The Pearl

John Steinbeck
1947

Introduction
Author Biography
Plot Summary
Characters
Themes
Style
Historical Context
Critical Overview
Criticism
Sources
Further Reading

Introduction

In The Log from "The Sea of Cortez" Steinbeck writes that he heard a story about a Mexican boy finding a huge pearl and thinking that he would never have to work again. Soon, however, so many people tried to take the pearl from him that he threw it back into the sea. The story so struck his imagination that he created his own version of it in his celebrated novella The Pearl. Steinbeck changed the boy into the adult Kino, and gave him a family, and created a compelling story of oppression, rebellion, and greed.

After Kino finds the largest and most beautiful pearl he has ever seen, he is convinced that it will ensure him and his family a promising future. He will be able to have enough money to cure his son Coyotito from the poison of a scorpion's bite, to marry Coyotito's mother, and to provide his son with an education, which he knows will help him to escape the bonds of the oppression under which his people suffer. Kino does not count, however, on the power of the pearl to inspire the worst as well as the best in human nature.

Author Biography

John Steinbeck Jr. was born in Salinas, California, on February 27, 1902. His father John served as the county treasurer in Salinas. His mother Olive was a school teacher and helped inspire her son's passion for reading. In the summers during his youth, Steinbeck worked on nearby ranches as a hired hand. This work cultivated his love for the earth, which emerges in so many of his works.

After high school, Steinbeck attended Stanford University between 1920 and 1926, where he studied marine biology but did not earn a degree. After moving to New York, he determined to make a career out of writing. He worked briefly as a reporter for the American before deciding to return to California.

For the next couple of years, he took on odd jobs to support himself while he wrote. He worked as a painter, fruit picker, and surveyor, among other professions. Steinbeck wrote his first novel in 1929, Cup of Gold, which was not well received. His next two novels, The Pastures of Heaven, published in 1932, and To a God Unknown, published the next year, were also unsuccessful.

In 1930, Steinbeck and his first wife, Carol Henning, moved to Pacific Grove where he gathered material for his first successful novel, Tortilla Flat, a humorous story about Mexican Americans. It earned Steinbeck the California Commonwealth Club's Gold Medal for best novel by a California author. The 1937 novel Of Mice and Men established his literary reputation as one of America's finest novelists. Steinbeck's most celebrated work, The Grapes of Wrath, published in 1939, earned him the Pulitzer Prize. The book was later made into a film by John Ford and became one of the American Film Institute's top 100 classic films.

During World War II, Steinbeck wrote war propaganda and worked briefly as a war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune. Some of his dispatches were later collected and published with the title, Once There Was a War. He wrote the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock's film Lifeboat in 1944. After the war, he wrote two more successful works, Cannery Row (1945), and The Pearl (1947).

In his later years, he tried to reclaim his waning status as a major American novelist with works such as Burning Bright (1950), East of Eden (1952), and The Winter of Our Discontent (1961). None of these novels, however, gained Steinbeck the praise his earlier works received. Yet, in 1962, Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He died December 20, 1968, in New York City and at his request his ashes were buried in the Garden of Memories Cemetery in Salinas.

Plot Summary

Chapter 1

The Pearl begins as Kino, a Mexican pearl diver in the village of La Paz on the gulf of California, awakes before morning. His wife Juana and child Coyotito lie nearby in their brush house. Kino contentedly listens to the waves on the beach and declares "it was very good." His ancestors had passed their songs down from generation to generation to Kino, who this morning has the "Song of Family" in his mind. Juana rises and makes breakfast for the family, as she does every morning, and sings part of the Family Song.

Suddenly Kino sees a scorpion crawling down one of the ropes that holds the baby's cradle, and a new song, a "Song of Evil," enters his head. He lunges at it but is too late and the scorpion stings Coyotito. Juana immediately tries to suck out the poison from the wound, but the area begins to swell. She and Kino take the baby to the doctor in town, along with many neighbors who have come to watch, but because they have no money, he will not see them. Filled with shame and rage, Kino smashes his fist against the doctor's gate.

Chapter 2

After Kino and his family return to their fishing village, Juana places a seaweed poultice on the baby's wound and prays that Kino will find a pearl that would pay for the doctor. That afternoon when Kino goes diving, he finds the largest pearl he has ever seen, "The Pearl of the World," "as large as a sea-gull's egg" and as "perfect as the moon," and he howls with joy.

Chapter 3

Soon the entire town knows of the pearl, speculating on what it is worth. All suddenly are interested in Kino as the pearl "stirred up something infinitely black and evil in the town." Kino had become "curiously every man's enemy," but he and Juana are oblivious to the town's dark thoughts. They dream of what they can do with the money they will gain when they sell the pearl, deciding that they will be able to get married and buy new clothes and get their son an education, which will grant him freedom.

Kino, however, begins to hear the "Evil Song" as he thinks others will try to steal the pearl from him and so he makes "a hard skin for himself against the world." When the doctor hears the news, he reminisces of his past life in Paris and decides that he will take Coyotito as a patient and so get his hands on some of the money from the pearl. He comes to the brush house and warns Kino and Juana that the poison may still be inside their son but that he can help. After the doctor forces Coyotito to swallow what he insists is medicine to drive the poison out, Coyotito becomes ill. Soon, however, he appears to recover and the doctor demands payment. Kino determines to sell the pearl the next day. That night, though, someone comes to the hut to try to steal the it. Kino scares him away but not before he is hit in the head. Juana warns that the pearl is a "sin" and will destroy them, but Kino insists it is their only chance to send Coyotito to school.

Chapter 4

The townspeople follow Kino into town on his journey to meet with the pearl buyers and speculate about what they would buy with the money he will earn for it. The first buyer offers only 1000 pesos, claiming that the pearl is "fool's gold" and has little value. When Kino refuses the offer and insists that it is worth 50,000 pesos, the buyer calls others in to make bids, but they also determine the pearl to be worthless. Kino declares that he is being cheated and vows to journey to the capital to sell it even though he is afraid to go there. His neighbors are unsure about whether Kino has been cheated or whether he is being greedy. That evening when Kino is again attacked by robbers outside his brush house, Juana pleads with him to destroy the pearl, but he refuses, insisting that he "is a man" and so can handle any trouble they may face.

Chapter 5

In the middle of the night Juana arises and takes the pearl to the water, ready to throw it in. Kino, however, stops her just in time, grabs the pearl and beats her in an animalistic rage. On his way back to the brush house, he is sickened by what he has done. On the trail assassins attack him, but this time he kills one of the men. Juana realizes that at this point, "the old life was gone forever." Realizing that he will be accused of murder, Kino decides that they must flee and turns to his brother Juan Tomas and his wife for help. Kino admits, "This pearl has become my soul…. If I give it up I shall lose my soul."

