"Thou met'st with things dying, I with things new-born": On Seasons and Genres in The Winter's Tale

I found a flower in the snow

The last play I taught in my Shakespeare class this semester was, appropriately to the season,  The Winter's Tale. A strange play that few of my students had read or seen before, Winter's Tale spends its first three acts as a tragedy and then makes a surprising and bittersweet comeback by the end. The play begins with King Leontes's unfounded jealousy over an imagined relationship between his wife Hermione and best friend Polixenes. This jealousy serves to tear apart his family and friendship and country. His heir dies, his wife dies, and his newborn child, whom he wrongly believes to be illegitimate, is left out in the cold and bear-filled landscape to face the elements. Antigonus, the man sent to leave the baby, receives one of the most famous stage directions in history: Exit, pursued by a Bear. Perhaps Antigonus is punished by nature for abandoning the child, perhaps this is a lesson in conflicting loyalties (loyalty to the king's orders vs. loyalty to personal morality), or perhaps he is a scapegoat figure. In any case, the last we see of Antigonus he is running for his life. Offstage, he dies a terrible death (while the bear, presumably, gets a good meal). Also offstage, a young man observes the violent mauling, while onstage the man's father, a shepherd, finds the baby. And here, at the end of act three, we get the first moment of real hope in the play. The play has been filled with jealousy and despair and death and cold and darkness, but the baby lives. At this time of year, when days are short and temperatures are cold and it feels like spring may never return, a glimmer of hope can mean life. (I never really understood this when I lived in California, but I certainly get it in upstate New York.) To survive winter, we need something to look forward to. A celebration. A winter holiday. A candle or a sprig of holly. And, of course, the shortest day of the year means that each subsequent day will be longer. The play, tied to seasonal change, is rooted in such inevitable cycles. A tragedy or a comedy, the play suggests, is only a matter of where you stop the tale. And this play keeps going into spring.

The shepherd is amazed by his discovery of the helpless child, and his son is horrified by the violence he has witnessed, and their conversation brings despair and hope, death and life, into contact. It is no accident that it is the old man who finds the new life. The pivotal moment of the play is this one of life and death, beginnings and endings. At the same time as father saves a new life, the son can do nothing to stop a life from ending. Hope, it seems, comes at a price.

I won't go into lengthy summary or analysis (though I have much more to say on the play), nor will I give away the ending. Instead, I just want to say a few words about the play in terms of this holiday season. In keeping with my Christmas posts from the past two years (one on Gawain and the Green Knight and another on The Second Shepherd's Play), I want to think here about how The Winter's Tale might help us contemplate this time of year. It's a play in which hope comes just as things seem the most tragic. Death is everywhere and we are sure this must have been mislabeled as comedy or romance. Surely it's a tragedy. In Act 2, the doomed little heir Mamillius explains to his mother that "A sad tale's is best for winter" (II.i.25). And what we get is indeed a seasonally-appropriate sad tale. But then something miraculous happens. A baby is born; a baby lives. Time passes, and it is winter no longer.

One of the many things I love about this play is that it manages to bring together genres in the way that seasons come together, not as separate entities but as parts of a larger, interconnected cycle. Even the play's ending, which allows for resolution, reconciliation, and even joy, is not completely free from the sorrow of the first three acts. Time has passed, bodies once young are now wrinkled. The years cannot be regained anymore than the wrongs can be forgotten. People have died, people have been slandered and exiled. And though some wrongs can be righted, others never can. Leontes regrets and learns and gets some redemption, but none of this erases what he's done. His happy ending is truly happy, but also bittersweet. The characters value their happiness because they know how dearly-bought it is. Likewise, we can always do better and the world can always do better for us, but what we've done and experienced won't just go away. It makes us who we are. The baby grows into a woman, but this doesn't eliminate the fact that her father intended her death. Her name, Perdita, means "the lost one," indicating that if she's found she will nonetheless represent that which has been lost. It is in this lost one, this Perdita, that we find hope, and the hope is real, but that doesn't disconnect it from the circumstances that required hope in the first place. This looking forward as well as backward, this Janus posture fitting to the new year, helps us to see that joy and sorrow are not always distinct, nor do they need to be. As redemption is only possible after a fall, hope only means anything in times of despair. This holiday season, as we move to a new year, let's think on the fact that looking for joy and hope and goodness in the world need not mean that we've forgotten the bad and the sad. Instead, let us try to see the bigger picture, to learn from mistakes and to understand that sometimes our gain comes from another's loss. And as the happiness found at the end of Winter's Tale is more meaningful to the characters in that they've known such sorrow, perhaps we can remember that life has no simple happy endings. Happiness is tangled and complicated, and life very often continues even after marriages or deaths that would make such neat conclusions to comedies or tragedies. And even the times of year we associate with joy can be filled with loss as well. I shine with love for those around me, but I also ache with fresh grief for those I have lost. I know I am warm and safe inside, but others are stuck in the cold. Part of being in the spirit of the season, I think, is in realizing what it means to celebrate light in the middle of the winter. In the spirit of The Winter's Tale, then, I wish for more joy and compassion for you all this holiday season. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!

Writing on Pearl

Below is the paper that I gave at Kalamazoo back in May. I remain, as I mentioned in my last post, deeply grateful for the opportunity to present on Pearl and for the wonderful feedback I received on the paper while I was there. That said, I've honestly never found a paper as emotionally exhausting to write as this one, and the process has actually given me pause about my ideas for a second project. Writing about Pearl as I did a couple of years ago was more cathartic than anything else, and as a result I starting toying with the idea that my next project (once I get my manuscript for this first book together) would focus on the ways in which grief and mourning are depicted in Middle English literature. I can definitely see myself writing more on the topic at some point. At the moment, however, I don't think I'm in the right place or time. So much has happened since I wrote that earlier post on Pearl, and the additional losses I've experienced have made the process of writing about the poem much harder than I  anticipated.

I also found myself writing the bulk of this paper in April, which has become a terribly hard month for a variety of reasons. My father-in-law passed away on April 3rd (which also happened to be Easter Saturday) back in 2010, and so both the anniversary of his passing and Easter weekend itself are very painful. What is more, the due date for the first pregnancy that I lost (the one that I mentioned in my earlier post on Pearl) would have fallen in April, and so I always tend to find myself slowing to a kind of crawl during this month because of the weight of all of these anniversaries. Fortunately, I've survived enough of these Aprils to know what's coming and what to expect, which is why I found myself more than a little bemused by my choice in topic for this particular paper. I know that my rationale had been to write on it because it was the next logical step (i.e. use conferences as I've used them in the past: to vet ideas for larger projects), and so for that reason I'm glad that I took this leap and struggled through the writing process. It reminded me in a big way of how important it is to choose my large projects wisely and to make sure I can sit with them for a long, long time. I know for a fact that I haven't arrived at that juncture with this particular topic quite yet, but maybe — in a few years' time — I'll find myself there.

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Pearl's Poetics of Grief

“[T]here is nothing that can replace the absence of someone dear to us, and one should not even attempt to do so. One must simply hold out and endure it. At first that sounds very hard, but at the same time it is also a great comfort. For to the extent the emptiness truly remains unfilled one remains connected to the other person through it. It is wrong to say that God fills the emptiness. God in no way fills it but much more leaves it precisely unfilled and thus helps us preserve -- even in pain -- the authentic relationship. Further more, the more beautiful and full the remembrances, the more difficult the separation. But gratitude transforms the torment of memory into silent joy. One bears what was lovely in the past not as a thorn but as a precious gift deep within, a hidden treasure of which one can always be certain” (Bonhoeffer, 238)

Dietrich Bonhoeffer penned these words in a letter to Eberhard Bethge — his student, close friend, and confidant — while imprisoned and awaiting his execution for his role in the attempted assassination of Adolph Hitler. I have thought quite frequently about this passage over the past few months as I prepared this talk.  Pearl, at its core, wrestles with the same themes of pain and absence born of grief that Bonhoeffer describes, and the poem ultimately argues for a similar conceptualization of loss — that it is impermanent, and that joy can be found through the suffering that comes with loss.  

       But Pearl, as many scholars have articulated, hones in on the spiritual problems of excessive grief, and many have seen the dreamer as someone who has forgotten himself in the midst of his pain. In focusing on the absence of his beloved pearl, he has forgotten both God and the possibility of salvation.  His forgetfulness, in this reading, belies a kind of foolishness similar to the self-indulgent grieving of Olivia in Twelfth Night, for which Feste chides her: 

Feste: Good Madonna, why mournest though?

Olivia: Good fool, for my brother’s death

Feste: I think his soul is in hell, Madonna.

Olivia: I know his soul is in heaven, fool.

Feste: The more fool, Madonna, to mourn for your brother’s soul being in heaven. . . . 

(Act I, Scene V, 357-60)

In similar way, the Pearl maiden chides the dreamer for making the same kind of error. Corey Owen has observed, however, that this criticism may not extend to the narrator we encounter in the poem, who seems — especially at the beginning and end of the poem — to be reflecting on his past experiences and mistakes. Moreover, the configuration of the Pearl maiden has long contributed to arguments that the poem is either an elegy or an allegory, and scholars such as Daniel Kline have stressed how the allegorical approach and related attempts to universalize the Pearl maiden and the narrator’s grief diminish the personal pains and experiences so poignantly conveyed in the narrative.

I want to offer up two interpretive possibilities in complement to these established readings. The first is that the author simultaneously personalizes and universalizes the child — as well as the grief experienced by narrator/dreamer — in order to actualize the instructional potential of the poem. I am suggesting, in other words, that these dual impulses  in the poem are not mutually exclusive, as some scholars have worried they might be, but are rather deeply complementary. The second possibility — one that lies at the core of Pearl’s poetics of grief — is that the poem invites its readers to simultaneously criticize and sympathize with dreamer. While the poem presents the dreamer as an excessive griever, the state of abjection formed by his immeasurable grief gives rise to the dream vision itself. In this way, the poem stresses not only the dangers of emotional excess, but also the seeming inevitability of this part of the grieving process and the potential it offers for growth and revelation. These two, dual aspects — the sympathetic/critical and the personal/universal — cooperatively present an atemporal and metacritical model of the grieving process. This model meshes criticism of the griever’s “category mistakes” with the rueful acknowledgment that, as fellow human beings, we are only separated from the narrator “in degree, not in time,” — to borrow from Arthur Bahr’s recent paper on Patience —  bound as we are to the same experiences and constraints of earthly existence.

The poem begins with the establishment of the narrator’s fallen state caused by his excessive and – as he will learn – misguided grief. The very first word, “perle,” introduces us to the object of the narrator’s affections and of his grieving and, to borrow from Sarah Stanbury, to the poem’s “central object and symbol” (31, n. 1). The centrality of the pearl is made very clear in these opening stanzas, especially in their conclusions: the first two stanzas end with the phrase “that [or my] privy perle withouten spot” and the third through fifth stanzas end with “that [or my] precious perle withouten spot.” Each stanza, however, ultimately provides deeper insight into the dreamer’s bereaved state. We learn of the pearl’s disappearance in the first stanza, and the other four go to great lengths to depict a man fixated on his pearl’s assumed “imprisonment” in the earth, this awareness causing him intense pain. In this nearly exclusive focus on the earth and related images of rot and decay, the dreamer literalizes his inability to think beyond his earthly cares and losses and perceive the broader, spiritual implications of the loss that so pains him. Pained as he is, however, he cannot keep himself from thinking about her as we see in the final lines of each stanza, and it is these meditations on his lost pearl that ultimately serve as an access point for the dream vision itself. 

This rhythmic iteration of the Pearl’s simultaneous presence and absence overshadows the grief of the narrator and hint at the limitations of the griever’s perspective.  As Sarah Stanbury illustrates, the term “privy” — and to a lesser extent, “precious” — not to mention the repetition of the phrase “my perle” at the end of each stanza — emphasizes the possessive attitude that the dreamer takes towards his pearl. The phrase “withouten spot,” by contrast can mean not only that the pearl is blemish-free but that it also has no one place/spot to call home; and as an aside, it also could easily tie into Boethian conceptualizations as well, where the dreamer himself has essentially – to paraphrase the famous line from the Consolatio, forgotten who he is. He has lost the object that gave him a stable sense of identity, and has, in this sense, lost his own spot. This very line, then, hints at the mystical abode of the Pearl maiden described in the proceeding sections while simultaneously pointing towards the flawed perspective of the dreamer. 

I say dreamer, and not narrator, because I think it is important to acknowledge the presence of two “versions” of the speaker we meet in the poem. As Corey Owen has argued, the poem offers us two different personas: the dreamer in throws of grief and the narrator who writes of his past experiences. With this in mind, I would like to offer that the outset of the poem, and even the depiction of the dreamer himself, should potentially be viewed through this more sympathetic lens. The narrator, as Owen observes so well, has had time to process and manage his grief — to exit out of his abject state thanks to the vision and the lessons learned in the dream world.  Thus, while the opening lines serve as a critical reflection on the fallen state of the dreamer, that reflection does not necessarily need to be divorced of sympathy — of the awareness that his suffering may well be a mirror to our own.

 “Death,” as David Aers remarks in his article on Pearl, “is a massive challenge to human identity. The disclosure of an utter powerlessness framing our will to control others, our environments, and ourselves. Death shatters networks in which human identity is created and sustained: we mourn, inevitably, for ourselves and the unwelcome reminder of the contingency of all that gives us a sense of identity, the reminder of the precariousness of all that we habitually take for granted” (56). This powerlessness is vividly depicted in Section 1 of the poem. The narrator describes the pearl as falling “thurgh gresse to grounde” (10), her color now “clad in clot” and marred by the “moul” (the earth) (22, 24). He, in turn, is frozen, chilled by a grief “that does bot thrych my herte thrange / My breste in bale bot bolne and bele” (17-18). He observes, or at least suggests, that he knew better than to despair but could not help himself: 

A deuely dele in my hert denned

Thagh resoun settle myselven saght.

I playned my perle that ther was penned

Wyth fyrce skylles that faste faght.

Thagh kynde of Kryst me comfort kenned

My wreched wylle in wo ay wraghte (51-56)  

The first fifty lines of the poem capture, in striking and startlingly accurate detail, the excruciating pain — both physical and emotional — that come with the loss of someone precious to you. These last lines, in particular however, lend credence to Owen’s assertion that the narrator speaks with greater wisdom than the dreamer, because they describe the very solutions to the problems faced by the dreamer — solutions that the dreamer cannot see because of his fixation on the earthly. 

Nevertheless, his forgetfulness, and the despair from which it is born, is not necessarily cause for criticism.  The opening of the poem, for instance, in its description of a garden and of a private moment of agony, seem to evoke Christ’s moments of apprehension in the garden of Gethsemane. And just as the angel visits Christ to strengthen him, so too does the Pearl maiden visit her father to help him recontextualize and manage his grief. A further similarity appears when we examine lines 1 (“Perle plesaunte to prynces paye”), 1164 (“Hit was not at my Prynces paye,”), and 1176 (“Now all be to that Prynces pay”). In the first, we have a reference to secular princes — to the earthly — and the pleasure that men take in the animate and inanimate objects of their affection. In the lines that follow, we are informed that the narrator’s problems stem from his inability to accept Christ’s (the Prince’s) will, manifest in the loss of his child. By the end of the dream vision, however, the narrator is able to contextualize his inability to cross the streambed and be with his beloved pearl. He is able to come to terms with his loss and his suffering in ways convergent with that of Christ in the garden.

In the gospel of Matthew’s account, for instance, Jesus tells Peter and Simon that: “My soul is sorrowful even unto death: stay you here, and watch with me” (Matthew: 26:38, Douay). He then falls to the earth “upon his face” before asking “My Father, if it be possible, let this chalice pass from me. Nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt.” In Luke’s version, an angel comes to Christ him to give him strength before he returns to his disciples. The narrative arc of Pearl mirrors Christ’s actions in the garden almost exactly: we have a man consumed with despair, “overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death,” who falls to the ground in a state of abjection and/or supplication. He receives divine counsel and strength, and is able to face the world and his unfortunate circumstances with a resoluteness he did not have before.  

Considering the dreamer/narrator as a figure modeling Christ’s spiritual journey in Gethsemane doesn’t necessarily mean that we have to jettison the idea that the dreamer is flawed. That would be ill-advised, I think, especially given the number of times that the Pearl maiden has to chastise the dreamer for misconstruing his and her circumstances. As Sarah Stanbury has observed, the very structure of the dialogue is rooted in the narrator’s repeated category mistakes and “acts of passionate misreading.” In this way, the narrator/dreamer certainly differs from Christ in the garden, given that Christ, from the very start of that episode, understands that God’s will must be done. At the same time, reading Pearl alongside the biblical narratives of Gethsemane allows for a more sympathetic approach; it invites readers into an awareness that even their creator suffered tremendously and was occasionally overwhelmed in the face of his suffering. With that being the case, how could we fault a man for being overly consumed with grief over the loss of his loved one? Moreover, while the dreamer might not be able to accept God’s will at the outset of the poem, he is clearly able, or at least beginning to be able, to do so at poem’s end. 

Certain critics have expressed dissatisfaction over the “pat” way in which the poem concludes, or have seen it as an unresolved ending, where the narrator tries to convince himself of his improved state more than anything else. I would offer, however, that by keeping the image of Gethsemane in mind, the conclusion of the poem becomes all the more whole/wholly satisfactory. The dreamer wakes because his desire to be with the Pearl maiden gets the better of him yet again, but unlike the opening of the poem, which finds him unable to accept spiritual comfort, the dreamer – upon waking – sighs and says: “Now al be to that Prynces paye” (1174). He observes, in both the previous stanza and the one that follows this line, that rushing across the waters was not to God’s liking, which is why the dream vision ends; he even elaborates in lines 1189-94 that he might have been granted a more extended vision of the afterlife if “to that Prynces paye hade I ay bente / and yerned no more then was me gyven.” The dreamer finds himself afflicted with a “longeyng hevy” because of his removal from the dreamscape, but he is now able to cling to his renewed understanding of God’s will and to a certain acceptance of his powerlessness in the face of it. To return to Aers’ observations about death and identity disruption, death no longer holds the same fears for the dreamer. Whereas at the outset he saw the Pearl as the one imprisoned, by the end of the poem he is able to rejoice — however wistfully — that she has escaped the “doel-doungoun” in which he and all humans are consigned to dwell. He realizes, in other words, how deeply he had misread the circumstances that gave rise to his grief. In this way, the narrator completes a similar metaphysical and meditative journey that Christ undergoes in the garden, and exits with a greater ability to trust in God’s will. The poem, as a result, simultaneously acknowledges the problematic state in which the dreamer finds himself at the outset of the poem (i.e. abject and excessive grief) and the fact that such a state is inevitable if one lives long enough in the world. The solution, as offered by the poem, is the meditative journey exemplified by Christ and imitated by the narrator — a movement from a state of abject grief and despair to one of acceptance and spiritual perspective.

The conclusion of the poem, especially its description of the dreamer’s aborted attempt to ford the river, makes very clear that the dreamer (and even the more spiritually mature narrator) hasn’t escaped his grief entirely. It is still something with which he will have to contend for as long as he continues to exist in the world. And it is here, in these passages before and after the dream vision that the poem invites readers to simultaneously universalize and personalize its narrative.  Whereas Chaucer, Langland, and Gower often give specific names (however emblematic) to their dreamers and their narrators, the dreamer here is given no such specificity, and the same goes for the Pearl maiden. This allows readers to either read the poem as a personal narrative of one man grieving for a daughter or to understand it as a universalizing meditation on loss. The powerful description of grief, however, has caused some — Daniel Kline in particular — to argue against the universalizing of the child and of the situation the poem describes. To Kline, “purely symbolic” readings of the Pearl maiden “rob. . . her of her individual life. The poem [as he argues] attempt[s] to restore her particularity” (120). Kline is particularly invested in reconciling this reading with the fact that the dreamer doesn’t recognize the Pearl as his pearl when he first sees her. He argues rather convincingly that the lack of recognition is both a sign of pathological grief and of his inability to see the maiden as a “subject in her own right.” 

While I agree with these arguments, I would like to offer, as I wind this paper to a close, that the poem is even more generous than Kline asserts. Kline writes movingly of the awful loss of his third child — through a tragic late-term miscarriage — in the same article, driving home how important it is to remember and honor the particular circumstances of a person’s grief. This is why it’s generally a terrible idea to tell a grieving person, when they’re in the throws of bereavement, that you understand how they feel. The simple fact of the matter is that you can’t know how they feel, even if you’ve experienced an equivalent kind of loss, because you are not them. By the same token, I think it’s safe to say that we’ve all been comforted by the stories of others in times of sorrow. When we experience loss and grief, as I wrote some time ago, we’re given the opportunity to enter into a “strange and beautiful communion with all who have (and all who will) endure” painful losses. This is why, perhaps, the dreamer begins his journey in a state of self-inflicted isolation at the outset of the poem, but ends it with an allusion to the spiritual and communal body of Christ: “That in the form of bred and wyn / The preste uus shewes uch a day / He gef to uus to be His homly hyne / And precious perles unto His pay” (1209-12).  The repeated emphasis on the first person plural in these lines resituates the narrator’s grief into the larger communal Christian body, one that the dreamer can now see himself rejoining. The dreamer completely isolates himself in his grief at the outset of the poem by relying to an extreme degree on the deeply personal circumstances of his loss. The end of the poem, however, shows him beginning to see the value in balancing the personalizing impulses of grief with a sense of universal or communal awareness of the suffering of others. I say beginning, because we are left at the end of the poem with an occluded vision of the narrator’s successful reentry into that communal Christian body, and I like to think that this is because the poet is trying to present his readers with a portrait of grief that Is genuinely open to interpretation – similar to how Patience ends with the unclear overlapping of God’s and Jonah’s voices — and still somewhat in flux. The narrator/dreamer still has a long way to go, but he at least has gotten to the point by the end of the poem where he can say the right words. These words and lines are, in fact, practically ripped from the pages of penitential literature, and my sensing is that the poet ends Pearl in this way to drive home the need for communality. By saying these words — ones said and written by so many others before him — the narrator enters into that “strange and beautiful” communion with his fellow pilgrims on the road. 

