Bernard Shaw's Henry Higgins: A Classic Aspergen

Abstract

Bernard Shaw's Henry Higgins: A Classic Aspergen Rodelle Weintraub Newark, Delaware THE CHARACTER Henry Higgins in Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion (1912) has presented directors and audiences with a dilemma. Shaw insisted that Higgins was not a romantic leading man, one with whom any romantic attachment with Eliza Doolittle was absurd. He described Higgins in a cable to Sally Luther1 as a "middle-aged bully" who was "indifferent to young women on the ground that they had an irresistible rival in his mother...."2 His Higgins is not only a middle-aged bully but a middle-aged adolescent who displays bad manners, lurches about the stage, jingles coins in his pockets, has temper tantrums, and has a childlike attachment to his mother and his housekeeper. Yet, from its first production, most directors have been loathe to accept Shaw's Higgins , now more commonly known to audiences as the phonetics expert in the musical adaptation My Fair Lady, and have tried to replace him with a romantic leading man. Actor-manager H. Beerbohm Tree, the first Henry Higgins, could not imagine himself as the misfit that Shaw had constructed. Slightly altering the ending without altering the dialogue, Tree offered flowers to the leading lady, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, at the close of the play but before the curtain fell. Shaw was furious, refusing to attend any performances after the opening night, with the exception of the one hundredth performance. After seeing it, he "cursed the whole enterprise and bade the delinquents farewell for ever." Still when writing the film script in 1938 he could not prevent the ambiguous directorial ending in which Higgins, played by the debonair actor-director Leslie Howard, listens to his recording of Eliza Doolittle's voice as she enters his study and repeats the words herself. With a smug look on his face, with no word of greeting and without turning to face her, he says: "Eliza, where the devil are my slippers?"3 The scene is repeated in My Fair Lady. 388 WEINTRAUB : SHAW Jackie Maxwell, in her 2004 Shaw Festival Theatre production, gave the audience a Higgins that might have pleased Shaw. Rather than being a handsome, sexy hero, Higgins was a balding, middle-aged eccentric linguist utterly lacking in social skills. Without realizing it, she and actor Jim Mezon had portrayed Higgins as an adult Aspergen.4 When asked,5 Ms. Maxwell said that she had not intentionally directed Higgins as an Aspergen, and, in fact, did not know what an Aspergen is. Until relatively recently she was not alone. In March 1912, Bernard Shaw began his play Pygmalion, completed in June 1912. Not until 1944 did the Viennese pediatrician Hans Asperger describe a form of high-functioning autism that now bears his name: Asperger's Syndrome. His work was forgotten and did not come back into the literature until 1981.6 An astute observer of human behavior, Shaw gives us a protagonist, Henry Higgins, who could now be described as a textbook example of an Aspergen.7 According to DSM-PV Diagnostic Criteria for Asperger's Disorder and Gillberg's Criteria for Asperger's Disorder, an Aspergen has difficulties in social interaction, lacks empathy, or has difficulties with it, has trouble with social role-taking and has unusual responses to the environment similar to those in autism. Cognitive and communicative development are within normal range and may be quite advanced, which is one of the distinguishing characteristics from classic autism, and verbal skills are usually strong. Geniuses such as Alexander Graham Bell, Albert Einstein, and Bill Gates have been suspected of being Aspergens.8 Idiosyncratic interests are common and may concentrate in unusual subjects or highly circumscribed areas, such as train schedules , the weather, lighthouses, insects, snakes, even deep-fry cookers and telegraph pole insulators. Aspergens often lack common sense. They may be socially aware but display inappropriate reciprocal interaction , and are often clumsy, awkward and fidgety. It is not uncommon for an Aspergen to be incorrectly diagnosed as Attention Deficit (and Hyperactivity) Disorder (ADD, ADHD) or Obsessive-Compulsion Disorder (OCD). Aspergens are usually male and are often interested in mechanical objects, especially things that spin. Digby Tantam, in "Asperger syndrome in Adulthood," lists...