Chapter 6

Kino and his family travel up the coast but soon realize that trackers are following them. In an effort to lose them, they head into the mountains. At one point, Kino considers turning himself in to save his family, but Juana convinces him that the trackers would kill all of them to get the pearl. The family stops near caves to rest, but the trackers eventually catch up with them. Under the cover of darkness, Kino tries to jump one of the men while the other two are sleeping. He is able to kill all three, but a random rifle shot during the struggle hits Coyotito, killing him.

Kino and Juana return to La Paz, devastated at the loss of their son, appearing as if "removed from human experience." Hearing the Song of the Family ringing in his ears like "a battle cry," Kino grasps the pearl, which has become "gray and ulcerous" with "evil faces" peering from it. When he tries to give it to Juana, she insists, "no you." Kino then throws it with all of his might into the green water, and it disappears.

Characters

Coyotito

Coyotito, Kino and Juana's infant son, is the catalyst for his parents' obsession with the pearl. Both of his parents want the pearl to help pay for his recovery from the scorpion sting and for his education, so that he will not be limited by the same oppression under which his parents have suffered.

Doctor

The doctor is part of the system that oppresses Kino and his family. The villagers know "his cruelty, his avarice, his appetites," his laziness, and his incompetence. His sense of superiority prompts him to regard Kino and his neighbors as animals and so determines that he need not treat them. Only after he learns of Kino's pearl does he offer help so that he may be able to get his hands on it and regain the luxurious life he has enjoyed in Paris. To that end, he deceives Kino and Juana about Coyotito's illness and his own powers as a healer.

Juan Tomas

Kino's brother Juan Tomas provides Kino with shelter and wise counsel.

Juana

Juana is a dutiful wife who rises every morning to make breakfast for her family. She exhibits a fierce, instinctual need to protect her child as evidenced by her clearheaded response to the scorpion's sting and her insistence that they take him to the doctor, knowing that there is little chance that the doctor will see him yet ready to face the resulting shame. Coyotito is Juana's first baby and so he is "nearly everything there was in [her] world."

Her strength and endurance, however, are her most dominant qualities. Kino "wondered often at the iron in his patient, fragile wife" who "could arch her back in child pain with hardly a cry" and "stand fatigue and hunger almost better than Kino himself." He notes that "in the canoe she was like a strong man." Although patient with and obedient to her husband, she tries to convince him to throw away the pearl when she recognizes the danger it brings.

Her endurance is displayed after Kino beats her. As he stands over her with his teeth bared, she stares as him "with wide unfrightened eyes." She accepts that he had been driven over the edge of reason and decided "she would not resist or even protest." As a result, Kino's rage disappears and is replaced by disgust for what he has done to her.

Juana shows a great and patient understanding of her husband. After he beats her, she feels no anger toward him, recognizing that as a man "he was half insane and half god." She knows that he will "drive his strength against a mountain and plunge his strength against the sea" and that he would inevitably be destroyed by both. Although puzzled by the differences she recognizes between men and women, she "knew them and accepted them and needed them" because as an Indian woman "she could not live without a man." She then determines to follow him, hoping that her reason, caution, and "sense of preservation could cut through Kino's manness and save them all." Juana endures the pain of her injuries as she escapes with Kino and Coyotito.

Her ability to defy her husband by attempting to throw the pearl in the sea while admitting that she could not survive without him reveals her great courage. She is driven by her need to "rescue something of the old peace, of the time before the pearl." Yet after Kino kills his attacker, she shows her resilience when she immediately admits that the past was gone, "and there was no retrieving it. And knowing this, she abandoned the past instantly. There was nothing to do but to save themselves." The death of her child appears to break her, however. As she walks back to the village at the end of the story, "her wide eyes stared inward on herself" and she "was as remote and as removed as Heaven.

Kino

Even though he lives in poverty, Kino is content at the beginning of the story because he is surrounded by the family he loves. It is only after his child's life is threatened by the scorpion bite that Kino determines that he will rebel against the system that oppresses him.

He is connected to his ancestors through their songs, which he often hears in his head. The frequency of the Family Song and the Enemy Song suggests his strong link to those ancestors as well as to his environment. Kino experiences a combination of rage and fear as he confronts his oppressors, showing strength as well as an intuitive assessment of the reality of his position. He is a proud man who feels shame when he stirs up the courage to challenge that position and is rebuffed.

Like Juana, he is a responsible parent who strives to provide the best life possible for his child. This commitment gives him the courage to rebel against the status quo by calling on the doctor, by refusing to accept the offer from the pearl buyers, and by fleeing the village after he murders one of his attackers. His loyalty is also expressed toward his neighbors when it does not even occur to him to take one of their boats during his escape.

His obsession with the pearl is prompted by his desire for respect and power, but most importantly for the education of his child. He wants to be able to marry Juana, to buy a rifle that can "[break] down the barriers," to dress his family in nice clothes, and finally to enable his son to free himself and his people from subjugation.

Kino's fierce desire to provide for and protect his family reduces him to a primal state. Ironically that desire to provide for them causes him to viciously attack Juana. Later, after he kills his attacker, the narrator concludes that Kino is "an animal now, for hiding, for attacking, and he lived only to preserve himself and his family." This primal nature enables him to escape his trackers, at least initially. The narrator notes that "some ancient thing stirred in Kino…. some animal thing was moving in him so that he was cautious and wary and dangerous." At the end of the story, he appears broken as he retains his primal state. He, along with Juana, appears "removed from human experience." He "carried fear with him" and "he was as dangerous as a rising storm."

Themes

Greed

The story has been applauded as a parable that warns of the effects of greed. A parable is a story that is chiefly intended to convey a moral or truth. After Kino finds the pearl, he learns how far others will go, including committing murder, to gain wealth and the power that it brings. All those who hear about the pearl, even his neighbors "suddenly became related to [it], and [it] went into the dreams, the speculations, the schemes, the plans, the futures, the wishes, the needs, the lusts, the hungers, of everyone." And since Kino stood in their way, "he became curiously every man's enemy." Kino recognizes this desire in himself, not for wealth, but for the power the pearl can grant him. He says the pearl is his soul.

Environmental and Biological Determinism

Steinbeck incorporates naturalistic elements in the story through his focus on environmental and biological determinism. Determinism is a way of understanding what causes humans to experience what they do. The assumption is that there are forces (such as race, economic class, environment, and chance) at work that determine the outcome of human events, regardless of human intention and effort to shape events otherwise. Kino's fate is sealed by these forces, which prevent him from escaping the limitations of his world. The most obvious determinants are his social and economic status.

Kino knows that "other forces were set up to destroy" his plan to provide his family with an opportunity to escape oppression. He believes though that these forces are created by the gods, who "do not love men's plans," who "do not love success unless it comes by accident," and who "take their revenge on a man if he be successful through his own efforts." This deterministic view maintains that the individual is powerless to shape his circumstances or to rise above them. Perhaps it is the gods or fate but some arbitrary force beyond the self controls everything.

