Pearl
DESCRIPTION:
An iridescent mineral made within the soft tissue of a shelled mollusk, but still prized as a gemstone
COMPOSITION:
Calcium carbonate
METAPHYSICAL PROPERTIES:
A stone of purity and innocence. It is said to soothe negative energy and bring balance and wisdom to one’s actions.
During my freshman year of college, I experienced deep horror upon learning that the girl across the hall wore her pearls to the gym. She fancied herself a Massachusetts prep, all seersucker and boat shoes and high ponytails. I’d see her returning red-faced from the treadmill, her strand of pearls slicked in sweat. When we’d go out, I’d see her spritz Clinique Happy onto her pearl-studded neck, and then come home and pass out drunk after partying in the Louisiana humidity without bothering to take the necklace off and put it back in its velvet box. Something so delicate seemed out of place for the life we were living at eighteen.
According to The Official Preppy Handbook, the 1980 humor book edited by Lisa Birnbach, pearls are an integral part of the uniform for any preppy woman. For a debut ball “you will need white kid gloves, white shoes and pearls.” After one’s debut, “prep women never take off their jewelry—pearls on the squash court are perfectly acceptable.” And even if you’re not sporting a modest strand around your neck, studs in your ears are acceptable for all occasions. Birnbach extended that ubiquity to nudity in a 2016 article for Town and Country, writing that even when the true prep is naked on her honeymoon, she should still be wearing her pearl studs and her engagement ring.
Whenever my hallmate would return from the gym, I’d cringe with both worry and smug self-satisfaction. My grandmother, prep that she was, taught me that pearls are finicky. They fade with sweat but need body oil to maintain their luster. They don’t respond well to perfume, cosmetics, or arid climates. They’re scratched easily by other sharp gems and shouldn’t come in contact with direct sunlight, high temperatures, vinegar, laundry detergent, or fruit juice.
The squash court seems like a horrible place for them. Pearls are innocent and must be protected.
A pearl is nurtured by the organism it’s born into, lacquered and polished into its full beauty, and if it weren’t for us, it would never leave its home. This complicates things, metaphysically speaking. “Since the oyster must be killed to remove the pearl, some believe there is a heavy debt incurred by those who engage in trafficking pearls and by those who wear and use them,” writes author Scott Cunningham in Cunningham’s Encyclopedia of Crystal, Gem & Metal Magic. There is violence inherent in their stories, whether it’s the Japanese myth that pearls are the tears of mermaids or the Greek belief that pearls could keep a new bride from crying (because of course she would cry). “Popular folklore naming pearls as bearers of bad luck might be connected with the violence of their collection. You’ll know intuitively whether you can use them or not.”
A pearl is nurtured by the organism it’s born into, lacquered and polished into its full beauty, and if it weren’t for us, it would never leave its home.
If a pearl is a reminder of innocence and purity, it is also a reminder that there is no innocence without the possibility of its loss, no purity without the impure. If the pearl is a symbol of innocence, it is only because we know what decay looks like. No matter how well you treat it, something can only stay pure for so long. Its end is as inevitable as the violence that will cause it.
Pearls sometimes seem like more hassle than they’re worth. Even before we knew how they were formed, pearls inspired the language of cautious magic. “The quality of the pearl depends much more upon a calm state of the heavens than of the sea,” wrote Pliny the Elder in Natural History, “and hence it is that it contracts a cloudy hue, or a limpid appearance, according to the degree of serenity of the sky in the morning.”
The pearl is a result of an itch, its nacre coating the result of a compulsive healing behavior, like licking a wound. Natural pearls are formed when a piece of sand or grit finds its way into an oyster, whereas cultured pearls are born of the farmer placing the irritant inside. Pearls sit like pimples on the mollusk’s gooey, slick flesh. A smattering of iridescent zits. Once they’re removed from their corporeal incubators, their appeal is undeniable. The pearl itself is a symbol of honesty, purity, and protection. It has magical associations with the moon and water, based on where it comes from, and is said to have a sedative effect, as if the magician herself has been gently rocked and covered in a protective gloss. Saint Hildegard believed they had the power to purify water, perhaps as an extension of what oysters do as filter feeders. But as symbols of purity and truth, of refinement and sincerity, you could do worse than a luminous bead plucked from the flesh of the sea.
