Author Bio:
Naomi is a fourth-year English Literature and History student at the University of Edinburgh. Her interests are in late-medieval English and Scottish literature, as well as queer theory and psychoanalysis. She is particularly interested in literature as a vehicle for memorialisation, and the intellectual project of mourning. Outside of university, she likes to read literary fiction, her favourite being the novels of Jeanette Winterson.
Abstract:
Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, this essay argues that for medieval writers, the dream constituted a literary space able to transcend temporal boundaries between the living and the dead. Close readings of Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, Pearl, and Hary’s The Wallace elucidate how the dream serves as a site of both consolation and commemoration. As an atemporal setting which the living and the dead both occupy, the dream vision is a space for confronting loss or receiving spiritual enlightenment. As The Wallace demonstrates, the dream can be employed to serve nationalistic projects of memorialisation, by dissolving the linear temporality of past and present. The essay also highlights the limitations of the dream, particularly in its inability to fully resolve grief. By framing the dream as a poetic structure, medieval writers navigate the tension between the ineffability of loss and the consolatory power of literature, suggesting that while the dream cannot erase mourning, it offers a transformative space for processing and remembering.
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