Since Kino is an Indian and has no education, he does not know how to fight against the ruling class who exploit him in an effort to keep him in his place. He cannot read the medicine packet that the doctor uses to "treat" Coyotito, he does not have the knowledge to judge the real value of the pearl, and he does not know how to find someone who will give him a fair price. He is poor because he is a member of an oppressed race, and so he must live in dangerous conditions where scorpions can pose a risk.

Another dangerous and immediate environmental factor is posed by the greedy men who want to steal his pearl. Kino is almost killed by these attackers until he kills one in self defense. Their greed illustrates the biological forces with which Kino must also grapple.

At least initially, both Kino and Juana are committed to their dreams. Juana becomes "a lioness" when her baby is stung by the scorpion, which ironically triggers the path to his destruction. Her fierce sense of protection prompts her to convince Kino to go to the doctor and later to find the biggest pearl he can catch so that they will have the money to cure their child.

After Kino finds the pearl, his own biology takes over as he becomes filled with a hatred that "raged and flamed in back of his eyes, and fear too, for the hundreds of years of subjugation were cut deep in him." That rage, coupled with his own instinct to provide the best for his family, urges him on even as murderers wait outside his brush house to attack him. These urges become obsessions as his brain "burns" in dreams of his son's future. Even after Juana warns him of the dangers of keeping the pearl, Kino insists he will not give it up, claiming "this is our one chance…. Our son must go to school. He must break out of the pot that holds us in."

His obsession with the pearl prompts him to violently attack Juana when she tries to throw it back into the sea. His brain, "red hot with anger," reverts to a primal state as he punches and kicks her with "his teeth bared" and hissing "like a snake." These dual forces, Kino's environment and his own biology conspire against him: his burning desire for a better life for his family and the oppression of the ruling class that forces him into subjugation ultimately shape his destiny.

Style

Parable

A parable is a story designed to illustrate a lesson or moral. Steinbeck notes at the beginning of The Pearl that the story of Kino and the pearl has been told so often, "it has taken root in every man's mind" and "heart." He characterizes the story as a parable when he explains that "there are only good and bad things and black and white things and good and evil things and no in-between anywhere."

On one level, the story can be viewed as an allegory of good and evil, with Kino and his family representing good, and those who try to steal the pearl from him as evil. In this reading, the lesson or moral focuses on how the pearl inspires greed. However, there are some "in-between things" that suggest a more complex reflection of reality, especially in Steinbeck's exploration of the interplay of oppression and rebellion.

Symbolism

The dominant symbol in the novel is the pearl. Initially it is "the Pearl of the World," "as large as a sea gull's egg" and as "perfect as the moon"; it represents a bright future for Kino and his family. Kino sees the pearl as providing the "music of promise and delight" with its "guarantee of the future, of comfort, of security." It promised "a poultice against illness and a wall against insult. It closed a door on hunger." As it inspires greed in the hearts of others, however, and Kino is forced to face the consequences of that greed, the pearl transforms into a "gray and ulcerous" object with "evil faces" peering from it."

The scorpion becomes a symbol of this transformation. Like the scorpion's sting, the pearl infects those who come into contact with it because it stimulates their greed. They turn into predators symbolized by the story's nighttime setting, when "mice crept about on the ground and the little night hawks hunted them silently." The darkness is filled with a "poisonous air." At the beginning of the story, the attacks that Kino must fend off are symbolized by the two roosters near his house, who "bowed and feinted at each other with squared wings and neck feathers ruffed out."

Historical Context

Pearl Diving in La Paz

La Paz (meaning "peace" in Spanish) is in the Mexican state of Southern Baja California on the Sea of Cortez. For several centuries, the area was famous for its pearl diving and was known as "The City of Pearls." The oyster beds, however, became diseased and died out in the middle of the twentieth century.

In the mid 1900s, approximately 800 divers would submerge themselves in the waters off La Paz at depths of up to 12 fathoms. Divers had to tear the oysters by hand from their beds, a process that often left their hands with deep cuts and gashes. The number of divers decreased to about 200 by the end of the century as the oyster population declined and divers lost their lives due to accidents and shark attacks.

Naturalism

Naturalism is a literary movement that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in France, England, and the United States. Writers included in this group, such as Emile Zola, Thomas Hardy, and the Americans Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser, write about biological and/or environmental determinism that prevents their characters from achieving the goals they seek. These characters' plans for the future and their choices (the exercise of their free will) are all swamped by forces beyond their control. For example, in The Red Badge of Courage Crane depicts how one Civil War soldier is overwhelmed by the U.S. political and military conflict. Zola's and Dreiser's work include this type of environmental determinism coupled with an exploration of the influences of heredity in their portraits of ordinary men and women engaged in a relentless and brutal struggle for survival.

World War II

The world witnessed a decade of aggression in the 1930s that culminated in the 1939 onset of World War II. This war resulted from the rise of totalitarian regimes in Germany, Italy, and Japan. These militaristic regimes gained control, in part, as a result of a global economic depression and from the conditions created by the peace settlements following World War I, called the Treaty of Versailles. The dictatorships established in these three countries were committed to territorial expansion. In Germany Hitler strengthened the army during the late 1930s. In 1936 Benito Mussolini's Italian troops took Ethiopia. From 1936 to 1939 Spain was engaged in civil war involving Francisco Franco's fascist army, aided by Germany and Italy. In March 1938 Germany annexed Austria and in March 1939 occupied Czechoslovakia. Italy took Albania in April 1939. One week after Nazi Germany and the U.S.S.R. signed the Treaty of Nonaggression, on September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland. On September 3, 1939, Britain and France declared war on Germany after a U-boat sank the British ship Athenia off the coast of Ireland. Another British ship, Courageous, was sunk on September 19. All the members of the British Commonwealth, except Ireland, soon joined Britain and France in their declaration of war against Germany.

On December 7, 1941, Japan attacked the U.S. military base in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. As a result of the four-hour attack, approximately 2,400 Americans died and 1300 were wounded. Three days later, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States. The total number of European casualties by the end of the war was approximately 40,000,000. More than 400,000 Americans died.

Critical Overview

"The Pearl of the World" first appeared in The Women's Home Companion in 1945. The 1947 revised version, The Pearl, gained immediate critical and popular attention. During the following years, the novella was attacked by some, such as Warren French in his article on Steinbeck, as being too "sentimental." Many readers, however, continued throughout the twentieth century to praise the story's themes and construction.

Ernest E. Karsten Jr., in his 1965 article on The Pearl, praises its "combination of simple story, strongly established symbolism, social commentary, and important themes," and argues that Steinbeck's "beautiful writing makes this a literary work that may well become a classic and certainly as fine an introduction to the genre as could be found."

In his 1947 review of the novella for the New York Times, Carlos Baker writes that the novella "fits as neatly into the list of Steinbeck's books as the last gem in a carefully matched necklace." Orville Prescott, in his review for the same paper, commends Steinbeck's "artful simplicity exactly suitable to his theme" and insists that it is "the best book which Mr. Steinbeck has written since "The Red Pony" and The Grapes of Wrath." Prescott especially praises the characterizations in the book, noting that Kino's "devotion to his family and his courage in the face of death are deeply moving" and that these traits give the novella "a universally human quality, for they are the virtues which men everywhere have always admired above all others."

