The Perfect Treat

The Perfect Treat

Yes indeed, it is good when you obey the royal law as found in the Scriptures: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

James 2:8

George Bernard Shaw gives the ancient Greek story of Pygmalion a twentieth-century twist. In the legend, Pygmalion creates a wonderful statue of a maiden and begs the gods to give the statue life, which they do. Shaw’s Pygmalion, further adapted for the silver screen as My Fair Lady, has a phonetics professor bring gentility to a London “guttersnipe.”

Professor Henry Higgins prides himself on being able to identify any Londoner’s residence within a few blocks just by listening to his or her dialect. The professor’s friend Colonel Pickering bets Higgins that he cannot take a Cockney flower girl and pass her off as a lady after just three months of instruction. This challenge is too much to resist for the haughty professor, and he chooses Eliza Doolittle as the object of his experiment.

Higgins drives Eliza like a slave master. Pickering tries to soften the professor’s treatment of Eliza, but to Higgins she is nothing but an experiment. The great day arrives, and Higgins unveils his masterpiece at a royal reception. Eliza enters wearing jewels and a gown. She walks gracefully, demonstrates impeccable manners, and dances divinely. Her diction is pure; her conversation refined. No one suspects Eliza’s origins, and she becomes the toast of London. Later, Higgins touts his own genius: “I created this thing out of squashed cabbage leaves.”

Eliza eventually confronts the prideful professor: yes, she says, he may have changed her dialect, but the kindness of Colonel Pickering changed her heart. Pickering’s gentle affirmation through the months of criticism and toil made the difference.

Eliza says to Colonel Pickering, “I owe so much to you. . . . It was from you that I learned really nice manners, and that’s what makes one a lady, isn’t it?”

Pickering bashfully responds, “No doubt. Still, he taught you to speak, you know, and I couldn’t have done that.”

Eliza continues, “Of course. That was his profession. It’s just like learning to dance in the fashionable way, nothing more than that in it. You know what began my real education? Your calling me ‘Miss Doolittle’ that day when I first came to [the professor’s study]. That was the beginning of self-respect for me. You see, the difference between a lady and a flower girl isn’t how she behaves. It’s how she is treated. I know that I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins because he always treats me as a flower girl and always will. But I know that I can be a lady to you because you always treat me as a lady and always will.”

How we treat each other has great power to help us become what we were meant to be.

Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you help them to become what they are capable of being.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe