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

Chapter Six: Conclusion

Chapter Six Conclusion Et ne me puis donner contentement, Si hors de moy ne fay quelque saillie. Sonnet 18 See Appendix 87 EstantAmour desir, ou, quoy que ce soit, ne pouvant estre sans desir: iffaut confesser qu'incontinent que cette passion vient saisir l'homme, elle l'altere et l'immue. Car le desir incessament se demeine dedens l'ame, la poignant tousjours et resveillant. Le Debat de Folie et d'Amour See Appendix 88 In this detailed textual journey through Labe's collected works, I have attempted to analyze the dramatic creation and evolution of a female subjectivity and its embodiment in the female speaking voice of one key woman writer in early modem France. My readings have suggested that the development of female subjectivity in Labe defines itself as a passionate quest for achieved internal selfhood both through authentic self-study and self-expression and through authentic connection and exchange with others in the exterior world. As such, the rise of the female subject coincides with an ongoing interrogation of the inherited models of Petrarchan poetics that privilege an exclusively male subjectivity characterized by its insistently solitary and auto-obsessive posture. Aconcluding look at Labe's texts reveals that the displacement of the self-reflexive male speaking voice and the transformation of woman from the object to the subject of erotic and artistic discourse emerge from the diachronic as well as the synchronic disposition of the 1555 163 Chapter Six volume. Some briefconsideration of each ofthese perspectives will help to synthesize both the itinerary of selfhood embarked on by the female speaker from the Epistre to the sonnets and the global organic unity through which the individual works mirror and support one another in their representations of female desire and subjectivity. . Lab6's diachronic ordering of her four major works reflects a dynamic passage that my study has already variously termed as movements from polemics to poetics, from theory to practice , and from public to private discourse. In each of these formulations , what is clear is that the broad cultural arenas evoked in the Epistre and the Debat and the social imperatives they produce work to create a space of inclusiveness in which communication with a broader male and female audience legitimates the personal and intertextual dialogues in the author's lyric poetry. Thus, the polemical strain of the volume's two opening works, although surely aimed at exposing strongly the specific problems offemale literary self-presentation, strives ultimately not toward a rupture but toward a harmonization of gender relations through an acceptance of sexual difference within a wider shared realm of human dilemmas and vicissitudes. Yet the Epistre and the Debat serve another important diachronic function in the staging of female subjectivity that the collected works enact. Labe's charged depiction of women's entrance onto the literary stage in the dedicatory letter figures the emergence of the female subject as a metaphoric process of labor, birth, and hereditary passage. Beyond the fervent rhetorical entreaty to her co-citizens to rise above their distaffs and spindles and to seize the intellectual pursuits traditionally accorded to men, Labe details the strenuous work, the arduous , but pleasure-producing travail of study, writing, rereading , and personal reflection that establishes female selfhood and creates women as subjects of their own discourse. Furthermore, in pointedly passing the literary torch to Clemence de Bourges at the end of her text, she engages the construction and validation of female selfhood as an ongoing challenge and foresees the continuing reb~rth of female subjectivity in future generations. Having thus delineated the engendering of the female subject in the Epistre, Labe proceeds to personify and allegorize it as Folie in the Debat, and to submit it to a phase of growth, 164 Conclusion testing, and evaluation throughout the text's five discours. Indeed , the charged encounter between Folie and Amour, together with th~ir ensuing trial, dramatically metaphorizes the process ofexposure and judgment that the assertion of female selfhood confronts in the largely male-dominated world. Just as Folie stands up to claim her rights as Amour's equal within the universe whose workings they share, Labe's female subject must undergo the trials ofaffirming her parity with men in the cultural hierarchy and of voicing the personal agency that her normative silencing in male discourse have effaced. Jupiter's ultimate decision accepting Folie's personhood and balancing her power struggle with Amour suggests...