Subject of Desire: Petrarchan Poetics and the Female Voice in Louise Labé

Chapter Four: Loss and Legitimation: Labé's Elegiac Voice

Chapter Four Loss and Legitimation Labe's Elegiac Voice The opening to the world of Labe's poetry that the Debat anticipates invites first a careful look at the way the author presents her personal lyric sequence. As Fran~ois Lecercle has pointed out, Labe's division of her elegies and sonnets into two discrete groups aligns her with a French tendency to classify collected poems by genre, in contrast to the Petrarchan model, which features the intermingling of verse forms. 1 Furthermore, in the chronological organization of Labe's poetic oeuvre, her three lesser-known elegies precede the famous sonnets, although critics have argued that the elegies are among the last verses composed before the volume's publication in 1555.2 An obvious but important question thus arises: is it significant that Labe places her elegies before the sonnets, and why might she have chosen to do so? The first part of the question begs an affirmative response: as Charpentier has strongly stated in reference to Labe's poetry and the Debat, whatever the uncertainties of the chronology of her works, the reader needs to believe that Labe ordered them as she wanted them read, even if that order sometimes defies our expectations ("Le Debat ... Une Poetique ?" 153). The speculative issue of why Labe opened her lyric works with her elegies is what I want to address in this chapter through a close examination of the texts and evolution of these three long poems. My study views their textual ordering as representing a three-staged process in which the poet introduces, interrogates, and challenges the problematics of her inherited Petrarchan love tradition, in ways working toward the transformed lyric model advanced in the very sonnet cycle that links her most directly with her Italian predecessor.3 The Canzoniere, of course does not contain formal elegies, but Labe's adaptation ofthis antique form nevertheless facilitates 91 Chapter Four several kinds of global links with Petrarch's lyric project. A brief review concerning the appearance of the genre in Labe's poetry will be helpful in making these connections. As Gertrude Hanisch, Michel Dassonville, and Rigolot have shown, Labe apparently followed tqe basic elegiac model put forth by Clement Marot, who introduced the genre in France with his Suite de l'Adolescence Clementine (1534), a group of twentyone love poems in the form of letters, or epistres, written in decasyllabes with rimes plates.4 In his excellent recent critical study of Marot, Gerard Defaux has noted that these lyric works maintain a strong sense of the author's self-presence and unique stylistic virtuosity despite their frequent status as diverse and circumstantially contrived court pieces (Marot, Rabelais, Montaigne 59).5 Although this contrived aspect of the Suite de l'Adolescence Clementine has often caused it to be viewed as diverging sharply from Labe's spontaneously passionate laments, the collection's poems display two features fundamental to her elegiac project: a proliferation of Petrarchan conventions and motifs attesting to Marot's assimilation of the growing force of Petrarchism in France during this period, and the insistence on the issue of unrequited love that these very conventions "preciously" dramatize (Hanisch 47-49).6 Indeed, in taking up a Marotic form whose language is already highly Petrarchized, Labe embarks on a much deeper exploration of the problem paramount to the Petrarchan lyric ethos: p.ot simply unrequited love per se, but the inextricable ,relationship between love and loss. The complex p~rception of loss, initially in respect to death, then later, by extension, in response to incompletely fulfilled or unhappily ended love, is a defining trait of elegiac verse throughout its classical development, and Labe's poetic confrontation of loss thus demonstrates important connections to the Latin love elegists, most notably Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid.7 The choice of the elegiac form allows her to rewrite the concrete loss of abandonment articulated by the lovers in the letters of Ovid's Heroides; to revisit the loss of individual freedom suffered in the militaristic battle defining love in the Ars amatoria; to reinscribe the loss of all physical and psychic control perceived in the furor amoris of the Propertian lover.8 The physiological and affective symptomology of these losses had of course been assimilated into 92 Loss and Legitimation Petrarch's own poetry, most strikingly in the diction of physical and emotional vacillation, violation, servitude, and death.9 Likewise, the narrative or novelistic...