Death and the "Pearl" Maiden: Plague, Poetry, England by David K. Coley (review)

"In vain does one look for a parallel from an English quill to the long and moving descriptions of the Black Death given by Boccaccio and by Machaut." Siegfried Wenzel's statement in "Pestilence and Middle English Literature" (1982) becomes for David Coley a challenge to locate in the four poems of the Cotton Nero A.x manuscript (but not Saint Erkenwald) literary traces of the bubonic plague, even if nothing like the graphic representations in the Decameron and Judgment of the King of Navarre. It is indeed deeply mysterious why the outpouring of vernacular poetry in the second half of the fourteenth century should have remained persistently silent about the devastating trauma of the Black Death, which killed upwards of 62 percent of England's population during its first outbreak during 1348–50 and returned periodically, with similar mortality rates, in 1361 and thereafter.

Coley has produced a book of such originality, so much rooted in gripping historical and smart theoretical texts, and so much written against the grain of traditional interpretation, that it is a real page-turner. This is true despite the fact—or because of the fact—that the Pearl-poet is such an unlikely writer to investigate. Nowhere does he provide even glimpses comparable to Langland's "pokkes and pestilences" in Piers Plowman (B XX.97–107) or Chaucer's Death who "hath a thousand slayn this pestilence" in The Pardoner's Tale (PardT, VI.675–82). Vance Smith and Aranye Fradenburg assist with insights into the ways in which trauma leads to historical as well as personal amnesia, forcing responses that negotiate between acknowledgment and suppression, between the need to speak and the denial of events too painful to speak about. What emerged instead was "a literary witness defined less by verisimilitude and directness than by oblique referentiality, linguistic play, and allusive embodiment" (6). Literary responses to trauma, when not marked by silence and inarticulacy, were expressed "in ways that are deferred, submerged, deflected, or unrecognized—in ways that are resistant to transparent narrative representation" (15).

Most persuasive is the opening chapter on Cleanness where a string of biblical holocausts are deployed, starting with Noah's Flood and proceeding to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, then Jerusalem, and finally Babylon. These repetitions are themselves symptomatic of trauma. "The poem's three Old Testament exempla produce a pattern of violence, survival, silence, witness, and memory that reiterates, in its compulsive repetition, a key pattern that trauma theorists recognize in survivors, as well as in modern and postmodern literature written out of trauma" (47). Lot's wife, frozen and deprived of emotion and voice, becomes both witness and victim of the catastrophic event, repeating in miniature the Sodomites' sin of disobeying God. Greatly exceeding his scriptural sources, the poet lavished shocking visual details on the carnage of Jerusalem's women and children and the butchery of Babylon's sleeping citizens, all of these passages legible as displaced memories of the physical ravages visited upon English plague victims whom he must have seen dead and dying.

What Cleanness left implicit, London, British Library, MS Sloane 965's Latin treatise made explicit by comparing the devastation of the plague to God's punishment for sinfulness in exactly the same biblical instances: Noah's Flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, and Lot's wife (47–48). These Old Testament precedents had become such commonplaces in chronicles and sermons such as those of Thomas Brinton that Cleanness may be considered a "plague poem" in which these unspeakable events, never indeed spoken outright, stood powerfully before readers.

The next chapter on Pearl proceeds on the dubious assumption that the Pearl-Maiden died of the plague. Whatever her identity or true cause of death, she nonetheless represented singly what England had suffered collectively in the 1361 visitation known as "the mortality of children." Coley demonstrates how a "pestilential lexicon" of spot...