There are almost no myths that evoke innocence and purity without young women. In Hindu myth, the god Krishna picked the first pearls from the ocean and presented them to his daughter on her wedding day; pearls are still a part of many Hindu weddings, whether as bridal accessories or offerings to gods. They were presented by ladies to knights to wear at tournaments in medieval Europe. The traditionally female name Margarita (and all derivatives) come from the Greek word for pearl, of which there is no male equivalent. In Chinese medicine, only “virgin” pearls were used in healing, not those that had been bored for jewelry—which is extremely A Metaphor. The implication is women, like pearls, are worth the most (to men, to society) when they are young and untouched. “Unlike other gems, a pearl comes to us perfect and beautiful, direct from the hand of nature,” writes mineralogist George Kunz in The Book of the Pearl. The pearl owes nothing to humans, “and there is a purity and sweetness about it which makes it especially suitable for the maiden.”
Pearl is an embarrassingly allegorical name for a child of sin, but then again, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter is an embarrassingly allegorical book. Hester Prynne’s daughter Pearl, the result of Hester’s infidelity, is a wild and witchy child, though the Puritan community blames that on her mother’s deeds and not on the fact that they shunned her and made her live on the edge of town. It’s no surprise she has little interest in the society that condemns her existence. In “Hawthorne’s Pearl: Woman-Child of the Future,” published in 2005 in American Transcendental Quarterly, Cindy Lou Daniels writes that the child “is neither forced into displaying guilt, nor into hiding it, because she does not own the guilt brought into her life by her mother and her mother’s lover.”
Hester uses Pearl to thwart that guilt by dressing her in elaborate, beautiful things that serve two purposes: signaling to outsiders that Pearl is good and worthy, and reminding Hester herself that something beautiful has come out of her “shameful” act. Another easy metaphor to make with pearls is birth. They are beautiful, delicate objects created by a living creature, ripped from those bodies, and then used by outsiders in the way their creators could never imagine. Mother-of-pearl is the name given to the iridescent inner layer of the mollusks that also makes up the outer layer of pearls, a protective coating passed from parent to child in the hopes it will be enough. Pearls are harvested and pierced and worn to the gym regardless. It is not enough.
Hawthorne tries to argue that Hester’s sartorial efforts were in vain. “So magnificent was the small figure, when thus arrayed, and such was the splendor of Pearl’s own beauty, shining through the gorgeous robes which might have extinguished a paler loveliness, that there was an absolute circle of radiance around her, on the darksome cottage floor,” he wrote. “And yet a russet gown, torn and soiled with the child’s rude play, made a picture of her just as perfect.” She would have been beautiful no matter what, he tries to say. Except that’s not quite right. Though the Puritans were skeptical of Pearl either way, the clothes helped; that she was obviously beautiful even in a torn dress made them madder. Her mother’s protective layers allowed her to have at least the appearance of civility, like she was one of them, to let the Puritans forget, just for a moment, that her provenance had no effect on the beauty God had bestowed on her, and that she is as good as any of them despite the supposed sin at her core.
It’s rare that someone would look at a pearl and think of the dirt at the center. If they do, it would be more to marvel than to disparage. But then again, that’s sort of the draw of the pearl—something beautiful and dirty at once, something that has to be stolen from a disgusting place and can never be looked at without remembering just how and why it came to be. In Natural History, Pliny the Elder writes of how difficult pearls are to harvest. “The fish, as soon as ever it perceives the hand, shuts its shell and covers up its treasures, being well aware that it is for them that it is sought; and if it happens to catch the hand, it cuts it off with the sharp edge of the shell. And no punishment is there that could be more justly inflicted.” If you could risk losing your hand, you’d think you might make do with a quartz found in the dirt. But I’m sure there’s some idiom about risk and reward that anyone who has ever dived for pearls has told themselves.
