SOURCE: "The Dreamer Redeemed: Exile and the Kingdom in the Middle English Pearl," in Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Vol. 16, 1994, pp. 119-42.

In the following essay, Rhodes argues that instead of regarding the dreamer as a mere foil to the Maiden, the dreamer should be viewed as her equal and the poem should be seen as accurately reflecting the theological debate taking place in the fourteenth century.

One might maintain, not too paradoxically, that every medieval poetic form (on whatever level one may define it) tends toward double meaning: and I don't mean the doubling deciphered by an allegoristic reading but, superimposing or complexifying its effects, a perpetual sic et non, yes and no, obverse/reverse. Every meaning, in the last analysis, would present itself as enigmatic, the enigma being resolved into simultaneous and contradictory propositions, one of which always more or less parodies the other.¹

With...