'Virtue In Pearl Poet's Pearl'

The central conflict of the Pearl poet’s Pearl centers around the question of virtue and attainability of it. As the poem progresses with its focused lectures upon virtue, it may be easy to expect an uncompromised, direct resolution, one where the narrator successfully crosses into the proclaimed city of God. However, this simply ends up not being the case, as he rashly decides to attempt to cross, awaking from his spiritual vision. Despite this, he finds a sense of newfound resolution, ready to devote himself to God. Even with this moment, some critics focus on the narrator’s earlier failure as entirely representative of his sense of virtue and its attainability. On this point, Professor Corey Owen’s essay “The Prudence of Pearl” even concludes, “Even those brought close to the beatific vision necessarily suffer grief because of the constraints

The narrator loosely highlights that “any unclannesse has on, auwhere abowte” presents an issue; the catch-all “auwhere abowte” makes this invirtue something easily remediable. Although the concept may be used in an abstract context, with the clothes functioning in a more metaphorical sense, this is not at all unlike the “perle” of the previous poem. The word itself, as used by Pearl’s narrator, exists in between boundaries of definition, ultimately allowing for a realization of a desire for religious devotion when it takes on its signified role with subordination. In Cleanness, the body acts as a liminal space on which clothes, as representative of either purity or filth, can be placed or taken off. In the space of this poem, the naked body is an ambiguous space that holds infinite potential, making it a conduit to religious