Personified Gemstone: A New Interpretation of the Pearl Maiden

Barbara Janina Kowalik

doi:10.18290/rh257311.6

Published : 2025-12-19

Vol. 73 No. 11 (2025)

Personified Gemstone: A New Interpretation of the Pearl Maiden

Barbara Janina Kowalik

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6479-2164

DOI: https://doi.org/10.18290/rh257311.6

Abstract

This paper reinterprets the central character of the Middle English dream poem Pearl, the Pearl Maiden, observing that she is nearly as bewilderingly elusive and multifaceted a figure as the green challenger of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, another famous poem attributed to the same unknown fourteenth-century author. The paper’s argument draws upon the pre-modern perception of gemstones as animate beings and on modern thing theory as developed by Bill Brown. I argue that, before the Maiden begins to speak in the dream-vision, correcting the Dreamer’s errors and false assumptions and revealing her status of a heavenly queen, the poem underscores her identity as a precious stone, confronting the Dreamer, and the reader, with an intriguing gemstone persona, a marvel of the Terrestrial Paradise. The poem’s allegory rests, therefore, not exactly on a jewel or a human child at the literal level of allegorical exegesis but, more precisely, on the fluid image of a half human, half lithic figure. The paper demonstrates that the modern conceptual network of binaries like human–nonhuman, human–lithic, or animate–vegetative might not be commensurable with the typically more labile pre-modern perception of things and objects.

Keywords:

medieval, human, lithic, liquid, liminal

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