Higgins was plainly Shaw: an intelligent, abusive, emotionally detached survivor of some form of primal PTSD, with significant “mother issues” as they say, whose morality as it evolves in the play consists in a sort of effete estheticism of manners oriented around the abuse of lower classes in the name of redeeming them.
The essence of the Fabianism he and the Webbs created is a decadent formality oriented around saving people they hate and despise.
Nothing admirable there. And there is no doubt that Higgins does, in the end, hit Eliza, just as she expects, and as she became “accustomed” to in her childhood. Her father makes many references to hitting her.
This is basic psychology: she marries an abusive and emotionally absent father.
Can you see the sickness in these ideas? Can you see the role authoritarianisms played for Shaw, who admired Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin equally?
Can you see the connection between the decadence of the British ruling class and purported efforts to “save” people they don’t understand and don’t care for?
Brilliant musical, but shitty ending. You can put wit into the mouth of a savage, but you cannot make him into a decent human being. Cannibalism is at the heart of all of this. It is plainly implied by the moral logic of the situations. It is profoundly ugly.
I have posted this before, but it is worth watching again (if you have), and once if you have not: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgpaKkrZex4
Only a genteel beast, one capable of thinking of people as “cabbage leaves” and “baggage” could refer to a “humane” poison gas.
And I will actually add one more thing: at several points in the play everyone freezes. In Liza’s neighborhood, and at the track. I don’t know what the claimed purpose of this was, but I would submit again that this is the wax museum quality of frozen notions like “class”, which exempt individuals from being treated as individuals, which is capable of abstracting “middle class” (aka bourgeois) morality from actual morality, which is capable of extreme violence with a genteel and innocent face, which is characterized, in short, by what I continue to call Cultural Sadeism.
This is a deep notion. It does not exist on the surface. It is an emergent property of a system of thinking and feeling and behaving. It is rarely openly claimed, but it can be seen manifested everywhere, in sloppy thinking, denialism, rationalized abuses, and glorifications of horrors like Cuba.
Edit: Higgins also at one point argues that if he treats a Duchess as a flower girl, or a flower girl as a Duchess, it is all the same, since equality, not quality, of treatment is what is what matters.
This is a socialist argument. Logically, if I kill everyone I meet, then I meet this criterion, and some, like Che Guevera, come quite close.
As I say again and again, socialistm is an ANTI-morality and an anti-humanism. All the jokes in My Fair Lady? Shaw meant them. He was not joking. He was merely so far out from acceptable social norms that people took it as exaggeration and wit, and he KNEW this to be the case, that he could argue for the monstrous right in front of people, and still be accepted in society.
One could view the entirety of the British preoccupation with manners and protocol as an elaborate charade, whose principle goal is to eviscerate fully the capacity for honesty, genuine kindness, and society of a nurturing sort.
Socialism is what you get when society is ruined.