My Fair Lady is one of my darling bride’s favorite plays. I, on the other hand, am more a fan of the original play script Pygmallion, by George Bernard Shaw. On May 20, Eliza Doolittle Day Is celebrated, reminding us of a Cockney flower girl inside her own imagination; in Alan Jay Lerner’s lyric from My Fair Lady, Eliza dreams of the King declaring, “Next week on the twentieth of May, I proclaim Eliza Doolittle Day” (Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, My Fair Lady, 1956), which is a wonderfully absurd little coronation for a woman whose great cultural crime was speaking in a way that made polite society reach for smelling salts.
The joke works because My Fair Lady is built upon a serious question that modern people keep pretending they have outgrown: namely whether manners, speech, bearing, dress, and disciplined self-command are merely artificial social costumes or whether they reveal something about the soul that has either been trained toward order or abandoned to appetite.
George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, which furnished the dramatic source for Lerner and Loewe’s musical, is far more caustic than the film and stage adaptation because Shaw was interested in language as social power, class machinery, and public deception; when Henry Higgins insists that Eliza’s “kerbstone English” will keep her “in the gutter to the end of her days” (George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion, 1913), he is speaking with the cruelty of a man who sees accurately and then ruins the truth by delivering it like a tax notice from hell.
The musical softens Shaw’s sharpness through story and song, although it preserves the main insight that civilization requires formation; indeed, Eliza’s ascent from the street to society depends upon speech because language is never merely sound since it discloses the moral habits by which a person has learned to present the self before others.
The ancient myth behind both works is stranger and more dangerous because Ovid’s Pygmalion is a sculptor disgusted by the vice of women around him who creates an ivory maiden so perfect that he falls in love with his own craftsmanship; therefore, when Venus grants life to the statue, Ovid writes that “the ivory yielded to his touch” (Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 10), which leaves the reader admiring the miracle while also wondering whether the artist has loved a person or merely adored his own idea with excellent posture.
That is the moral danger beneath every Pygmalion story because formation can become domination when the teacher seeks possession rather than virtue; accordingly, Higgins may improve Eliza’s vowels while still failing to see her dignity, which is precisely why Shaw’s Eliza eventually rebukes him with the human force of one who has learned that refinement without charity merely produces a better-dressed tyrant.
Yet the modern answer that rejects refinement altogether is even more ridiculous since it tells people that vulgarity is authenticity and that self-expression is nobility; naturally, the result is a society where adults speak like malfunctioning adolescents, public discourse resembles a food fight with Wi-Fi, and the same people who cannot govern their tongues demand authority over civilization.
Aristotle understood the issue far better because virtue is acquired through repeated action; he writes that “we become just by doing just acts” (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book 2), and this means that speech, manners, dress, punctuality, gratitude, and restraint are genuine schools of the person rather than decorative rituals for people who own matching silverware.
Saint Thomas Aquinas develops this truth with theological precision when he teaches that virtue is “a good habit bearing on activity” (Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 55, a. 3), which means the human person becomes excellent through grace-assisted discipline that gradually makes the good easier, sweeter, and more deeply rooted within the powers of intellect and will.
Consequently, refined speech and conduct are signs of a refined mind because the person who has learned to govern language has already learned some measure of interior rule; this is why Scripture warns that “death and life are in the power of the tongue” (Proverbs 18:21), and this is why Saint James says the tongue is “a fire” that can set a whole life ablaze (James 3:6).
Coarse speech usually reveals a coarse interior life because a mind saturated with filth rarely produces clean language for very long; yes, someone may have a rough background and still possess nobility, while another may possess polished pronunciation and remain morally rotten, yet ordinary patterns of speech still reveal what the soul has been feeding upon.
This is where Eliza’s journey becomes morally useful because she learns that speech can train perception, perception can train desire, and desire can train conduct; therefore, her refinement is deeper than elocution since every lesson in pronunciation asks her to attend carefully to sound and self-command.
C.S. Lewis once wrote that “the task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts” (C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 1943), and that line explains why the civilizing task remains urgent in an age that has confused neglect for freedom and then acted surprised when neglected souls behave rather poorly in public.
The Church has always known that grace perfects nature because Christ redeems the whole person; therefore, Christian formation influences speech, manners, imagination, habits and the ordinary courtesy by which one human being honors another creature made in the image of God.
Saint Paul gives the Christian grammar of refinement when he commands, “Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt” (Colossians 4:6), and again when he commands believers to put away “filthiness” and replace it with thanksgiving (Ephesians 5:4), which sounds terribly oppressive only to the sort of soul that thinks civilization peaked with comment-section insults.
Moreover, the Catechism teaches that human dignity requires education in virtue since “education in the virtues” teaches self-mastery and “freedom makes man responsible for his acts” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1804 and 1734), which means personal refinement is neither elitist nor optional since it belongs to the moral architecture of a free creature.
Still, the Christian must avoid Higgins’s central failure, because real formation never treats another person like raw material for one’s own vanity; rather, it receives the person as a living soul entrusted to God, capable of growth through truth and grace.
Accordingly, the lesson of Eliza Doolittle Day is wonderfully simple and rather inconvenient for our slovenly age; every person can become more virtuous through disciplined practice, every tongue can become more charitable through deliberate restraint, every mind can become more ordered through better reading, and every life can gain genuine refinement through the humble acceptance of correction.
So begin practically by reading Scripture aloud each day so that divine language retrains the ear, then read great prose slowly so that noble thought begins to discipline ordinary expression, then remove vulgar speech from daily use because the tongue will never become clean while the imagination remains comfortably dirty.
After that, practice gratitude in exact words, offer correction without cruelty, dress with modest dignity, arrive on time, listen before replying, and confess sins of speech with the same seriousness given to other moral failures because any even sins of speech carve the soul in the direction away from God.
Finally, place the entire work before Christ because the goal is never mere social polish; the goal is a soul conformed to the Word made flesh, who spoke truth with authority, received sinners with mercy, rebuked evil with holy strength, and now calls every ‘Eliza’ and every ‘Higgins’ to receive from Him the grace by which human nature becomes truly civilized. And, one way to enjoy a soul’s refinement is to spend leisure time with your beloved spouse and watch My Fair Lady. Just a suggestion.
