ABSTRACT
In the first of two reunion scenes presented to us in Act 5 of Pericles, the protagonist, paralyzed by grief, recognizes his lost daughter and exclaims, “O, come hither, / Thou that beget’st him that did thee beget … ” (5.1.194–5). Pericles’s words tellingly revise the incest riddle of the play’s first scene, whose solution sends him off on his traumatized wanderings—but here it is a virginal daughter who takes the place of the mother and who recalls the near-catatonic prince of Tyre to the land of the living. Mothering her own father, Marina teaches him to speak again, as if she were indeed nurturing an infant (the word quite literally means “unspeaking” in its Latin form of infans). She does so, furthermore, through an act of narration, relating her own history of loss and abduction and trial; she has, in effect, become a relater of romance. At this charged moment in its action, Pericles briefly offers a representation of the power of the mother (as life-giver, as nurturer, as story-teller), and then proceeds to undo it. The very act of curing Pericles reinstates him as patriarch, as governor of more than just himself. We should note, too, that the virginal Marina’s healing gift of new life to her father sidesteps the problematic, messy and anxiety-provoking business of material, biological begetting and parturition and erases the presence and threat of the desiring female body. As Janet Adelman suggests, in this scene and in Pericles’s subsequent reunion with the resurrected Thaisa (hidden away as a celibate priestess for 15 years), we have the recuperation and regeneration of the family, freed from the sexual body (and especially from that of the mother) (196–8). At the same time, we have an almost immediate silencing of Marina the storyteller: she will speak only once more after the paternal reunion of 5.1. 1
