Who is henry higgins

Higgins does very well for himself, and he would hate to have his peaceful home interrupted by any sort of noise or bother. That is, until Eliza Doolittle walks into his study.

Profession… phoneticist. Higgins studies all the vagaries of language, and considers himself one of the foremost experts on the English tongue. Interests… words, reading, the quiet and cultured life. Higgins has an appreciation for art and philosophy, and prefers to leave the rest of humanity to itself. Relationship Status… single. His unique brand of rhetoric, an unembarrassed, unhypocritical advocation of drink and pleasure at other people's expense , is amusing to Higgins.

Through Higgins' joking recommendation, Doolittle becomes a richly endowed lecturer to a moral reform society, transforming him from lowly dustman to a picture of middle class morality--he becomes miserable. Throughout, Alfred is a scoundrel who is willing to sell his daughter to make a few pounds, but he is one of the few unaffected characters in the play, unmasked by appearance or language. Though scandalous, his speeches are honest.

At points, it even seems that he might be Shaw's voice piece of social criticism Alfred's proletariat status, given Shaw's socialist leanings, makes the prospect all the more likely.

Professor Higgins' mother, Mrs. Higgins is a stately lady in her sixties who sees the Eliza Doolittle experiment as idiocy, and Higgins and Pickering as senseless children.

She is the first and only character to have any qualms about the whole affair. When her worries prove true, it is to her that all the characters turn. Because no woman can match up to his mother, Higgins claims, he has no interest in dallying with them. To observe the mother of Pygmalion Higgins , who completely understands all of his failings and inadequacies, is a good contrast to the mythic proportions to which Higgins builds himself in his self-estimations as a scientist of phonetics and a creator of duchesses.

Higgins' surmise that Freddy is a fool is probably accurate. In the opening scene he is a spineless and resourceless lackey to his mother and sister. Oh, and he can mimic them too. Right from the beginning we can tell he's a bit of a braggart and a bit of a preacher—he can't help but tell Pickering all about his trade, his life philosophy, and his ability to turn flower girls into duchesses just by changing their accent and speech pattern—but as far as first impressions go, he makes a pretty good one.

He comes off as a cool customer. By the end of the second act, things have become more complicated. It turns out he treats women like trash sometimes, and his motives for taking on Pickering's bet seem less than sincere.

He begins bossing Eliza around rather quickly, telling her what to do, manipulating her with big promises and chocolate—he can tell a chocoholic from a mile away, you have to give him that. He even pays Eliza's father so that he can take her into custody. All of this happens before he calls her an idiot and a slut and almost assaults her…twice. Higgins's actions spring from some unexplained distaste for young women, who he tells his mother are "all idiots" 3.

Oh, and he has this weird thing for women that remind him of his mom. At various points in the play he compares women to blocks of wood, calls Eliza garbage, asks to have her wrapped in brown paper like a package, and refers to her as "his masterpiece. Both his mother and his maid, Mrs.

Pearce, point out how unfair this all is and how, in Mrs. Pearce's words,. You can't take a girl up like that as if you were picking up a pebble on the beach. Though he can be a stubborn jerk, Higgins is definitely not a fool. He knows he's a jerk, and he's even come up with a justification for his behavior. After Eliza accuses him of treating her unfairly, he tells her, The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls: in short, behaving as if you were in Heaven, where there are no third-class carriages, and one soul is as good as another.

Sounds pretty convincing, right?