Reading Rapture: Richard Crashaw's Saint Teresa

Abstract:This article picks up on Jacques Lacan's notorious comment on Gian Lorenzo Bernini's sculpture Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, namely that she is obviously experiencing orgasm ("elle jouit"), to broach the topic of sacred erotics in Richard Crashaw's almost-contemporary Saint Teresa poems. For me, Lacan's comment is not an endpoint or revelation, but rather a starting point for the consideration of Crashaw's sacralization of Saint Teresa's ecstasy in contrast to its desacralization by Lacan and in psychoanalysis more generally. The poem obviously calls for contextual reading, but reading rapture, whether as saintly or scandalous, has an unfinished history of its own, and the phenomenon—or "thing," as Teresa calls it—remains an object of contention, as does the queer-feminine sexuality with which it is often associated.