In a 1997 episode of The Simpsons called “Homer’s Phobia,” the gay antiques dealer John (voiced by John Waters) is delighted at the retro camp of the Simpsons’ home. Marge serves Hi-C and fluffernutters. There’s corn on the kitchen curtains. And, he coos at Lisa, “pearls on a little girl. It’s a fairy tale!” There is no deeper metaphor to his delight. Pearls are sweet and innocent and almost campily so, like a Pat Boone record, like a little girl should be.
I feel old in pearls. My main association with them is accompanying my grandfather on Christmas Eve to buy my grandmother a new strand. He always did his shopping on Christmas Eve; the store clerks really turned on the charm (and sometimes passed out free food and eggnog) the last few hours before the jewelry shop closed. We brought her old strand to make sure we didn’t accidentally buy two of the same size, and my grandpa draped them both on my thirteen-year-old neck to compare. They were beautiful, and I figured someday I’d be elegant and refined enough to merit them. This was a necklace for an old-fashioned kind of girl intent on growing into an old-fashioned kind of woman, not for the girl I was. But maybe someday.
I stayed naive for a long time. My friends were the kind of girls who were always sneaking new, dirty things into our lives, the kind of girls who’d make up sexy dances to the Miss Saigon soundtrack, call me a “pussy” for crying at scary movies, and stuff their bras with tissues. The kind of girls who’d get fingered on a group date to the movies while I sat four seats down, still waiting for my first kiss. I was considered the innocent one among my friends, the good one, the one that needed protection. But eventually, though it took longer than I wanted, the spell of innocence started to lift. By the time I went with my grandpa to buy the necklace, whatever I had learned of sex and heartbreak and the savviness required to navigate my city (which, to be fair, wasn’t much) seemed enough that the label of innocent should no longer apply to me. I had begun to want things—the freedom to go out with my friends, the pleasure that came from touching my body, the thrill of romantic pursuit. I had learned, somewhere, that the presence of these feelings meant innocence could no longer thrive, something I could only sense as soon as I didn’t have it. But I didn’t understand why I should want it, or why the lack of it should make me feel somehow guilty. If the information I was absorbing about the world every minute was useful, why was it treated like a shame?
According to one myth, white pearls come from the tears of Eve, and black pearls from the tears of Adam, sobbing as they were cast out of Eden. Perhaps they are the last bits of innocence leaving their bodies. Religious interpretations aside, there’s a reason Eve’s story is compelling. By the time she bites the fruit it no longer matters whether she’s innocent or not. It’s her desire that blows the garden open.
The joke about debutantes is that the traditional white dress and kid gloves are rarely appropriate by the time these young women make their debut, but debs can pass better than most. Innocence depends as much on what we think it looks like as it does on actual behavior and knowledge. That metaphorical veil gives you the benefit of the doubt. There are many forms that veil can take. The white, well-off girls (they were all white, and we all lived on the Upper East Side) getting fingered at the movie theater would not be doomed by their behavior, through some combination of their whiteness and richness and other cultural signifiers. They could still call on the protection of childhood if they wanted. Yet multiple studies confirm that black children are routinely perceived as older than their white peers, and more likely to be viewed as guilty when suspected of a crime or even just transgressive behavior. In a 2017 study from the Georgetown Law Center, in which adults (mostly white women) were surveyed about girlhood, “black girls were more likely to be viewed as behaving and seeming older than their stated age,” starting from the age of five. Participants in the study “perceived black girls as needing less protection and nurturing than white girls, and that black girls were perceived to know more about adult topics and are more knowledgeable about sex than their white peers.”
