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

Chapter Two: Entering the Literary Stage: The Epistre to Mademoiselle Cl

Chapter Two Entering the Literary Stage The Epistre to Mademoiselle Clemence de Bourges, Lyonnaise When Labe published her complete works in 1555, she opened her volume with a startling dedicatory epistle addressed to a young noblewoman named Clemence de Bourges. Written to a female aristocrat by the leading female bourgeois figure in the scintillating literary scene of urban Lyons, this letter has increasingly come to be read as a central Renaissance manifesto asserting the intellectual equality of women and men. In her text, Labe also emphasizes the crucial importance of women's education and writing in the development of an autonomous female identity, one that would transcend both class inequities and gender differences. 1 My aim in this chapter is first to provide some background to the composition of the Epistre and then to discuss its overall rhetorical and thematic structure through an analysis of Labe's intersubjective and selfrepresentational strategies. Although not much is known about the connection between the author and her dedicatee, the very existence of their relationship is a vivid illustration of the flexibility of social movement that Labe herself seems to have enjoyed between her bourgeois origins and the higher ranks of Lyons society. The two young women may have met at a convent where Labe was likely sent to be educated following the death ofher mother, since members of her maternal family were among the convent's benefactors.2 Although Clemence (the daughter of a Lyons city magistrate) was probably some years younger than Labe (the daughter and later the wife of rope makers from Lyons), the author affirms that their relationship boasts both longevity and affection. The final lines justify Labe's dedication as an act of assurance "du bon vouloir lequel de longtemps je vous porte" ("of the good will I have borne you for a long time"); likewise, in her closing 11 Chapter Two she signs herself as Clemence's "humble amie" (her "humble friend").3 If Clemence is invoked in terms of her friendship at the end of the letter, her name is presented to the reader (in abbreviat~d form, the letters A. M. C. D. B. L., designating the French words "A Mademoiselle Clemence de Bourges, Lyonnaise ") before it even begins. The single epithet Lyonnaise suggests , as Berriot (183) and Jones (Currency ofEros 159) have pointed out, Labe's emphasis on the urban citizenship that the two women also shared despite their differing social classes. As we shall see, this careful framing of her letter by a sense of bonding with Clemence, locational on one hand and emotional on the other, allows Labe to address the interrelated issues of gender and class from a position of both strength and protection and to enlarge the potential scope ofan empathetic audience. The text of the Epistreitselfrepresents something quite new in the tradition of prose defenses of women, characterizing one side of the notorious medieval-Renaissance debate popularly known as the querelle des femmes. 4 The predominant rhetorical vehicle for presenting women in a positive and laudatory light in the querelle up to Labe's time was that of the exempLum or individual example, which formed a rich alternative to the static, blason-like idealizations of Petrarchan adulation also in circulation.5 Epitomized by Christine de Pizan's bold and sparkling celebrations of historical, mythical, and biblical women in the 1405 Livre de La Cite des Dames (The Book ofthe City ofLadies), which itself revised Boccaccio's equivocal portraits of many of the same figures in De claris mulieribus (Of Famous Women, c. 1380), the mode of exemplarity still played a significantrole in the sixteenth century not only in the courtly gender polemic led by Castiglione but in direct male defenses of women, such as Cornelius Agrippa's De nobilitate et praecellentiafoeminei sexus (1529, translated into French as Declamation de la noblesse et preexcellence du sexe feminin by Martin Le Pin in Lyons in 1537 and into English as Female Pre-eminence by Henry Care in 1670) and Fran~ois de Billon's Le Fort inexpugnable de L'honneur du sexefeminin, published, like Labe's works, in 1555. It was not unusual for male-authored texts in praise of women to modulate between individual exempLa and Petrarchan stereotypes, as admiration offemale accomplishment and disdain for female subjugation sometimes led 12 Entering the Literary Stage to a posture of reinshrining women as ideals rather than envisaging substantive changes in social...