Criticism

Wendy Perkins

Perkins is a professor of American and English literature and film. In this essay, Perkins explores the interplay of oppression and rebellion in the novella.

In The Grapes of Wrath (1939), John Steinbeck chronicles a family's hard journey from the Oklahoma Dust Bowl to the migrant camps of California. His portrayal of the plight of the Joads and that of other migrant workers is a poignant examination of oppression and the drive to rebel against it. In The Pearl, Steinbeck returns to these themes in his story of a Mexican pearl diver and his family. This novella, however, written after the devastation of World War II, takes a darker, more pessimistic vision of the spirit of rebellion. Richard Astro, in his review of the book, notes that in Steinbeck's post-war works, including The Pearl, his "organismal view of life, his belief that men can work together to fashion a better, more productive, and more meaningful life, seemed less and less applicable to the world he saw around him." Through his depiction of Kino and his family's experiences with the pearl, Steinbeck celebrates the spirit of rebellion but also acknowledges the dark forces that can eventually crush it.

Orville Prescott, in his 1947 review of The Pearl for the New York Times, argues that the novella is "permeated with the special sort of impotent and sullen bitterness which only an oppressed and subject people know." Prescott notes that Steinbeck has often turned his attention to the oppressed. "His admiration for them seems to have been a conscious protest against the decadence and cruelty and stupidity which have been so prevalent in this century among so-called civilized people." Kino and his family suffer the cruelty of so-called civilized people because their race is different from that of the ruling class.

The members of Kino's family, as well those of his community, have been denied basic human rights; they have been marginalized and disenfranchised. The money they earn from diving for pearls is not enough to adequately feed, shelter, and educate themselves and their families. Even though Kino determines that life is "good" when he awakens surrounded by his family and "the little splash of morning waves on the beach," the tentative nature of this good life becomes immediately evident when a scorpion stings his child. He and his family are forced to live in a brush house, where scorpions can come and go as freely as the members of his family, posing a constant danger to their lives.

When the inevitable happens, and a member of the community faces death from a scorpion sting, medical attention is denied because there is no money to pay the doctor. Kino must face this reality after Coyotito is stung. The neighbors marvel at Juana's call for the doctor, knowing that "the doctor never came to the cluster of brush houses" for "he had more than he could do to take care of the rich people who lived in the stone and plaster houses of the town." Yet Juana rebels against this limitation for Coyotito's sake, for her first baby. Juana's eyes "as cold as the eyes of a lioness," inspire Kino to join her in her fight against the rules of oppression.

When Kino approaches the doctor's gate, however, he hesitates: "This doctor was not of his people. This doctor was of a race which for nearly four hundred years had beaten and starved and robbed and despised Kino's race, and frightened it too." He admits that "as always when he came near to one of this race, [he] felt weak and afraid and angry at the same time" since "all of the doctor's race spoke to all of Kino's race as though they were simple animals." The doctor proves Kino's assertion when he complains that he will not see Coyotito, insisting, "I am a doctor, not a veterinary."

Another consequence of this type of oppression is the disruption of the community, which provides an effective way to suppress any rebellion within that community. Disruption can be seen in the behavior of the doctor's servant who refuses to speak to Kino in their native language. Allegiance to the ruling class and betrayal of the individual members of the community emerges again when many of Kino's neighbors are ready to take the word of the pearl dealers over Kino's regarding the value of the pearl. This behavior leads to an acceptance of the status quo rather than a rebellion against it.

One of the most powerful tools of oppression is the denial of an education. The Indian pearl divers have no money to buy themselves an education and so do not have the knowledge necessary to successfully rebel against authority. This is evident in their passive response to the pearl dealers and in Kino's frustrated dependence on the doctor who exploits Kino's lack of education when he insists that the baby will die without his intervention.

Kino recognizes that education empowers individuals and that the only way he can experience that empowerment is by selling his pearl. When the doctor gives Coyotito "medicine" that he claims will cure the child, Kino recognizes that he is trapped by his ignorance "as his people were always trapped, and would be until, as he had said, they could be sure that the things in the books were really in the books."

The pearl becomes so crucial to him because he understands that the money will grant him respect, when he can afford to marry Juana, and power, when he can purchase a rifle and give his son an education. If his son can learn to read and write, Kino insists, "these things will make us free because he will know-he will know and through him we will know."

The possibility of being able to give this gift to his son causes Kino to rebel against his oppressors. He develops "a hard skin for himself" as he stands up to the pearl dealers. Although he admits being "afraid of strangers and of strange places" and "terrified of that monster of strangeness they called the capital," he determines to go and get the best deal for the pearl. Juana understands that he has "defied not the pearl buyers, but the whole structure, the whole way of life," and she is afraid for him.

Kino, though, will not back down, and so risks his life to fend off those who try to steal the pearl from him. Even when Juana pleads with him to destroy the pearl, claiming that it has an evil force within it, he refuses, fueled by his dream "that Coyotito could read, that one of his own people could tell him the truth of things." After killing one of his attackers, Kino refuses to turn himself in to the authorities, knowing that his dream would then be destroyed.

He struggles mightily to hold onto the pearl and at the same time protect his family from the trackers. He insists that his community will offer support, that his friends will protect him, but Kino's brother recognizes the power of authority to destroy allegiances when he suggests that his friends will help him "only so long as they are not in danger or discomfort from it."

Kino's rebellious spirit challenges but cannot change the system. Unable to fight off the forces that try to oppress him, he loses his son along with his dreams of a better life for his family. The loss of the pearl at the end of the story suggests his loss of hope for the future and a loss in his belief that he can control his life and destiny.

In East of Eden, Steinbeck offers his response to oppressive political systems that try to crush the human spirit, declaring that he believes that the "free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world." And so, he insists that he would fight for "the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected" and fight against "an idea, religion or government which limits or destroys the individual" for "if the glory can be killed, we are lost." Steinbeck illustrates the tragic consequences of the loss of that freedom of the spirit in The Pearl, expressing a profound sympathy for the individual and the community that suffers under such an oppressive system.

Source: Wendy Perkins, Critical Essay on "The Pearl," in Short Stories for Students, Thomson Gale, 2006.

Harry Morris

In the following essay, Morris examines "The Pearl" alongside early English allegories and finds "the continuing tradition of true allegory and the modern writer's strong links with the past."

John Steinbeck has never been very far away from the allegorical method. Some of his earliest work—and among that, his best—shows involvement with elements of allegory. The Grapes of Wrath (1939) employs as a framework the journey, the most common of allegorical devices:

  Go thou to Everyman,
  And show him in my name
  A pilgrimage he must on him take
  Which he in no wise may escape.

