I'm A Good Girl I Am!

Breann Adams
Apr 10, 2017
4 min read

*Warning, spoiler are in this blog. You have been warned.*

My Fair Lady is the musical that will leave you singing the songs for weeks to come. However, this movie is perfect to examine not only through a semiotic lens, but also a Marxist perspective. Audrey Hepburn plays the role of a poor girl by the name of Eliza Doolittle who sells flowers on a London street corner. However, that is until she meets Professor Henry Higgins, played by Rex Harrison, who happens to be a professor of phonetics.

Eliza is shown to be a dirty, poor, good-for-nothing girl, who lives on the street in the beginning of the film. However, it doesn’t take long to see that she is a headstrong girl who knows what she wants and will fight for it. Going to Higgins for lessons on how to speak and act like a real lady exposes her to upper class event such as the races and eventually lands her in Buckingham Palace dancing with the prince. Her role in society started out as a simple peasant who really didn’t have a place in society. Nobody paid much attention to her and if they did, it was to tell her to go away or to be quiet. However, after her transformation with the help of Professor Higgins, she is a proper lady who fits into her role in society. She dresses and acts the part as she goes to tea and hangs on the arm of her suitor. Quiet and mild mannered is how society expects her to be and she abides by the norms that come with her role as a woman in the early 1900s (IMDb, 1964).

One can say that she has quite the hero’s journey. She begins her journey on the streets and is then mentored by the Professor on how to be a lady. She overcomes many obstacles that come her way in this process. She eventually learns the social graces of being a lady, but in the end feels out of place. Conflicted on her position in society, Eliza goes back to where she used to be in life. After realizing that she no longer fits into her old life, she goes back to the Professor’s house to embrace her new life as a lady.

The semiotic lens will show us that the activities and performances of Eliza are highly important to her being a lady. People watch how she acts, the expressions she gets on her face, and most importantly, how she speaks. This is a musical, and therefore the use of music and is used to evoke a certain response out of the audience. In this case, I see that response being happiness (Berger, 2014). I can’t help but smile through the many songs and dances contained in this film.

On the other hand, the Marxist analysis shows that the materialism in this film is how the society organizes itself. This can be seen when Eliza goes to the races and the ball. The main element that stood out to me was the base and the super structure. The base is the life Eliza had in the beginning and the hard working poor people who worked on the street. The superstructure, on the other hand, is the upper class where Eliza later finds herself. However, the base, which is her old life and friends, greatly influences in profound and complicated ways her new life in the superstructure. This leads to class conflict. The working class conflicts with the upper class, or rather “ruling class,” which are the elites of society. When she is selling flowers on the street, the upper class ignores her and looks down on her for her status in society. However, this changes when she moves up in society and becomes an elite herself. It also changes the relationships she had with the people in her former life because her friends from the street no longer recognize her when she goes back. Her own father doesn’t even recognize her. They treat her like a queen and know that they are, in a sense, lower than she is. This causes her to feel a sense of alienation from her previous life because she no longer fits into that lifestyle. She also feels like she is distanced and separated from her new life because of her background (Berger, 2014).

So, lets now summarize and answer the “she did what?” question. Eliza went from an underdog who was rejected by society to an elite who embraced the role of a proper lady. She overcame the differences and setbacks that life put before her. In the last scene, it is clear that she is in love with Professor Higgins. He asks where his slippers are and we see her bringing them to him as he sits back with his feet up. She not only is a lady, but she also plays the role of a submissive and obedient woman. Yes, I know I probably just ruined this movie for anyone who has not seen it, but hey, you were warned!