Thank you both for your replies. Unfortunately, they don't completely address my question. The big idea was that the objects themselves would still be scalar references (not array references), except they would
array references. In the perltie perldoc there is an example that does this with a hash reference, so I think it must be possible.
In the original class constructor a UID is generated. The object is a reference to this UID (hence a scalar). I like to keep this (but have the objects behave as array references).