Eight years later, Steinbeck displayed his perfect familiarity with Everyman by using a passage from the morality play as an epigraph for his own most complete allegory of the life-journey, The Wayward Bus (1947). In Dubious Battle (1936) has some things in common with the medieval psychomachia, the debate, the poetry of warfare between body and soul, between head and heart. The title itself comes from the opening book of Paradise Lost (I.104), where, shortly following, Milton presents his own great allegory of sin and death (II.648-814). Some episodes in The Pastures of Heaven (1932) and some stories in The Long Valley (1938) move into allegory frequently, although in the early fiction allegorical materials are so completely absorbed into the techniques of realism as to be almost undetectable.

But beginning in 1945 and through the years immediately following World War II, following the realistic works that belong to that war, Steinbeck wrote a series of novels that he proclaimed openly to be allegorical. In addition to the already mentioned Wayward Bus (1947) were Burning Bright (1950) and East of Eden (1952). Preceding these three was The Pearl. Peter Lisca, in The Wide World of John Steinbeck (1958), cites letters which Steinbeck wrote to Pascal Covici to show that The Pearl was completed by early February 1945. Woman's Home Companion in its December issue of the same year was the first publisher, presenting the short novel under the title The Pearl of the World. An earlier letter to Covici indicates that while the story was still in progress Steinbeck called it The Pearl of La Paz. When it was issued in book form in 1947 to coincide with its release as a motion picture by RKO, it had become simply The Pearl. A rehearsal of these variations in the title should not be considered pedantry, for nothing more clearly indicates the allegorical nature of the work as it developed in Steinbeck's mind from the beginning. Although the city of La Paz may be named appropriately in the title since the setting for the action is in and around the place, the Spanish word provides a neat additional bit of symbolism, if in some aspects ironic. In its working title, the novel tells the story of The Pearl of Peace. When this title was changed to The Pearl of the World for magazine publication, although the irony was partially lost, the allegorical implications were still present. But Steinbeck had apparently no fears that the nature of the tale would be mistaken when he reduced the title to merely The Pearl, for he could rely still upon the epigraph to warn his readers:

If this story is a parable, perhaps everyone takes his own meaning from it and reads his own life into it.

Status of Allegory

But why should a critic labor to put the stamp of allegory on a modern novel? For also two hundred years now such a mark has been almost equivalent to a seal of literary oblivion. Shakespeare, the greatest writer in the English language, had eschewed allegory. One of the next best, Chaucer, turned an early hand to translating The Romance of the Rose, but after a few more false starts, found his genius in narrative and satire and produced his two masterpieces, Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterburry Tales. But it was Coleridge who downgraded allegory in a series of critical pronouncements and then became the master and model of a hundred and fifty years of literary criticism. His influence has been such that I have heard one of America's foremost poets and one of the major figures in what has long been called the "New Criticism" say, "I simply cannot read Spenser," by which he meant he could not abide allegory. Steinbeck's Pearl has come also under this interdict. When first published, it was reviewed by Maxwell Geismar, who wrote, "… the quality that has marked Steinbeck's work as a whole is … the sense of black and white things and good and bad things—that is to say, the sense of a fabulist or a propagandist rather than the insight of an artist?" The fabulist as Geismar describes him is neither more nor less than the allegorist. We see how far distaste for allegory has come. The writer who employs the mode is read out of the ranks of the artist; the fabulist lacks insight.

It is doubtful that Coleridge ever intended his sometime-mentioned disapproval of allegory to be taken as strong aversion. His lecture on Spenser seemed to equate allegory with a one-to-one relationship between story and underlying meaning:

No one can appreciate Spenser without some reflection on the nature of allegorical writing. The mere etymological meaning of the word, allegory,—to talk of one thing and thereby convey another,—is too wide. The true sense is this,—the employment of one set of agents and images to convey in disguise a moral meaning.

The unfortunate suggestion that moral meanings have to be disguised is also present. But the more famous and more severe disavowal is in Coleridge's Statesman's Manual:

Now an allegory is but a translation of abstract notions into a picture-language which is itself nothing but an abstraction from objects of the senses; the principal being more worthless even than its phantom proxy, both alike unsubstantial, and the former shapeless to boot.

But elsewhere Coleridge found exceptions to his general censure: the allegory of Cupid and Psyche, the Sin and Death episode in Paradise Lost, and the first part of Pilgrim's Progress.

Nevertheless, Coleridge had done almost irreparable damage. Only recently have there been signs that allegory has been given a false character. Rosemond Tuve has shown that the first mistake is to imagine that medieval and Renaissance allegory could ever be comprehended as a one-to-one relationship of story and second meaning. Allegory in Spenser's hand is as rich in its multiplicity of meaning as is symbolism, the most highly admired literary device both of Coleridge and of modern criticism. Parable in the New Testament and medieval commentary on the Old Testament gave rise to the rich legacy that we call the fourfold manner of Scriptural interpretation, of which Dante wrote, "although [three of] these mystical meanings are called by various names, they may all be called in general allegorical, since they differ from the literal." No literary figure can ever quite ignore that Christ chose to talk in parables; none can ever forget that The Divine Comedy is one of the most complex allegories ever written. Great allegory, even in its purest forms—in so medieval a work as the anonymous Pearl of the fourteenth century—carries all the exciting allusiveness of the most complex symbolism. Our own age is rediscovering this fact, and much fine literature is being produced in the allegorical mode, from the serious attempts of Steinbeck already mentioned and including such important novels as Orwell's Animal Farm, Faulkner's A Fable, and Katherine Anne Porter's Ship of Fools all the way to the intellectualized comic strips of Schulz and Walt Kelly. Of course, allegory has never been completely dead in the modern novel, for in their ways Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Mann's Magic Mountain, and Joyce's Ulysses carry an allegorical burden. It has become fashionable to call them mythopoeic—reworkings of old or inventions of new myths—but the myths themselves are true allegories.

Steinbeck's Method

In reading The Pearl, we encounter the work of a professed parabolist, and we must assert, and so reject Geismar's explicit objections to The Pearl, that the fable is an art form and that the fabulist as artist has never lacked insight. We cannot evaluate Steinbeck's performance with the criteria employed for judgment of the realistic novel. We cannot condemn The Pearl because as Geismar says it is all black and white, all good and bad. Such was Steinbeck's intention:

And because the story has been told so often, it has taken root in every man's mind. And as with all retold tales that are in people's hearts, there are only good and bad things and black and white things and good and evil things and no in-between anywhere.

Writing about its composition, Steinbeck said elsewhere, "I tried to write it as folklore, to give it that set-aside, raised-up feeling that all folk stories have." He was telling us again that The Pearl is not totally in the realistic tradition.

