That the professor moving a women into his bachelor household is weird, unexpected, comic. That Higgins' response to this beautiful and over-the-course-of-the-play blossoming young woman is comically wrong. The audience falls in love with her. Higgins, not so much.
Modern critics might write that Higgins is clearly homosexual. That would be wrong-headed too. He is a clownish character, with totally unusual reactions, which make him comic.
Shaw was, he writes in the afterword to a later edition, often asked what became of Eliza. Supposedly to answer that, he wrote a long, detailed, pedantic afterword. I may be alone in thinking this, but I think the afterword is itself a joke, ribbing people who cannot accept ambiguity. The afterword has no humor in it and is, to me, less satisfying than not knowing what happens after the curtain comes down. Some folks want to know what happened to Nora after the door slammed ending Ibsen's "A Doll's House." What happened to Happy and Biff after "Death of a Salesman"? Where did Tom Wingfield go after Laura blows out her candles? Etc. |