Some girls get to wear innocence longer than others, whether because of race or class or affect. But other girls, usually from marginalized backgrounds, are sexualized in spite of their childhood, or sexualized for it—different flavors of rotten fruit from the same tree. Elvis Presley famously favored white, cotton panties on all the white teen girls he lured into bed. It is overwhelmingly white girls who are fetishized for their Catholic school uniforms, or for being “barely legal,” or for inspiring men to set internet countdown clocks to the day they turn eighteen. Meanwhile, teenage Aaliyah was considered mature enough to be in a relationship with R. Kelly. Maybe my college hallmate knew better than I did what pearls at the gym signified. They were meant to protect her—which is why it didn’t matter if she protected them. If she ruined them with her sweat, she could just buy another strand.
“Invoking the image of innocent and pure white women in constant need of protection, the men endeavored to perform their manly duties as fathers, husbands, and brothers,” wrote Crystal Nicole Feimster in the 2011 book Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching, describing the lynching of Ephraim and Henry Grizzard in 1892. The brothers were accused of raping Mollie and Sadie Bruce, two young white women who lived just outside Nashville. A group of “deputized citizens” found Henry first, and after the Bruce sisters identified him as one of their assailants, he was turned over to the lynch mob by the sheriff. But, Feimster writes, “the lunchtime lynching failed to satisfy the mob’s taste for revenge,” and the mob took Ephraim from the jail where he was being held, injuring a number of officers in the process, and hanged him too. The headline in the Indianapolis Journal read “grizzard lynched at last” and did not mention the Bruce sisters.
Some of the most unforgivable violence has been committed in the name of protecting innocence personified. Women and children—especially of the dominant race or higher class—are victims of the benevolent misogyny that both lumps them together and insists they are inherently pure in a way adult men are not. It is a justification for men’s actions toward them and in their name. Women are pure, we have to protect them grows from the same roots as Men are evil, we must harm.
Women have also taken up the mantle of purity to maintain their conditional privileges. In the 1910s, Josephine Dodge, cofounder of the National Association Opposed to Women’s Suffrage, argued against giving women the right to vote in the United States. “The life of the average woman is not so ordered as to give her firsthand knowledge of those things which are the essentials of sound government,” she said at one meeting in New Jersey. “She is worthily employed in other departments of life, and the vote will not help her fulfill her obligations therein.” Better not to sully herself with dirty politics. Better to stay in the home and wield her power there, where she can influence her husband’s vote in subtler ways.
Many suffragists, conversely, assumed that women’s “inherent” purity would improve political discourse. But anarchist Emma Goldman was skeptical of the power of the women’s vote. This was mostly because she knew true revolution would never be on a ballot and that women were deluded in their assumption that their purity would make politics better. “Woman will purify politics, we are assured…. To assume, therefore, that she would succeed in purifying something which is not susceptible of purification, is to credit her with supernatural powers,” she wrote in her essay “Woman Suffrage,” which was included in her 1910 work Anarchism and Other Essays. In fact, she argues that women’s purist attitudes, though they may be socially inherited, make them a greater liability in the political realm, essentially busybodies hell-bent on regulating drink, prostitution, and gambling instead of fighting for equality. “Man has long overcome the superstitions that still engulf woman…. He therefore had neither time nor inclination to measure everyone’s morality with a Puritanic yardstick.”
It is only women (usually white) who clutch their pearls, both because they have been conditioned to and because they have accepted those conditions as fair compensation for their protection. Their perceived innocence is all they have. But I do not know the value of innocence except as a false barrier to predators, something considered, absorbed, and then discarded by the wrong kind of beholder. To them, innocence invites dirt; it’s a blank canvas asking to be smeared, begging for the color of experience. It’s an invitation for predatory behavior.
The Nashville mob wanted to show Ephraim Grizzard’s body to the white women in what Feimster says was both a display of their imagined bravery and a “form of terror.” Look what your innocence made me do.