But Steinbeck knew that the modern fabulist could write neither a medieval Pearl nor a classical Aesopian Fox and Grapes story. It was essential to overlay his primary media of parable and folklore with a coat of realism, and this was one of his chief problems. Realism as a technique requires two basic elements: credible people and situations on the one hand and recognizable evocation of the world of nature and of things on the other. Steinbeck succeeds brilliantly in the second of these tasks but perhaps does not come off quite so well in the first. In supplying realistic detail, he is a master, trained by his long and productive journeyman days at work on the proletarian novels of the thirties and the war pieces of the early forties. His description of the natural world is so handled as to do double and treble duty in enrichment of both symbolism and allegory. Many critics have observed Steinbeck's use of animal imagery that pervades this novel with the realistic detail that is also one of its strengths:

Kino awakened in the near dark. The stars shone and the day had drawn only a pale wash of light in the lower sky to the east. The roosters had been crowing for some time, and the early pigs were already beginning their ceaseless turning of twigs and bits of wood to see whether anything to eat had been overlooked. Outside the brush house in the tuna clump, a covey of little birds chittered and flurried their wings.

Kino is identified symbolically with low animal orders: he must rise early and he must root in the earth for sustenance; but the simple, pastoral life has the beauty of the stars, the dawn, and the singing, happy birds. Yet provided also is a realistic description of village life on the fringe of La Paz. Finally, we should observe that the allegory too has begun. The first sentence—"Kino awakened in the near dark"—is a statement of multiple allegorical significance. Kino is what modern sociologists are fond of calling a primitive. As such, he comes from a society that is in its infancy; or, to paraphrase Steinbeck, it is in the dark or the near-dark intellectually, politically, theologically, and sociologically. But the third sentence tells us that the roosters have been crowing for some time, and we are to understand that Kino has heard the cock of progress crow. He will begin to question the institutions that have kept him primitive: medicine, the church, the pearl industry, the government. The allegory operates then locally, dealing at first with one person, Kino, and then with his people, the Mexican peasants of Lower California. But the allegory works also universally, and Kino is Everyman. The darkness in which he awakes is one of the spirit. The cock crow is one of warning that the spirit must awake to its own dangers. The allegorical journey has often been called the way into the dark night of the soul, in which the darkness stands for despair or hopelessness. We cannot describe Kino or his people as in despair, for they have never known any life other than the one they lead; neither are they in hopelessness, for they are not aware that there is anything for which to hope. In a social parable, then, the darkness is injustice and helplessness in the face of it; in the allegory of the spirit, darkness concerns the opacity of the moral substance in man.

The social element is developed rapidly through the episode of Coyotito's scorpion bite and the doctor's refusal to treat a child whose father cannot pay a substantial fee. Kino's helplessness is conveyed by the fist he crushes into a split and bleeding mass against the doctor's gate. This theme of helplessness reaches its peak in the pearl-selling attempt. When Kino says to his incredulous brother, Juan Thomás, that perhaps all three buyers set a price amongst themselves before Kino's arrival, Juan Thomás answers, "If that is so, then all of us have been cheated all of our lives." And of course they have been.

Kino is, then, in the near dark; and, as his misfortunes develop, he descends deeper and deeper into the dark night of the soul. The journey that the soul makes as well as the journey that the living Kino makes—in terms of the good and evil that invest the one and the oppression and freedom that come to the other—provides the allegorical statement of the novel.

Difficulties of the Method

In the attempt to achieve believable situations, create three-dimensional characters, Steinbeck met greater difficulties that he did not entirely overcome. The germ-anecdote out of which he constructed his story gave him little more than the bare elements of myth:

An event which happened at La Paz in recent years is typical of such places. An Indian boy by accident found a pearl of great size, an unbelievable pearl. He knew its value was so great that he need never work again. In his one pearl he had the ability to be drunk as long as he wished, to marry any one of a number of girls, and to make many more a little happy too. In his great pearl lay salvation, for he could in advance purchase masses sufficient to pop him out of Purgatory like a squeezed watermelon seed. In addition he could shift a number of dead relatives a little nearer Paradise. He went to La Paz with his pearl in his hand and his future clear into eternity in his heart. He took his pearl to a broker and was offered so little that he grew angry, for he knew he was cheated. Then he carried his pearl to another broker and was offered the same amount. After a few more visits he came to know that he could not sell his pearl for more. He took it to the beach and hid it under a stone, and that night he was clubbed into unconsciousness and his clothing was searched. The next night he slept at the house of a friend and his friend and he were injured and bound and the whole house searched. Then he went inland to lose his pursuers and he was waylaid and tortured. But he was very angry now and he knew what he must do. Hurt as he was he crept back to La Paz in the night and he skulked like a hunted fox to the beach and took out his pearl from under the stone. Then he cursed it and threw it as far as he could into the channel. He was a free man again with his soul in danger and his food and shelter insecure. And he laughed a great deal about it.

Steinbeck recorded this sketch in The Sea of Cortez (1941), where he noted also how difficult it would be for anyone to believe:

This seems to be a true story, but it is so much like a parable that it almost can't be true. The Indian boy is too heroic, too wise. He knows too much and acts on his knowledge. In every way, he goes contrary to human direction. The story is probably true, but we don't believe it; it is far too reasonable to be true.

We see in Steinbeck's source all the major elements of his expanded version: the Mexican peasant, the discovered pearl, the belief that the pearl will make the finder free, the corrupt brokers, the attacks, the flight, the return, and the disposal of the pearl. But there are also additions and alterations. The episodes of the doctor and the priest are added; the motives for retaining the pearl are changed. While the additions add perhaps some realism at the same time that they increase the impact of the allegory, the alterations tend to diminish the realistic aspects of the hero. Kino becomes almost unbelievably sophisticated. The boy wants only to be drunk forever; Kino wants his son educated. The boy wants to buy prayers for his own soul and for the souls of his relatives in Purgatory; Kino distrusts the priest who asks that the church be remembered when the pearl is sold, closes his fist only more tightly about the pearl, determined instead to buy a rifle. The boy's desires are primitive; they are consonant with his origins and his intellect, crafty and wise as he may be. Kino's wants are sophisticated; he sees in the pearl not the objects that can be bought, but beyond. Coyotito's education will make the Indians free, a social, political, and economic sophistication; new clothes and a church wedding will give Kino and Juana position and respectability, again a social sophistication; the rifle will give Kino power, an intellectual sophistication. With the rifle all other things were possible: "It was the rifle that broke down the barriers. This was an impossibility, and if he could think of having a rifle whole horizons were burst and he could rush on." Later, ironically, all that the rifle gives to Kino is the power to destroy human life; and in this irony, the symbolic import of the pearl-rifle fusion gives to the allegory the very complication that Geismar (and even Steinbeck himself) says is lacking. The pearl is not clearly good or evil, black or white.

Diminished Realism

In these alterations, employed perhaps to add reality to a fable, Steinbeck has diminished realism. Narrative detail alone supplies this element. The opening of chapter three, like the beginning paragraph of the book, is descriptive:

A town is a thing like a colonial animal. A town has a nervous system and a head and shoulders and feet. A town is a thing separate from all other towns, so that there are no two towns alike. And a town has a whole emotion.

