Andrew attempts to refine Georgie, treating her like a malleable object he can transform into his ideal woman. This motif revisits the late Victorian play Pygmalion, by George Bernard Shaw, itself a reworking of a Greek myth most famously explored in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In the myth, a sculptor named Pygmalion carves a statue as a rebuke to living women, whom he hates (a kind of proto-incel, he is upset to realize that some women enjoy sex work). After falling in love with the statue, he prays to Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, who makes it come alive so he can marry his misogynist creation, now named Galatea. Shaw’s play excises the myth’s fantastical elements, keeps the sculptor’s misogyny, and adds a dose of the playwright’s socialism: Henry Higgins decides to mold Eliza Doolittle into a duchess to show up strict English class structures, but insists that women lack souls. The politics of the play were later sanded off for the wildly successful 1956 Lerner and Loewe musical adaptation My Fair Lady, which nevertheless hangs on to Higgins’s hatred of women.

When Edward jokes with the guys at the law firm that his idealistic college chum Andrew is attempting “this Pygmalion thing” (24), Georgie buys a copy of Shaw’s play to understand the reference.