Eliza
Doolittle, the Galatea to Higgins' , is first encountered selling flowers outdoors. Shaw gives
an elaborate description of her in his stage directions, describing her as dirty, shabby, and
having bad teeth:
She is not at all an attractive person.
She is perhaps eighteen... [her] hat... has long been exposed to the dust and soot of London and
has seldom if ever been brushed. Her hair needs washing rather badly ... she is very
dirty.
Shaw adds, though, that her features are actually
no less regular than those of the ladies but the main difference in their appearance really has
to do with class. Eliza's poverty does not allow her to engage in the sort of personal hygiene
habits common among the upper classes and her clothing suffers from her earning her living
selling flowers on the street. Shaw also attempts to reproduce herphonetically, emphasizing the
great distance between her cockney accent and standard pronunciation.
While
the mother and daughter regard her as a nuisance to be paid off, Higgins is simply interested in
her speech patterns and sees her as more of an object of scientific curiosity than as a human
being. The bystanders tend to be sympathetic to her plight as they can see that she is
struggling to support herself by selling flowers.
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