The most famous shell-based birth is that of Venus, of whom the pearl is one of many symbols. The Roman goddess was born of the ocean, supposedly after Saturn castrated his father, Uranus, and his blood fell into the sea; a radiant good from a dark sin. The scene was set in a Homeric hymn:
Of august gold-wreathed and beautiful
Aphrodite I shall sing to whose domain
belong the battlements of all sea-loved
Cyprus where, blown by the moist breath
of Zephyros, she was carried over the
waves of the resounding sea on soft foam.
Venus is a dynamic goddess. She represents sex and fertility, growth and renewal, beauty and love, and the victory that comes when those things are yours. But she also represents the opposite of sexuality and fertility: chastity. “Venus Verticordia” was the changer of hearts and had the ability to turn the sexual vice in her followers into virtue. She inspired maidens to stay chaste and married women to stay true to their husbands, even when temptation called. For all her championing of sex and baby-making, these had to happen within the prescribed confines of patriarchal society. The heart should only change one way.
In Venus’s most famous visual depiction, by Botticelli, she is demure even on her the day of her birth, covering her vulva and one breast, her shy contrapposto reminding you she is nude but not naked. If you want her, that’s because of your own projections. But the story isn’t always told this way. In some images, the goddess is standing, arms outstretched, in the middle of the shell. In Birth of Venus by Alexandre Cabanel, she is lying naked on top of the foam, her hair mingling with the waves, as cherubs announce her to the world. In one painting by Henri Pierre Picou, she is nestled in a shell the length of her body, luxuriating in her bed alone, more woman than goddess. If she can turn your heart toward chastity, she is also there to remind you what you are turning away from.
In 1929, the New York Times’s Herbert L. Matthews painted at once a harsh and romantic picture of Mikimoto Kōkichi and his pearl farm. Mikimoto had been experimenting since the 1880s with creating a perfectly spherical cultured pearl, a pearl made by intentionally seeding an oyster with a sphere of mother-of-pearl, rather than opening as many wild oysters as possible and hoping to find matching stones. By the 1920s he had made the process commercially viable. His pearls completely upended the industry, which until then had been based mainly in Paris and relied on nature to do all the work of creation. Matthews writes of Mikimoto’s farm on the Gokasho Bay, where “thousands upon thousands of oysters are patiently working night and day like so many obedient slaves, doing the bidding of their lord and master.” The pearls were harvested by women, who were deemed better divers than men and who wore nothing but a “flimsy white cotton garment” to protect them from the cold of the water. “They are splendid specimens of femininity,” wrote Matthews, “all of them.”
It’s a beautiful inversion of the Western metaphors of violence and purity—this time the pearls are being rescued from the “slaves” not by brute male force, but by the kindred, gentle spirit of a woman in white. Matthews referred to them as “girls,” implying youth and virginity, and sex by extension. The “honor” the lynch mobs were protecting was always that of the imagined white hymen. If pearls are worn by proper, virtuous, and refined women, it’s because they suggest those women’s innocence is directly tied to sex.
Virginity always comes with a limited time frame. Miss Havisham sitting in her wedding dress as her mansion crumbles around her is an unnatural sight, too old now to be wearing white lace and ignorant of bodily pleasures (we assume). Steve Carrell’s forty-year-old virgin inspires a multipronged crusade by his friends, who are clearly uncomfortable by his mere presence, in order to get him laid. Too much innocence turns into its own kind of vulgarity, and even those who are allowed to be innocent have to give it up eventually. It’s only worth something if it’s ephemeral.
“Human beings have no monopoly on physical virginity,” wrote Hanne Blank in her 2007 book Virginity: The Untouched History. “But we have cornered the market on it, both in terms of recognizing that it exists and in making it useful in the way we organize our cultures and our relationships with one another.” We socially regulate who should be having sex, with whom, when, and how (cis men and women, when they get married, and in a way that will produce children, respectively). In modern society, few people order their sexual lives around such strict mores, but those ideas have informed Western values around sex.
