The Sex Life of
Pearls: Pygmalion, Pearl, and Objectumsexuality
Obsession. Radiance, hardness,
smoothness, whiteness, roundness. Textured. Obsession, obsessed, pearls. A pearl: “sengeley in synglure”. 144,000
pearls, resounding together as a single note. The Kingdom of Heaven?
His head spins; he
feels like he is going mad. Is this love? If it is, it feels one-sided. The
pearl was recalcitrant enough when she was in his possession, but now she is
lost: “Alas! I leste hyr in on erbere!” The exclamation interrupts the smooth
meter and redirects the rhyme scheme. Not so much love as “luf-daungere”:
coyness, coldness. He understands how Pygmalion must have felt, but Pygmalion doesn’t
know the half of it. Pygmalion could never have created such beauty. The pearl
is alluring, seductive even. Her natural perfection exceeds even Aristotle’s
ability to systematize: any articulation of her qualities would miss the mark,
but the Dreamer verbalizes them anyway. Obsessed.
Pearl is a poem that hints at
metamorphosis as it recounts the queer encounter between an objectophile and
his cold mistress—an inanimate pearl. It is not surprising that the Poet
references Ovid’s Pygmalion; however, unlike Ovid’s anthropocentric story of an
enlivened statue, Pearl invites the
reader to decenter the human, discovering the vibrant materiality of stone, and
learning the value of becoming pearl-like. Through the lenses of OOO, New Materialisms,
and a posthumanist queer theory, I follow the desires of the dreamer,
considering how such desires rely on attempting, and failing, to translate this
queer encounter into a relationship between mere human subjects. Only when the
Dreamer’s desires are thwarted—by surprise, frustration, failure—does he begin
to recognize the ontological differences between himself and the stone, and
only within such difference is the reader invited to discover the possibility for
transformation. There are no subjects here, just objects: a man becoming-pearl,
as the pearl becomes-otherwise.
