'My Fair
Lady' is a story of modern Cinderella. It begins in London, on a rainy evening outside Covent Garden (an area long noted for its produce market and its royal theater), where the flower
girl Eliza Doolittle is selling bouquets of violets. Being born to a family of very low social status and lack of god breeding, she speaks and behaves in very bad taste. She meets
Professor Henry Higgins in the rain, a phonetics and linguistics expert who came to the market to record people’s accent and way of speaking English. He arrogantly expresses that the English language is deteriorating while people do not articulate it in the right way. Playfully Henry says in six months he is able to transform the vulgar girl into a graceful lady through
training, so that she can find a decent job.
Seeing the words a chance Eliza goes to the Higgins' asking to be trained. She is surely not able to afford the training and refused by the Professor. The sympathetic Colonel Pickering puts forward a wager with Henry that if the later ever can change the street girl with a strong cockney accent into a lady by teaching her to speak beautifully, behave gracefully and pass her off in an upper class party – Embassy Ball within six months, Colonel Pickering will pay for the training fee and all the expenses incurred. Emulative Henry takes this seemingly hopeless challenge.
The training has a very difficult beginning. Eliza has to practice all vowels again and again, all
day long, day after day. Eliza finally pronounces impeccably the tongue twisters as what she is taught. She is also taught how to behave like a lady. Yet what all she has suffered is leading to a pleasant end: the harsh training thoroughly remolded the flower girl! At the Embassy Ball in the Buckingham Palace hosted by the Queen, she charms everyone with her elegance and beauty including the Queen and the Prince. A Royal linguistics says she is a princess coming from abroad.
Ironically, comparing with Pickering, the self-glorifying professor is not always behaving like a gentleman. When Henry and Pickering are ecstatic at their success, Eliza has been totally neglected. Worrying about her future, she left the Higgins' the very night after the Ball. Professor Higgins, after her leaving, unhappily realizes that Eliza has become a part of her life already…..
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