Just as the narrative arc of Pearl mirrors that of Christ’s agony in the garden, so will the lives of its readers inevitably include similar moments of pain and loss. Pearl challenges its audience, however, to remember that while the initial, isolated state of the narrator might be excessive, those very kinds of raw states can give rise to revelations that will allow us to more peaceably abide in the world. Pearl reminds us that even the most abject can rescue himself from despair — that, to draw on Patience, no one is unworthy of God’s love and forgiveness. These states are deeply painful and problematic, but the poem ultimately shows that wisdom can, in fact, spring from them as well. Pearls of great price, indeed.


N.B.: All images are taken from The Cotton Nero A.x. Project. 

Bibliography: 

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Letters and Papers from Prison. Edited by Gerhard Ludwig Müller and Albrecht Schönherr. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996—.

Aers, David. “The Self Mourning: Reflections on Pearl.” Speculum 68 (1993): 54-73. 

Garrison, Jennifer. “Liturgy and Loss: ‘Pearl’ and the Ritual Reform of the Aristocractic Subject.” Chaucer Review (2010): 294-322. 

Kline, Daniel. “The Pearl, A Crayon, and a Lego.” Essays in Medieval Studies 15, 1998. 

Pearl. Ed. Sarah Stanbury. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2001.

"And we all shine on . . ."

A lot has happened since I last wrote, and I have a list of posts (on dissertating, on NEMLA) that I plan on submitting to the blog very soon.

For now, however, I want to talk about something else. Two years ago today, my beloved father-in-law passed away. This anniversary is hitting me particularly hard, so I don't honestly have all that much that I can say right now -- words aren't coming that easily, and there are so many stories that I could tell.  Too many for a single post though, and they deserve more justice than I can give to them right now.

What I do want to announce, however, is that my incredible mother-in-law has written a beautiful book about Mark, and it's going to be released tomorrow. It's called The Humanity of Medicine: A Journey from Boyhood to Manhood, and you can find it here. 

 For those of you who don't know, Mark survived what should have been terminal cancer as teenager, and went on to have a miraculously long and rich life. He was diagnosed again with malignant melanoma in October 2009, and while the months (and especially the weeks leading up to his passing) were among the most brutal our family has ever experienced, I will never forget what he told us when we saw him shortly after the diagnosis.  He reminded us, in his gentle way, of all the cards stacked against him throughout his life. He was told he wouldn't survive cancer as an eighteen-year-old, and yet he did. He was then told that he wouldn't have children because of the chemo, but he went on to marry the love of his life and they have not one, but three amazing kids. He was told he wouldn't live long, but he lived cancer-free for about thirty years. He reminded us of all of these things, and he told us that he was going to fight hard to beat the cancer again, just as he did before; but if it turned out that this was his time, he told us that in his mind he felt he'd already lived a truly blessed and rich life.  Here he was, facing down his own fears and confronting them with grace, but also finding a way to lead his family through the storm; truth be told, he never stopped being a healer, not even on his death bed . . . one of his last lucid conversations involved him asking his doctor (who had known him a long time) how she was holding up.  He somehow found it within himself to be strong in the face of immeasurable sorrow and fear -- and not even just then, in 2009, but throughout his entire life. He chose to live his life by looking forward rather than over his shoulder, and that was, in no small part, what he sought to give and instill in all of us in the last months that we were able to spend with him.  

I can't express how glad I am that this book is going being released tomorrow. I just made the discovery a few moments ago, and it struck an immediate chord.  Loudly and clearly, it reminded me to spend tomorrow/today trying not just to remember and grieve for the amazing person I was so blessed to know, but to live by his example, to try -- as best I can -- to "take a sad song and make it better" (Mark's motto). Because truthfully, we control precious little in this life. The only thing we seem to have any control over is the way in which we digest and respond to our circumstances.  True joy lies within those choices -- even in the face of sorrow and loss. This was a truth that Mark knew deeply and well, and I hope that I can do him proud by striving to live in that awareness. 

Writing through Grief (or, How I got over critical distance and just started writing)

Kate's recent post on grief was inspiring and honest and brave, and the fact that it led to so much wonderful discussion, both in the blog comments and in other forums, indicates that others found it inspiring as well. Her ideas on grief specifically struck me, since grief has been a powerful force in my graduate career thus far, but I was also interested in her combination of the personal and the professional. I admire those people who admit their personal connection to their work, those people who admit that they have lives and loves and families and that those things don't just take away from their work but actually inform and influence it. Finding a way to do so can be tricky, and can also be scary, especially to grad students who are trying desperately to professionalize. However, I do think it's important and rewarding, so I will try it out here and see what people think.