Animal imagery again dominates the human scene, but this passage is only the first half of a statement that is concluded midway through the chapter:

Out in the estuary a tight woven school of small fishes glittered and broke water to escape a school of great fishes that drove in to eat them. And in the houses the people could hear the swish of the small ones and the bouncing splash of the great ones as the slaughter went on…. And the night mice crept about on the ground and the little night hawks hunted them silently.

Symbol, allegory, and realistic detail are again woven satisfactorily together. The large fish and the hawks symbolize the doctor, the priest, the brokers, and the man behind the brokers, in fact all enemies of the village people from time prehistoric. Allegorically these predatory animals are all the snares that beset the journeying soul and the hungering body. Realistically these scenes can be observed in any coastal town where water, foul, and animal ecology provide these specific denizens.

Somewhere in every chapter Steinbeck adds a similar touch: the tidepool description that opens chapter two, the pearl-buyer with his sleight-of-hand coin manipulation midway in chapter four, the great wind passages at the end of chapter five, and the wasteland imagery a third of the way into chapter six. All these passages operate symbolically as well as realistically, and some of them work even allegorically.

Interpretation of the Allegory

One of the major charges against allegory is obscurantism. Why does the author not say what he means outright? Is it not too easy to derive two or more entirely separate and frequently contradictory meanings from a single allegory? These are the terms in which Coleridge first objected. Being told what a poet intended by his allegory, he responded,

Apollo be praised! not a thought like it would ever enter of its own accord into any mortal mind; and what is an additional good feature, when put there, it will not stay, having the very opposite quality that snakes have—they come out of their holes into open view at the sound of sweet music, while the allegoric meaning slinks off at the very first notes, and lurks in murkiest oblivion—and utter invisibility.

Such is the reaction to The Pearl of Warren French in John Steinbeck (1961), who finds Kino's disposal of the pearl capable of contradictory interpretations: it may be seen as "noble renunciation," but it can also be read as "defeatism." The Pearl is most commonly understood as a rejection of materialism. Peter Lisca accepts the theme of antimaterialism but suggests a second layer of allegory which creates a "pattern of man's search for his soul." Others think The Pearl, like many another Steinbeck novel, to be a search for values, something like Odysseus' ten-year wanderings in the Homeric epic.

I often wonder at the ability of the anti-allegorists to read any piece of literature. Like Coleridge, allegory-haters are usually symbolism-lovers. How do they find any more certainty in the meaning of the evasive symbol than in "obscure" allegory? How do they respond to the "negative capability" of Shakespeare and Keats? What is their reaction first to Christ's parables or Dante's Paradiso and then to the mountains of commentary on both that indicate there is very little certainty in any interpretation? We might say to them (since allegory deals almost always with the ways toward faith) that their faith is weak and urge that they ask in order to be given, seek in order to find, and knock in order to have opened.

But even the interpreters who have dealt with and accepted the allegory of The Pearl have been disturbingly vague. What are the results of Kino's particular search, we ask? What is the nature of Kino's soul? its disposition? in grace? in reprobation? What set of values did he arrive at? What is the precise nature of the materialism which he rejected?

Let us consider the general implications of any allegorical journey. Either it chronicles the transition of the soul from its captivity in the body and this mortality to liberation in Paradise and eternal life, or it records simply man's passing from a state of sin to one of grace. Quite often both these things happen at the same time. In The Divine Comedy, for example, Dante the pilgrim passes from this world into the existence of the afterworld; yet the entire journey is also one man's moral regeneration from error to rectitude, an object lesson that instructs the traveler in the nature of sin and the terrors of its punishment as opposed to the beatitude of salvation and the glories of its rewards.

But one thing always remains at the end of an allegorical journey. The traveler of the literal journey is still alive, still mortal, still in this world, and still to make the true journey from the corruption of this earth to the crystal bowers of heaven or sulphurous pits of hell that is undergone only after death.

Kino's Journeys

Kino's flight may be seen as a double journey, with a third still to be made. The journey is one half spiritual—the route to salvation of the soul—and one half physical—the way to freedom from bodily want. The second half is obvious; it is the theme of most of the early Steinbeck works; it is delineated in the list of things Kino will buy with the pearl. The first half may not be obvious, since for a long time now critics have been calling Steinbeck's writing nonteleological, by which they mean it does not concern itself with end-products, with what might be, what should be, or what could be, but only with what is. Especially is he unconcerned with eschatology. This view has long seemed to me mistaken. An allegorist with no teleology, no eschatology is almost a contradiction in terms. How this view of Steinbeck came into being is easy to see. His early novels such as In Dubious Battle and The Grapes of Wrath are a-Christian. No set of characters ever swore by Christ's name or cried out their disbelief in the church more often than those in In Dubious Battle. Mac says to Jim Nolan, "You got no vices, have you. And you're not a Christer either." But these are early works. In Steinbeck's latest novel, The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), the central character, Ethan Allen Hawley, is a regular member of the Episcopal Church; his problems are oriented about morality in a Christian framework, and much of the incidental symbolism is sacramental. Perhaps we have witnessed in Steinbeck himself an orthodox conversion, which, once witnessed, gives us cause to look for signs of it in previous writings. The Pearl is one of the first in which I detect a change; Juan Chicoy's bargains with the Virgin of Guadalupe in The Wayward Bus may be reluctant religion, but they represent at least a willingness to sit at the arbitration table with what used to be the enemy. East of Eden, in my view, among other things is an allegory of redemption through grace.

One of Kino's journeys then is the search for salvation. The forces that necessitate the literal journey, the flight, are cloaked in mystery and darkness:

"I was attacked in the dark," said Kino. "And in the fight I have killed a man."

"Who?" asked Juan Thomás quickly.

"I do not know. It is all darkness—all darkness and shape of darkness."

"It is the pearl," said Juan Thomás. "There is a devil in this pearl. You should have sold it and passed on the devil."

We are reminded of the formlessness of Milton's allegorical Death. Juan Thomás, torn like Kino by desires for a better life but concerned for his brother's safety, both blesses the journey and argues against it:

"Go with God," he said, and it was like a death.

"You will not give up the pearl?"

"This pearl has become my soul," said Kino.

"If I give it up I shall lose my soul."

Already almost overburdened with multiple symbolic equivalences—it stands for greed, for beauty, for materialism, for freedom from want, for evil, for good, for effete society, degenerate religion, and unethical medicine, for the strength and virtue of primitive societies—the pearl, with these words of Kino, stands also for Kino's soul.

The Indian boy of the germ-story had quite falsely identified his hold on the pearl with a firm grasp on salvation, a salvation absolutely assured while he still went about enveloped in flesh and mortality: "he could in advance purchase masses sufficient to pop him out of Purgatory like a squeezed watermelon seed." Kino also holds the pearl in his hand and equates it with freedom from want and then, mystically, also with freedom from damnation: "If I give it up I shall lose my soul." But he too has mistaken the pearl. The chances are very much more likely that with freedom from want his soul will be all the more in danger from sin. The Indian boy becomes free only when he throws the pearl away, only when he is "again with his soul in danger and his food and shelter insecure." The full significance of Kino's throwing the pearl back into the sea now becomes clear: the act represents his willingness to accept the third journey, the journey still to be made, the journey that Dante had still to make even after rising out of Hell to Purgatory and Paradise, the journey that any fictional character has still to make after his dreamvision allegory is over. Kino, Dante, Everyman have been given nothing more than instruction. They must apply their new knowledge and win their way to eternal salvation, which can come only with their actual deaths.

