The Pearl-Maiden's Two Lovers

I N her contribution to A Companion to the Gawain-Poet, Jane Gilbert analyzes gender and sexual transgression in Cleanness, Pearl, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and she argues that Pearl contains implications of incest: ‘‘Feminist critics have long (Greer ) complained that women are infantilized in Western culture—that the features which are considered to constitute their sexual attractiveness are in many cases those of the child. . . . In Pearl, this combination works powerfully to emphasize the idea of incest with a very young daughter, and thus to render the desire the Dreamer expresses disturbing.’’ Gilbert’s claim depends on an ‘‘elegiac’’ reading of Pearl, a reading that originated with Richard Morris in when he edited the poem for the Early English Text Society. In his introduction, he wrote, ‘‘the author evidently gives expression to his own sorrow for the loss of his infant child, a girl of two years old,’’ and this view, that the relationship between the Dreamer and the Pearl-Maiden is one between a father and a daughter, has been widely accepted. When an elegiac reading is combined with an analysis of courtly love language in Pearl, such as the one by Charlotte Gross, Gilbert’s argument about incestuous desire gains additional support. Gross begins her essay by acknowledging the father-daughter relationship in