ELIZA

A flower girl remade as a "lady" turns on the man who unmade her — and asks the question he never considered: what is she for now?

1:00Dramatic20s–30sIntermediate

The speech118 words · 3 beats

0:00 / 1:00

Off-book

I sold flowers. I didn't sell myself. Now you've made a lady of me I'm not fit to sell anything else. I wish you'd left me where you found me.

What am I fit for? What have you fitted me for? Where am I to go? What am I to do? What's to become of me?

I know I'm a common ignorant girl, and you a book-learned gentleman; but I'm not dirt under your feet. What I did was not for the dresses and the taxis: I did it because we were pleasant together and I came to care for you.turn

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Speaking to: Professor Higgins, the morning after her triumph.
What just happened: Eliza has just passed as a duchess at a ball and won Higgins his bet. He has celebrated himself and ignored her. She has fled to his mother's house.
Objective: To make Higgins see her as a person he has stranded, not an experiment he has finished.
The turn: From the cold accounting of what she's lost to the raw admission that she did it because she cared for him.
Watch out for: Modern prose that must not slide into either Cockney caricature or self-pity. The class fury and the hurt are the same feeling.

Full work: Pygmalion New to the vocabulary? What’s a beat? →