The story begins in the rain, which you could have guessed, given the setting. The reader, having read the back of the book, is probably eager to meet this new protagonist, but it is not apparent at first that she is present in the opening scene. It is not until later than her name, or the fact that she has a name and is not some faceless stand-in, is revealed. The same goes for the two Higgins and Pickering, and the fact that they just happened to run into each other when one was looking to find the other. It seems very coincidental. My observation is that people and characters often drastically change and become more complex the more time you spend around them. As the play goes on, names and backgrounds are slowly revealed.
Second (I'm jumping around here), Mr. Doolittle's erratic behavior seems off to me. Eliza, seeming to be about 17-20(ish), never mentioned that she had much of a family, and she is living on her own, which I guess is uncommon for the time. When Mr. Doolittle shows up, first demanding to take her back and then later allowing her to stay, it indicates to me that there is more something more to him.
The story, at first, reminds me of Jasper Fforde's Shades of Grey (published long before there were fifty, thankyouverymuch), where everyone is colorblind to a certain extent, and social standing are determined by how much and what color a person can see. In Pygmalion, more realistically, how a person speaks determines how others see them and indicates where they came from. While eloquence may make communication clearer and more polite, people often make too big a deal of it. I think that exaggeration of one thing like color or speech as part of a literary work serves to illustrate how society puts too much emphasis on small differences that can't completely define a person.
[my copy only has 102 full pages, so this is to the end of act II]
No comments:
Post a Comment