She Only Wants to Talk of Love: Male Infatuation in My Fair Lady
My mother recalls that the first time she visited my father’s hometown, she was both anxious and filled with awe. As she and my grandfather drove through narrow roads in a town drenched in moonlight, she claims she began to understand him a little better, know him a little better. Whether he had actually walked down this one particular road or had actually entered that one corner shop, all that mattered was that she was in his world now, the place that had borne him and watched him grow up.
My father, on the other hand, has a special kind of memory, where certain things never seem to stick and others he never forgets. Must be that sweet, stubborn pride from his side of the family. Just the other day he sat down and watched all of Star Wars and it was as he was putting away Empire Strikes back that he asked me, “so that Vader…was he really Luke’s father or was he just lying to him?”
Oh, my God, dad.
My father has such a selective memory to the point where it’s become a running joke that he must think he was born married to my mother despite meeting her at age 19. Her presence in his life is so absolute, the thought of another woman occupying her place is out of the question. They simply are two puzzle pieces that slid perfectly into each other’s life.
I’ve therefore grown to understand that love is measured beyond the other person; it doesn’t stop but rather overrides their very presence, tainting their possessions, their likes and dislikes, and even the very ground they walk on. Whatever they come into contact with, it forever becomes related to the person we cherish. So how does love change us through the act of the beloved simply being there?
I’m of the belief that unrequited love can still change your life in a positive manner. Often portrayed as the most heartbreaking of sentiments, the mere act of falling in love holds an inherent value within a person, despite the lack of reciprocity from the object of their affection.
Technically speaking, you don’t need someone to love you back in order to love them. Like any feeling, love can find its source in another person but it remains your feeling and yours alone.
Rewatching the 1964 film adaptation of My Fair Lady, my mind started skipping back and forth in the story and I started to realize that this musical presents two love songs from our two male romantic figures: Freddy Eynsford-Hill’s “On the Street Where You Live” and Henry Higgins’ “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face.” And what struck me the most, despite having known and loved this musical for years, is that they don’t sing of grand, sweeping declarations of love or the pain of unrequited emotion or anything like that. Instead, we are presented with an outlook of love that completely centers on the presence of Eliza Doolittle in their respective lives.
I’m drawn to the way in which Freddy and Higgins’ affection manifests through what can be considered a gentle, almost naïve expression of love and how, without meaning to, Eliza changes these men’s lives by simply being there.
As I spoke about in my Amelie essay, musicals are a special medium that allow for characters to vocalize their inner thoughts and feelings in a cohesive manner without breaking the flow of the story. So what do Freddy and Henry Higgins express when in love with the same woman?
We first hear “On the Street Where You Live” almost at the halfway point of the musical. After a disastrous first impression at Ascott due to Eliza’s outburst (“Come on, Dover, move your bloomin’ arse!”), Freddy remains enchanted by her wit and beauty, despite knowing next to nothing about her.
Seeking her out at Wimpole Street, Freddy sings about how that part of town, specifically the street, has transformed now that he’s met Eliza, and how it becomes monumentally grander in his mind because of her presence there. He sees the street through the lens of Eliza in his heart, and although she’s lived there for a few months, all that matters to Freddy is that he has stepped into what he believes is her world.
Lovingly, albeit stalkingly, Freddy is shown to frequent the street in the middle of the night, absorbing the sheer pleasure that is being close to her. Though he sings of the excitement of knowing that, in any moment, she “may suddenly appear,” his love is presented as innocent enough, dare I say even chivalrous enough, that her mere proximity satisfies him bodily and emotionally.
This kind of love expressed by Freddy is presented as selfless, in the sense that he demands nothing of her and chooses not to invade a place he considers as hers. When he first knocks on the door, Mrs. Pierce invites him to wait in the hall yet Freddy responds, “I want to drink in the street where she lives.” While Freddy’s assumptions about the kind of person she is are incorrect, and he clearly doesn’t recognize her as the flower girl from the beginning of the musical, he stands by almost as a knightly figure, close to his beloved but always from afar in rapt adoration.