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In my second year of PhD work, my father died. The loss was crippling. I didn't know how to function in the world, no less to go on with my work. My dad had believed I was intelligent, capable of anything, but I didn't know how to be these things once he was gone. Yet I simply returned to my courses and my work and tried to understand how to exist in a world without my father. I had been writing a seminar paper on a 15th century play, the Digby Mary Magdalene, and, though I forced myself to continue with my coursework, I couldn't return to that paper right away. I took an incomplete (something I would warn other grad students to avoid at all costs), and focused on my other work. When I came back to that paper, I saw it in a new way. Near the play's opening, Mary's father dies suddenly. I had previously seen this plot point as a clumsy bit of writing. Right after a perfectly nice conversation with his children, the father is struck down by death with no warning and no explanation. Before, this seemed far-fetched. But after my own father's death, I suddenly understood. Death is sudden, inexplicable, and terrible. Even in cases of lingering illness, death itself rarely feels anything but shocking. The timing is seldom right. I had been writing vaguely about the positive way in which Mary Magdalene is depicted in the play, but I was now able to understand what was so different about this depiction of the saint.

Though Mary Magdalene is meant to represent the redemption possible to every sinner, many medieval sermons discussed her early life in a decidedly misogynist way. Her early sins (completely fabricated, by the way -- there's no mention in the Bible that she was a prostitute) were represented as evidence of female weakness and wickedness. Fathers and brothers and husbands were warned not to give their daughters and sisters and wives too much freedom. If the Magdalene was any example, an unchaperoned woman couldn't help but turn to sin. (For more information on these sermons, see The Making of the Magdalen: Preaching and Popular Devotion in the Later Middle Ages by Katherine Ludwig Jansen.) But that's not how it was depicted in this play. In the Digby play, Mary's a sweet but naive young woman, a dutiful daughter. She grows lost not because of female weakness but because of human grief. The playwright never denigrates Mary, something that I'd noticed in my initial readings of the play. Yet now I saw something more. Mary says that grief has wounded her. She's struck down by the loss of her father and no longer knows how to exist in the world. Most everyone in the audience would have experienced some kind of grief. Her heartache would have made sense, particularly at a time when the infant mortality rate was high and the Black Death was still in recent memory. Mary's fumbling to recover from her loss and reclaim her identity, perhaps making a few mistakes along the way, would have evoked sympathy, not derision. Her mistakes are not those of a wicked woman, but a grieving human. What I had written off as an awkward side note turned out to be the key to Mary's positive characterization. Anyone who has experienced any kind of heartache can recognize a bit of him or herself in Mary, a point I find crucial for the play's message.

This is not to discount rigorous research or careful examination of the evidence in the play, but rather to demonstrate how I could see important aspects of the play better when I approached it as a human who had experienced loss as well. My attempt at critical distance had blinded me to those features of the play meant for a very human audience. Combining my own personal response to my research and analysis brought me a much fuller picture of the play, and allowed me to clear up my incomplete. That paper has turned into several presentations, an article, and a dissertation chapter. I had discovered a new way to engage with my sources, and people seemed to be responding to it as well. I used a similar tactic when writing about Joan of Arc. My own horror at the sight of my father's ashes turned into an examination of the symbolism of Joan's execution. Joan was burned twice, and her ashes were thrown in the river, and I wondered what to make of this horrifying spectacle. I found a great deal to say about the way in which Joan's enemies attempted to annihilate Joan's body and keep peasants from making relics out of her. More to the point, I found a great deal of fascinating evidence. By the time I finished, I felt better about my father's ashes, and about my research. Joan was a real human who lived and who died, and it seemed right to take her death seriously (and even a bit emotionally). Instead of keeping me from doing careful scholarship, my human response to Joan aided me once again.

I am not saying that I have any real answers. I'm still sometimes overwhelmed, confused, scared, sad. I'm still not sure how to write a dissertation. And I am not saying that my father died so that I could learn something or so that I could write better papers, but rather that the only way for me to survive the rush of emotion that flooded me in the wake of my father's death was to allow it to flow into my work. The texts I read were written by humans for other humans. I am, after all, in the humanities, and admitting that I was a human with all of my faults and feelings was a relief. Pretending to a kind of objectivity which I simply cannot (and don't really want to) have is neither honest nor productive. It's scary to admit my emotional connection to my work, but it feels right, too. It is not necessarily narcissistic to focus on one's own experiences. It may be self-centered to wallow indefinitely (though a little wallowing can be quite helpful), but I think that bringing personal emotions and experiences and traumas into a larger conversation is quite the opposite. It's a way that we can all connect and gain a greater understanding. We can't say that people or literature were just the same in the Middle Ages as they are now. We can't say that people around the world or even in our own neighborhoods experience anything in the same way as we do. Grief is particular, to be sure. Neither can traumas be compared. One child experiences war or genocide while another loses a beloved family pet. No, these situations cannot be equated. Yet anyone who has experienced heartache of any kind, from a first break-up to the death of a parent, has a share in human suffering. Such heartaches are soul-crushing, and yet they contain within them a gift: human empathy. All grief is different, and yet those who have experienced any grief can understand the depth of human emotion and therefore feel for others who suffer. Not everyone can accept this gift. Some turn inward and never look back out. Nor does this gift bring any final answers. But there's a beauty in caring for others. There's a beauty in bringing our own human vulnerabilities and offering them up to others and accepting their vulnerabilities in return. There's a beauty in caring about one's work enough to let it be emotional, imperfect, human.

