“…I cannot at my age undertake studio work; and about
20 directors seem to have turned up there and spent their
time trying to sidetrack me….They devised a scene to give a lovelorn
complexion to Mr. Leslie Howard; but it is too inconclusive to be worth making a fuss about.”
—Bernard Shaw, "From a Recent Interview" (1939), p. v.

When Pygmalion was made into a movie in 1938, Shaw stopped trying to control his message. When asked why he had allowed a “lovelorn” Higgins to appear at the end of the film, he cried defeat and, in contrast to his early diatribe, suggested that the movie’s ending was inconsequential. I disagree. Behind the romance is a problematic and violent remediation. Our lives and our rhetoric cannot escape mediation: for this reason, we cannot ignore it and we certainly should not romanticize it.

In exploring the dense intertextuality of different Elizas, I have shown several ways this story continues to run through history, reappearing in different contexts and forms. Sometimes our experiences with familiar narratives and the modes and situations in which they are delivered weigh heavily on us. But often, they resurface without much reflection. As a literacy researcher and teacher, I am always struck by the persistence in which such narratives circulate about literacy. Eliza’s narrative says much about the problematic faith that rigidly aligns literacy with upward mobility. When we consider the networks in which such stories circulate, it is not surprising that this narrative resurfaces again and again. Our re-imagining of the canons, particularly the canon of delivery, is an effort to attend to such networks, to trace communication across genres, technologies, and motives.

Remediations: Remediated photographs and movie clip from 1938 film.