Abstract
The exquisitely beautiful, fourteenth-century, Middle English dream vision
Pearl can be interpreted as a consolation. In early scholarship on the poem,
literary critics engaged in a vigorous debate over whether the poem was
an elegy or an allegory,1 and in response, John Conley proposed that the
poem might belong to a third genre, consolatio. Ian Bishop and others
subsequently agreed with him.2 But the idea that the Dreamer of Pearl is
consoled, or that Pearl has a consolatory effect on readers, came under
suspicion-even attack. Davenport has argued, for example, that the poem
is actually a contra-consolatio.3 Nicholas Watson has made a related case
in his essay, “The Gawain-Poet as Vernacular Theologian,” asserting of the
poem’s conclusion (lines 1201-12) that it “is not immediately obvious how
the jeweler can derive so comforting a lesson from his bruising encounter
with eternity nor how the poet can reconcile this picture of the ‘eþe’ [“ease”]
of Christian living with his analysis of the profound gap between earth and
heaven. …”4 Using the theoretical paradigms of psychoanalysis for interpretation, which might be characterized as Freudian and feminist respectively, David Aers and Sarah Stanbury have closely considered the emotional
progress of the Dreamer of Pearl as well.5 Aers affirms his filiation with
Pearl scholarship that “focuses on the narrator’s ‘inability to relinquish old
ties’ and sees the poem’s conclusion as an achievement of ‘practical consolation,’ of ‘acceptance’ of death in which the narrator shows ‘selflessness and
fatherly affection,’”6 while Stanbury takes an equally nuanced but nevertheless opposing position:
The final stanza group, in which the narrator recounts his reluctant
acceptance of the terms of loss once he has awakened from the dream,
resonates with a sense of ‘if only’ … But this articulation of words
beyond consolation, ‘if only, then …’ reminds us finally that the narrative, however formally shaped by religious allegory, returns to human
losses and to the melancholic recapitulations of grief … in Pearl, the
girl is never forgotten nor are her losses every fully put to rest.7