Blank outlines the anthropological developments that led to our modern ideas of virginity and virtue: the rise of agriculture, the concept of individual ownership, the importance of the right of primogeniture in property transfers, and the economic value of a virginal daughter and the dowry she could attract. Virginity has no inherent value, but it has been economically and morally encoded into society’s perception of a woman’s worth.
Whether or not money is involved, a woman’s virginity is still insidiously considered to have worth. The idea that a woman who has never had sex is more desirable on some level than a woman who knows what she is doing is a well-worn punchline in sitcoms and teen comedies. It’s in Cruel Intentions, in which Sebastian, a rich playboy, initially sees his vampy, sexually liberated ex-stepsister Kathryn as the prize until blonde, virginal Annette entices him with her purity, thereby purifying him. It’s in Fifty Shades of Grey, in which Christian repeatedly implies that Anastasia’s innocence has drawn him to her. The fact that she’s a virgin makes him all the hornier. It’s also embedded in every joke about a dad meeting his daughter’s prom date on the front porch with a shotgun.
For all the desire expressed, the act of losing one’s virginity is framed as just that—a loss. You do not gain sexual knowledge, but rather something is taken from you. No other rites of passage are described in this way. I have trained myself to tell the story of “the first time I had sex” instead of “the time I lost my virginity,” though the hard pause I give before uttering the phrase is a dead giveaway that this language doesn’t come naturally to me. As problematic as the word virginity can be, at least its succinct; I still haven’t been able to force out “the first time I had penetrative sex with someone with a penis.”
When I was seventeen, I called an ex and asked if they wanted to have sex. I was heading to college, which I viewed first and foremost as a place for hooking up without worrying about running into your parents. I refused to leave high school without knowing what I was doing, so I presented what I thought was a reasonable proposition: we’re still friends, we’re still comfortable with each other, let’s get this sex thing out of the way so it’s not such a daunting prospect. I do not remember the sex. What I remember is the train ride to my ex’s college, watching cartoons in a dorm room and waiting until it was nighttime (because this is the sort of thing that should be done at night). I remember my chilled skin against a polyfil comforter. I remember laughing when the geometry of our bodies didn’t line up correctly, and then the surprise when it did. Afterward, we laid cramped in the twin bed together, feeling like we had a secret and thinking I wouldn’t want it any other way. I didn’t feel anything like loss.
When I told a future boyfriend about this, he was baffled that I had no regrets and insisted I was somehow wrong in the way I handled it. To him, my experience was sullied by my explicit orchestrations; it should have just…happened. The idea of virginity as moral gift had a firm grip on his psyche, which would cause problems later, but at the time I listened patiently as he told me this moment in my life was worth less because it hadn’t happened “naturally.”
A pearl is just an oyster’s shining scab, and a hymen is just something your body made. There is nothing moral or pure about either, and there’s nothing natural about the energy it takes to maintain innocence. His confusion didn’t make me regret my choice, but the knowledge that my peers could still care so deeply about the “right” way to reach such a milestone slipped into me like a splinter. Even after we’ve grown up, an aura of purity is still something we’re willing to invest in both protecting and projecting.
Before we cultured them in long rows, pearls were always a discovery. You could crack open a hundred oysters and leave their flesh to rot on the rocks without finding a single one, or you could open shell after shell filled with precious wounds. The not knowing is the thrill.
But by the time you’re standing there on your wedding night, ring on your finger and pearls on your neck, you know. I think it’s as simple as longing. Innocence is potential. It is a moon-like cloak pulled over the implied vulgarity of reality, the hope that something pure can survive, and even thrive, surrounded by unspeakable things. A strand of pearls on a debutante is visual semantics we still value. A strand of pearls says, There’s still a part of me you can’t know. I’m too delicate to show you but there’s something filthy at the center of me. Doesn’t that make you want me more?