Kino's Triumph

It is difficult to understand how Warren French can interpret the "gesture [of flinging the pearl back into the sea] … as defeatism," how French can say that Kino "slips back not just half a step, but toboggans to the very bottom of the heap, for his boat smashed, his baby dead, and the pearl cast into the sea, he has less when the story is over than he had when it started." Kino is not defeated. He has in a sense triumphed over his enemy, over the chief of the pearl buyers, who neither gets the pearl nor kills Kino to keep him from talking. Kino has rid himself of his pursuers; he has a clear road to the cities of the north, to the capital, where indeed he may be cheated again, but where he has infinitely more opportunity to escape his destiny as a hut-dwelling peasant on the edge of La Paz. He has proved that he cannot be cheated nor destroyed. But his real triumph, his real gain, the heights to which he has risen rather than the depths to which he has slipped back is the immense knowledge that he has gained about good and evil. This knowledge is the tool that he needs to help him on the final journey, the inescapable journey that everyman must take.

A final note should be added concerning some parallels between Steinbeck's novel and the anonymous fourteenth century. Pearl. The Pearl Poet tells the story, in dream-vision and allegory, of the personal grief of a loving father who has lost his daughter, a child dead before she had lived "two years in our land." As the poem opens, the narrator returns to a place where a "pearl of great price" has dropped from his hand to the ground. He falls asleep over the spot; a young maiden appears whose garments are covered with pearls; and the narrator speaks to the girl, now identified with the pearl he has lost and whom he believes to be his daughter in heaven, grown in stature and wisdom:

  O Pearl, quoth I, in pearls bedight,
  Art thou my pearl that I have 'plain'd?

She lectures him about the ways to salvation. He struggles to cross a stream that separates him from her and from the heavenly city—the new Jerusalem—which is her abode. The effort awakens him, and he rises from the ground with new spiritual strength.

Steinbeck's familiarity with medieval English literature is easy to document. His general interest in allegory indicates a steeping in the tradition. The epigraph to The Wayward Bus establishes his close reading of Everyman; and two quotations from Old English in The Winter of Our Discontent (one of them significantly from the poetic Genesis in the Junius MS., 11. 897-899) show not only wide reading but also study in the original Anglo-Saxon.

The importance of the medieval Pearl for a reading of Steinbeck's novel is centered in the role of the children in each. Coyotito can, in several ways, be identified with Kino's "pearl of great value." The pearl from the sea is only a means by which Coyotito will be given an education. For the doctor, who at first refused to treat Coyotito, the child becomes his means to the pearl, i.e. the child is the pearl to him. But more important than these tenuous relationships is the fact that with the death of Coyotito the pearl no longer has any significance. The moment the pursuer with the rifle fires, Kino kills him. Kino then kills the two trackers who led the assassin to him and who were unshakable. This act gives Kino and his family unhindered passage to the cities of the north, where either the pearl might be sold or a new life begun. But the chance shot has killed Coyotito, and though Kino and Juana are now free, they return to the village near La Paz and throw the pearl back into the sea. Thus the sole act that has altered Kino's determination to keep the pearl which has become his soul is the death of his child; and, as I read the allegory, Kino and Juana turn from the waterside with new spiritual strength, regenerated even as the father in the medieval Pearl.

Much has been made of the leitmotif of music in The Pearl: the song of the family, the song of the enemy, etc. The suggestion for this musical background, interlaced as it is with Steinbeck's chief themes (cleaning of the soul, new wealth, complete well-being) may have come from the second stanza of the medieval poem:

  Oft have I watched, wishing for that wealth
  That was wont for a while to make nought of my
    sin,
  And exalt my fortune and my entire well-being—
  ........
  Yet never imagined I so sweet a song
  As a quiet hour let steal to me;
  Indeed many drifted to me there.

And, finally, the medieval Pearl ends on the same note of renunciation that is the crux of Steinbeck's fable:

  Upon this hill this destiny I grasped,
  Prostrate in sorrow for my pearl.
  And afterward to God I gave it up.
  (modernizations of The Pearl by Sister Mary
    Vincent Hillmann)

However, I do not think that anything overmuch should be made of these similarities. Possibly the mere title of Steinbeck's allegory brought memories to his mind of the fourteenth century poem. He may have gone back to look at it again, but he may have satisfied himself with distant evocations only. For myself, whatever likenesses I find between the two works serve only to emphasize the continuing tradition of true allegory and the modern writer's strong links with the past.

Source: Harry Morris, "'The Pearl': Realism and Allegory," in English Journal, Vol. 52, No. 7, October 1963, pp. 487-95, 505.

Sources

Astro, Richard, "John Steinbeck," in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 9, American Novelists, 1910–1945, Gale Research, 1981, pp. 43-68.

Baker, Carlos, "Steinbeck at the Top of His Form," in the New York Times, November 30, 1947, pp. BR4, 52.

French, Warren, "John Steinbeck," in Twayne's United States Authors Series Online, G. K. Hall, 1999.

Karsten, Ernest E., Jr., "Thematic Structure in The Pearl," in English Journal, Vol. 54, No. 1, January 1965, pp. 1-7.

Prescott, Orville, "Books of the Times," in the New York Times, November 24, 1947, p. 21.

Steinbeck, John, East of Eden, Penguin, 1992.

―――――, The Pearl, in The Short Novels of John Steinbeck, Viking, 1953, pp. 471-527.

Further Reading

Mitchell, Marilyn H., "Steinbeck's Strong Women: Feminine Identity in the Short Stories," in John Steinbeck: A Study of the Short Fiction, edited by R. S. Hughes, Twayne, 1989, pp. 154-66.

Mitchell looks at strong women in Steinbeck's fiction.

Owens, Lois, John Steinbeck's Re-Vision of America, University of Georgia Press, 1985.

Owens analyzes the changes in Steinbeck's vision of America over the course of his literary career.

Timmerman, John, "Steinbeck's Environmental Ethic: Humanity and Harmony with the Land," in Steinbeck and the Environment: Interdisciplinary Approaches, edited by Susan F. Beegel, Susan Shillinglaw, and Wesley N. Tiffney Jr., University of Alabama Press, 1997, pp. 310-22.

Timmerman examines Steinbeck's vision of the environment and people's relationship to it.

Tuttleton, James W., "Steinbeck Remembered," in the New Criterion, Vol. 13, No. 7, March 1995, pp. 22-28.

Tuttleton presents a comprehensive overview of Steinbeck's career and reputation.