Spike Heels

This play is a third iteration of the story of Pygmalion, a mythical sculptor. In the Ancient Roman poet Ovid’s poem Metamorphoses, Pygmalion is a hard-line misogynist, who hates women for being innately flawed. In response, he carves his ideal woman out of marble, and promptly falls in love with it. When sex with this inanimate object proves less than ideal, he prays to Aphrodite, the goddess of love, who brings the statue to life so that Pygmalion can marry her. Taking this myth as its frame narrative, George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion retells the story through the lens of socialism and class politics: An upper-crust English professor of phonetics decides on a dare to make a Cockney flower girl into a duchess by teaching her to speak like the English upper class. Rebeck’s play, which directly references Shaw, again updates this myth, this time as a commentary on gender relations.

The play’s opening scene sets up the shifting power dynamic between Georgie and Andrew. Georgie is often the sexual aggressor: She strips down to her bra and panties in his apartment and pressures him to have sex with her minutes before his fiancée is expected. At first glance, Andrew’s reluctance to have a sexual relationship paints him as upstanding. Georgie accuses him of having too high moral standards: “Fuck, yes, take advantage of me. Please, don’t be noble, Andrew. For once don’t be noble” (25). Later, he explains to her that because he has been instructing her in middle-class mores, they shouldn’t become involved: “I am your teacher. And you don’t sleep with your teacher; it screws up everything. You don’t do it” (28).

However, Andrew’s insistence that he is Georgie’s superior quickly reveals his somewhat sinister influence on her life. Like the professor in Pygmalion, Andrew is conducting a socio-economic experiment with Georgie. Dismissing her life experience and affect as wrong and invalid, Andrew is erasing markers of her working-class upbringing so she can fit into the white-collar world of his friend’s law firm. Andrew automatically assumes that his aesthetics are preferable to hers, an attitude that allows him to treat her like an object—so much so that he thinks nothing of asking Edward to aggressively hit on Georgie as a way of acculturating her. Andrew’s off-the-cuff remark about deciding to “give” Georgie to his reptilian best friend finally breaks Georgie’s equanimity: “Am I like your property?” (30).

This background complicates how the audience is meant to categorize Edward’s treatment of Georgie in the office. His sexual harassment of her is offensive and threatening, particularly since he is single-handedly responsible for giving her a job she is under-qualified to get on her own. However, he insists that since her job is not technically contingent on her sleeping with him, he is doing nothing wrong—a lack of quid pro quo means Georgie should have nothing to complain about. Modern readers will find Edward’s ideas repugnant, especially after the #MeToo movement —their necessarily uneven power dynamic means she has little recourse to handle his unwanted advances beyond chucking a pencil at him. However, Edward’s attitude captures the way workplace sexual harassment was thought of in the early 1990s. The play expects us to balance Edward’s rape jokes with Georgie behavior: She dresses to accentuate her sexuality, using her long legs (accentuated by her expensive spike heels) to distract from her lack of professional confidence and experience. Rebeck’s original audience would see power rather than desperation in Georgie’s unwillingness to quit her job after Edward’s harassment: “That job means a lot to me…What was I supposed to do, just quit and go back to—fuck, I don’t know—I mean—I don’t want to go back and be a waitress. What was I supposed to do? Quit because Edward is an asshole?” (20).

All Georgie can do to fit into the culture Andrew is pushing on her is recapitulate the same kind of abuse she has suffered on others; her only other choice is to flee. Either she accepts her role as sexual object, dressing in high heels for the office and coming onto Andrew on the sofa, or she rejects Andrew’s premise entirely. The scene ends with just that: Georgie exits in a huff after shoving Andrew because she has no place to make a stand, leaving the two men still in control. For Georgie, awareness is the beginning of her emotional and psychological evolution.