowledges the power of clothing when he agrees to accept her as a student. He directs Mrs. Pearce to “take all her clothes off and burn them” and order new clothes from Whitely, a high-end clothing store (Act II, Page 37). Eliza must look the part to play the part.

A change in clothes does influence how some treat Eliza. In her Act I taxi ride, she wears her street clothes, and the taxi driver insults her and questions whether she has “[e]ver been in a taxi before” (Act I, Page 25). When she rides with Freddy in her walking dress, the cab driver calls her “lady” (Act IV, Page 105) and unquestioningly takes them to their stop. In the first act, Eliza is afraid of the police, as they harass street women like her. When she is with Freddy later, the officers simply ask them to “[m]ove along” (Act IV, Page 104), rather than arresting her like they would have a poor woman who was kissing a man. The change in her clothing gives her respectability in the officers’ eyes. In contrast with the other characters, Higgins does not change his treatment of Eliza, despite her change in clothes. He still insults her and treats her as if she were a “guttersnipe” (Act IV, Page 102). While he recognizes the insignificance of her sartorial change, he fails to recognize her internal change.