However, it’s telling that after the reprise of this song, Eliza asks Freddy to take her “where [she] belongs”, that is to say, the flower market in Covent Garden, a place she identifies as her home, as the foundation of who she is, or at least who she used to be. After being transformed into a lady, Eliza doesn’t fit in with her peers anymore, despite being almost as poor and connectionless as they are. She speaks, moves, and is different, and that space she once inhabited has no room for her anymore. And the places she does fit in, a higher form of society, are either foreign to her or belong to someone else. While Freddy believes Wimpole Street to be this magical place that has the privilege of Eliza’s presence, it has always been Higgins’ space.
Now, as we reach the end of the musical, the final song comes from Higgins in the form of “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face,” sung first in a ranting manner, then taking on a hint of self-reflection after Eliza has turned down Higgins for good.
Higgins begins this song by swearing three times before exclaiming he’s “grown accustomed to her face,” seemingly surprising himself with this revelation. He lists out every little detail about Eliza, small gestures or expressions she makes throughout the day, and while these mannerisms and ways of speaking have nothing to do with him, they have been abruptly ripped from his daily life.
In an effort to distance himself from this sudden heartache, Higgins envisions a future in which Eliza’s marriage to Freddy is a sour one, where he will leave her for an heiress and she will crawl back to him, thus once again giving Higgins the power in their relationship. Yet in a powerful scene, we watch Higgins enter his home, taking in his surroundings despondently as the person who made this house feel alive is now gone.
In an episode of the British radio sitcom, Cabin Pressure, steward Arthur Shappey claims that he is someone who is truly happy, stating that moments like juggling an apple or getting into a bath at just the right temperature are simple things that bring him genuine happiness, because “you’re hardly ever blissfully happy with the love of your life in the moonlight; and when you are, you’re too busy worrying about it being over soon.” In My Fair Lady, we are presented with Higgins as a man with a cynical view on love and women, stating examples of their supposed chaotic nature like losing a glove during a play or having her chatty friends over, all complaining about him.
Yet what Henry doesn’t take into account is that these unpleasant moments are not only stereotypical but also not that commonplace, especially when he paints a vivid picture in which these are all inconveniences for him. And as he stubbornly clings to these imaginary displeasures, he fails to conceive the happy serenity at having someone greet you every morning or the pleasure of their voice in the next room. In a mournful tone, Higgins states that all of Eliza, her highs and lows, are “like breathing out and breathing in” to him. Suddenly cut off from something he took for granted, Higgins is left to suffer Eliza’s absence, this seeking out any remnant of hers in the form of her first recording blasting in an empty room.
It also becomes a more poignant kind of longing when you take into account that Alexander Walker, Rex Harrison’s biographer, claims that when Harrison filmed and recorded this song for the film adaptation, he channeled his thoughts into that of his late wife, Kay Kendall.
Up until my recent rewatching of the film, it hadn’t occurred to me to think that Freddy and Higgins sing about something similar, about the effect of Eliza’s presence in their lives, albeit in different places of their infatuation. Once Freddy gains it, he instantly looks at the world around him and finds it a better place due to Eliza’s presence, idolizing the very street she lives on. Meanwhile Higgins, after losing it, only then comes to realize how neatly Eliza had fitted into his life. Love, he must realize, isn’t about grand gestures or a stereotypical woman only wanting to talk about it; rather, love is a feeling that loses its intensity and instead settles comfortably into little details of our everyday life.
While he claims to have transformed Eliza, to have been the sculptor behind this lady who enchanted the prince of Transylvania himself, Eliza has altered him as well by simply existing. And if we take into account George Bernand Shaw’s preferred ending for his original play, Pygmalion, Eliza marries Freddy and sets up a flower shop with help from Colonel Pickering, leaving Higgins behind, alone and incomplete.
While Eliza’s personal story has little to do with love — more about the way a woman’s social status can change due to seemingly frivolous things like her clothes and the manner or accent in which she speaks — let’s not forget that when she sings about her ideal home she describes “someone’s head resting on my knee / warm and tender as he can be / who takes good care of me.” Taking into account our male love interests, Higgins can offer a physical home, a shelter, and the people inside she’s grown attached to like Colonel Pickering and Mrs. Pierce, while Freddy offers her the warmth of love and genuine pleasure at having her by his side.
And it’s left up to the audience to decide which of these two prospects Eliza settles with as the source of a proper home.
Mika is a Mexican writer and translator, pretender, pet-lover, and a mess at 1 in the morning. Follow her on Twitter @frequencymika.
