SOURCE: "The Role of the Narrator in Pearl," in The Middle English Pearl: Critical Essays, University of Notre Dame Press, 1970, pp. 103-21.

In the following essay, Moorman defines the poem's real subject as the narrator's mind: the stages of his conversation with the Pearl maiden represent stages leading to his personal redemption and acceptance of his situation.

It is decidedly not the intention of this paper to introduce a radically new interpretation of the Middle English Pearl, a poem which has already been done almost to death by its interpreters. The criticism already devoted to the poem contains judgments as to its meaning and purpose so varied and, at times, so downright contradictory that Pearl is in danger of becoming a scholarly free-for-all, another "Who was Homer?" or "Why did Hamlet delay?" The disputed question in Pearl is, of course, "What is the pearl-maiden?" So far it has...