The Poetics of Grief: Considering Pearl and Wm. Paul Young's The Shack.

Grief has a funny way of choking out your perspective and balance. It's so easy to let that creeping vine take hold, and once you do, it's so very hard to wrench yourself free.  Grief can become, during our darker moments, a trickster-friend. You get so used to its presence that you forget how to live without it, insidious though the relationship might be.

Having spent the better part of this Fall attempting to journey forward after an intensely personal and awful loss (I miscarried right before the start of the term), I've found myself thinking a lot about how humans grieve, and on the literature that has been born out of these moments of agony. So much has been written on this topic, but for me, poetic works and their explorations of how we suffer and grapple with loss have always moved me the most and have helped to transport me (or at least begin the journey) out of those dark spaces.  The journey to a place of peace and balance after experiencing a profound loss is always a difficult one, and I have grown fascinated with, and taken considerable comfort from, those who have written about their own journeys through grief as a result.

Given that most of what I study these days is medieval, I have found myself thinking a lot about Pearl of late. The poem has been one of my favorites ever since I first encountered it as an undergraduate.  Nearly a decade later and particularly in light of my most recent loss, I have returned to the poem with a fuller awareness of the grief that gives Pearl its initial fuel and momentum.

Simultaneously, I've found myself thinking as well about a far more recent work: The Shack. The novel is, at its core, a framed dream vision. The first eighty pages or so chronicle the protagonist's (Mac's) loss of his youngest daughter, Missy. This portion of the novel is agonizing, and it ends in the very place where the authorities find clear evidence of Missy's murder – a dilapidated shack in the wilds of Oregon. Mac returns to the shack after receiving a cryptic invitation from "Papa" – the name that his wife, Nan, uses for God.  He falls asleep in the shack after a fit of rage and an ensuing mental breakdown, and when he "wakes" he enters into a dream vision in which he finds the comfort he's been searching for and his release from grief and anger.   

What strikes me the most about both of these works is the candor with which they recount the deeply personal and awful grief that comes with the loss of a child (or any loved one). Both Mac and the narrator of Pearl are angry, lost, and utterly encased in their grief at the outset of these works.  As I returned to them both over the past few weeks, I immediately identified with these characters because of that. Their questions, their hurt, but most of all, their journeys through grief to a place of balance felt so deeply familiar and so strangely comforting.

As I kept thinking about these two works (largely in isolation at first), I began to realize just how much they actually share. Granted, there are NUMEROUS differences (cultural, structural, and theological) that separate them, but I found certain aspects profoundly intertwined nonetheless. For starters, both the Pearl narrator and Mac have — as I mentioned earlier — allowed their grief to consume all aspects of their lives by the time that we're introduced to them. Take, for instance, stanza five of Pearl:

Bifore that spot my honde I spenned
For care ful colde that to me caght.
A deuely dele in my hert denned
Thagh resoun sette myselven saght.
I playned my perle that ther was penned
Wyth fyrce skylles that faste faght.
Thagh kynde of Kryst me comfort kenned,
My wreched wylle in wo ay wraghte.
I felle upon that floury flaght -
Suche odour to my hernes schot,
I slode upon a slepyng-slaghte
On that precios perle wythouten spot. (49-56)

Before that spot my hands I clasped / For care full cold that seized upon me / A desolating grief in my heart lay deep / Though reason would have reconciled me. / I mourned my pearl that there was trapped / With fierce arguments that fast contended, / My wretched will in woe nature wrought . . .

The speaker here kneels over the very spot where he "lost" his pearl — which is often interpreted as a young daughter — and laments that the awareness of this loss "does nothing but pierce my heart sharply, / Swell and burn my breast painfully" (17-18).

Mac's grief after Missy's abduction and and murder is similarly all-consuming:

Little distractions like the ice storm were a welcome although brief respite from the haunting presence of his constant companion: The Great Sadness, as he referred to it. Shortly after the summer that Missy vanished, The Great Sadness had draped itself around Mack's shoulders like some invisible but almost tangibly heavy quilt.  The weight of its presence dulled his eyes and stooped his shoulders. Even his efforts to shake it off were exhausting, as if his arms were sewn into its bleak folds of despair, and he had somehow become part of it. He ate, worked, loved, dreamed, and played in this garment of heaviness, weighed down as if he were wearing a leaden bathrobe – trudging daily through the murky despondency that sucked the color out of everything.

At times he could feel The Great Sadness slowly tightening around his chest and heart like the crushing coils of a constructor, squeezing liquid from his eyes until he thought there no longer remained a reservoir. Other times he would dream that his feet were stuck in cloying mud as he caught brief glimpses of Missy running down the wooded path ahead of him, her red cotton summer dress gilded with wildflowers flashing through the trees. She was completely oblivious to the dark shadow tracking her from behind. Although he frantically tried to scream warnings to her, no sound emerged and he was always too late and too impotent to save her. He would bolt upright in bed, sweat dripping from his tortured body, while waves of nausea and guilt and regret rolled over him like some surreal tidal flood.  (27)

Both protagonists find themselves utterly consumed by their awareness of what they have lost. It dominates their thoughts and oppresses any capacity for joy.  Seeking (whether they realize it or not) an end to their suffering, both journey to origin point of their pain: to the places where they lost their beloved children.  The Pearl narrator moves into a garden (often interpreted as a graveyard) where his pearl "sprang away" from him, while Mac journeys to the shack where they found Missy's dress and an awful blood-stain, clear evidence of her murder.

