Abstract
Strictly speaking Pearl (1375–95) is not a narrative but a visionary and consolatory episode,1 in which a man, lamenting the loss of a precious pearl — in part perhaps his daughter — is granted a vision of his pearl among the blessed in heaven, and bid to grieve no more. But as a piece of Christian supernaturalism, as a peculiar picture of the strong current of otherworldliness in medieval Christian literature already glimpsed in the Queste, and as a poem of rare beauty in its own right, it demands some consideration here.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
On the backgrounds of the poem as ‘Vision of the Other World’ and ‘Consolatio’, respectively, see Thomas C. Niemann, ‘Pearl and the Christian Other World’, Genre, 7 (1974) 213–32;
and John Conley, ‘Pearl and a Lost Tradition’, JEGP, 54 (1955) 332d–47,
repr. in Conley (ed.), The Middle English ‘Pearl’: Critical Essays (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1970) pp. 50–72.
See also Howard Rollins Patch, The Other World: According to Descriptions in Medieval Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950) chs 4, 5.
References are to Pearl, ed. E. V. Gordon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953).
See Ian Bishop, ‘Pearl’ in its Setting: A Critical Study of the Structure and Meaning of the Middle English Poem (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1968) pp. 51–61. Bishop, pp. 62–72, also finds present an ‘allegory of the poets’.
On the pearl as symbol see also A. C. Spearing, ‘Symbolic and Dramatic Development in Pearl’, MP, 60 (1962) 1–12, repr. in Conley, Pearl, pp. 122–48;
Patricia M. Kean, ‘The Pearl’: An Interpretation (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967) pp. 138–61; Bishop, ‘Pearl’ in its Setting, pp. 92–8.
It is even potentially heretical in the sense that the child was not even a late labourer: she never worked at all. On possible medieval precedent for this, see D. W. Robertson Jr, ‘The “Heresy” of The Pearl’, MLN, 65 (1950) 152–5, repr. in Conley, pp. 291–6; Bishop, pp. 122–5.
See also Wendell Stacy Johnson, ‘The Imagery and Diction of The Pearl: Toward an Interpretation’, ELH, 20 (1953), repr. in Conley, Pearl, pp. 46–9;
and Charles Moorman, ‘The Role of the Narrator in Pearl’, MP, 53 (1955), repr. in Conley, Pearl, pp. 118, 120.
See for example Nikki Stiller, ‘The Transformation of the Physical in the Middle English Pearl’, ES, 63 (1982) 402–9.
There have been earlier suggestions that the dream expresses the psychology of the dreamer, but they tend to relate only to the ‘dreamlike’ structure and transitions of the poem: there is little idea of the content of the vision as symbolic expression of the moral nature of the dreamer. See Constance B. Hieatt, The Realism of Dream Visions: The Poetic Exploitation of the Dream-Experience in Chaucer and his Contemporaries (The Hague: Mouton, 1967) pp. 61–6;
and A. C. Spearing, Medieval Dream-Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976) pp. 111–29.
A recent partial exception on medieval dream-visions generally is J.A. Burrow, Essays on Medieval Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984) pp. 206–12: Burrow remarks tentatively, for instance, of the second vision from the first part of Piers Plowman (V-VII) that the ‘quite unexpected twists in the allegorical fiction suggest imaginatively, it seems to me, the continuous corkscrewing movement of the spirit, adopting and then rejecting successive images, definitions and external observances as it works towards inwardness and truth.... The story and the meaning seem to interpenetrate, in a way that Neo-Romantic criticism is especially well fitted to describe’ (p. 212).
There have been occasional remarks on the maiden’s coldness: for instance by Spearing, in Conley, Pearl, pp. 135, 138; by Kean, in The Pearl, pp. 198–9; and by Larry M. Sklute, in ‘Expectation and Fulfillment in Pearl, PQ, 52 (1973) 675. Kean, however, sees it as a function of the fact that she is ‘Reason’, and Sklute as an expression of her distance as a heavenly being from our merely human modes of feeling. No suggestion is made that her aspect expresses the dreamer’s way of seeing things.
An exception here is Theodore Bogdanos, Pearl: Image of the Ineffable: A Study in Medieval Poetic Symbolism (University Park, Pa: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1983) p. 87, which speaks of ‘the poets’ intentional accentuation of divine heartlessness... to elicit a powerful response in the reader as human sufferer. The poet wishes to heighten the dramatic tension between man in his frailty and the absolute, inscrutable decrees he must measure up to.’ My own interpretation of Pearl has, it should be said, certain affinities with Bogdanos’s fine account of the poem, particularly his treatment of the maiden’s parable and the picture of heaven; but Bogdanos is much more concerned to see the ‘unaccommodating’ aspects of the vision from the point of view of God’s ineffability rather than the dreamer’s particular frailty.
On the poem as a subversive, self-consuming artifact which continually tests the reader by undermining his espousal of the rational see Howard V. Hendrix, ‘Reasonable Failure: “Pearl” Considered as a Self-Consuming Artifact of “Gostly Porpose”’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 86 (1985) 458–66.
On the significance of the stones see Milton R. Stern, ‘An Approach to The Pearl’, JEGP, 54 (1955), repr. in Conley, Pearl, p. 84. Stern notes latent significance in the three precious stones specified in the stream-bed (p. 81).
Previous commentators have seen it as a three-stage ascent reflective of the gradations of the narrator’s spiritual development: thus Louis Blenkner, OSB, ‘The Theological Structure of Pearl, Traditio, 24 (1968) 43–75 [repr. in Conley, Pearl, pp. 220–71], and The Pattern of Traditional Images in Pearl, SP, 68 (1971) 26–49;
John Finlayson, ‘Pearl: Landscape and Vision’, SP, 71 (1974) 314–43; Stiller, in ES, 63.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 1992 Colin Manlove
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Manlove, C. (1992). The Middle English Pearl. In: Christian Fantasy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-12570-8_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-12570-8_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-12572-2
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-12570-8
eBook Packages: Palgrave Religion & Philosophy CollectionPhilosophy and Religion (R0)