The modern Pygmalion: Crossing Boundaries in Peter Goldsworthy’s Wish

Abstract

Peter Goldsworthy’s novel Wish (1995) narrates an unusual love story, that between the female gorilla Eliza and her Sign teacher John James. It can be interpreted as a re-writing of George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion (1912) where a Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, is turned into a lady thanks to her training in proper speech by professor of phonetics Henry Higgins. Both works depict language experiments oriented towards social  transformation. It can therefore be argued that both works aim, in sum, at dissecting the inequalities of their time and producing an ontological turn. This article therefore aims at analysing the strategies used by Australian author Peter Goldsworthy to dismantle the human/animal binary and demonstrate the contingency of the species boundary based on notions such as verbal language.