It is through this return to a place of complete pain that their dream visions occur. The dreamer in Pearl "awakens" to find himself in a transcendent and beautiful landscape, where he soon encounters the Pearl Maiden — a figure who both represents the child he lost and the Divine Wisdom he so desperately needs. Mac, in turn, wakes from his despair-induced slumber inside the shack and exits in complete frustration, only to find the landscape slowly transform itself from Winter to Spring and the desolate shack reshape itself into a warm and inviting log cabin, with clear signs of life inside. Mac is soon greeted by three humans, each of whom is revealed as an aspect of the Trinitarian God. 

From here, The Shack diverges markedly from Pearl in a number manner of ways, but a pivotal moment in the second half of the novel shares much with the medieval dream vision as well.  In this particular episode, Mac finds himself and his outlook — overshadowed as it is by The Great Sadness — challenged and questioned by Sophia.  Just as the Pearl Maiden challenges the narrator's misguided, grief-stricken perceptions, chiding him at one point for having misinterpreted and incorrectly contextualized his loss (5.265-76), Sophia forces Mac to face his destructive worldview in a similarly blunt and masterful way.  At the end of their dialogue — which proves as cathartic and transformative as the dialogue between the Pearl narrator and the Pearl Maiden — Mac is given a glimpse of Missy in the afterlife. He sees her playing with his other children (who are, themselves, experiencing dream visions of their own), and she eventually runs directly towards him. An invisible force (represented by a waterfall) separates them, but Mac is told that she knows that he is there "on the other side of the waterfall." Mac tries desperately to get to her, but the invisible force won't let him move. Once he stops, however, and simply gazes on her, taking in "every detail of her expression and hair and hands" she smiles at him and mouths "It's okay, I . . . love you." Sophia tells him at this point that while Missy cannot see him, she knows that he is there, and that she herself chose for their meeting to be this way. Eventually "the water roared down from above, directly in front of him, and obliterated all the sights and sounds of his children" and he finds himself in a grotto behind a waterfall (exactly where he had entered to talk with Sophia). Like the Pearl narrator, then, Mac is challenged in this portion of the narrative by a female counselor who speaks with Divine authority.  His resulting vision of his daughter, in turn, challenges his attachment to The Great Sadness and affirms what he has learned from Sophia. Just as the Pearl Maiden chides the narrator for becoming too attached to his limited perception of the world, Mac learns that he cannot – in the end – be the world's, or God's, judge, and that the more he accepts the limitations of his perception, the more free and more joyful he will become. The Great Sadness, then, loses its power because it can only hang over him so long as he convinces himself that his perceptions are wholly accurate. 

The water imagery in this scene, I should add, also parallels Pearl, because in both the protagonists meet their lost children but are separated from them by an impassable body of water. The water prevents the dreamer from completely accessing the afterlife and those within it.  Both Mac and the Pearl narrator try frantically to cross these bodies of water at certain points and rejoin their beloved children, only to realize that their reunion cannot come to pass while they are both alive. Both find their attempts to ford the barrier to be in vain — the Pearl narrator is held back initially by the maiden's words, and eventually wakes up because he tries to ford the stream. Mac, in turn, tries repeatedly to force his way through the invisible barrier, but to no avail, and Sophia eventually explains that the barrier is truly impenetrable. The fact that they want so desperately to experience the physical presence of their lost ones speaks, rather poignantly, to their reliance upon their limited sensory perceptions.  What they learn — in no small part through these vain attempts — is that true vision and wisdom lie in a state beyond the senses. They learn, as a little prince once said, that "One sees clearly only with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye."

As Pearl winds its way to a close, as the narrator comes to discover a world and a worldview much larger than his grief, the word "delyt" appears frequently, suggesting that the narrator has begun to move forward from the place of grief that brought him into the dream vision. Mac too finds a way to reclaim his life from The Great Sadness and to live in joy not in spite of his loss, but because of it. Both works, in their own way, explore the ways in which we can locate a sense of purpose in the midst of these awful losses. And this isn't to say, as Mac mistakenly observes, that these events come to pass for the benefit of our souls and psyches, but rather that "grace doesn't depend on suffering to exist, but where there is suffering you will find grace in many facets and colors" (The Shack, 188).

Ultimately, I'm not seeking to argue here that the author of The Shack drew inspiration from Pearl. Rather, my point in drawing out this comparison is to suggest that both of these works — separated as they are by centuries, by theological nuance, by culture — tap into the same mysteries of loss in uncannily similar ways, and that these similarities can — if we let them — remind us that we are never truly alone in our grief, deeply and intensely personal as those experiences always are. Considering these works alongside each other can offer us the deep and abiding comfort of knowing that when we experience the intensity of loss and grief, that we are entering into a strange and beautiful communion with all who have (and all who will) endure the same. This may seem terribly bleak at first, but it's actually — in my mind at least — quite beautiful to know that even with full knowledge of the pain that will come with the loss of our beloved "pearles," that we can never quite keep ourselves away from love. That we are always invited and drawn back into relationship with others and with ourselves because of these risks. Pearls of great price, indeed.