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Extant scholarship on literary representations of the spiritual during the medieval era has mostly focused on Christocentric discourses via theological treatises and structuralist or semiotic methods. This essay undertakes a Lacanian study of three medieval texts—Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love, “The Wife’s Lament,” and The Dream of the Rood—to demonstrate how Christ’s identity is problematised: as the lover, the beloved, the Other, the lost object, and finally displaced entirely in the form of the Christian Cross, relegated to a realm of Derridean spectral non-presence. Through psychoanalytic and deconstructive frameworks, the essay traces the oscillation of Christ’s ontological status across these texts, revealing how the feminine body and its inscriptions destabilise Christocentric subjectivity.
Ms.Sreeja Chowdhury. “Desire, Christ and the Flesh: Reading The Wife’s Lament and The Dream of the Rood and Julian’s Revelations.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 3, June 2026, pp. 223-245. DOI, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n3.16.
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