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

This article broaches what can sometimes be seen as the suppression of the female voice, sometimes the repression of the feminine. To address these matters involves the reconsideration of the political discourse that pervades education and educational research. This article is an attempt to disclose inequity in apparently equitable space, through the acknowledgment of the voice of disequilibrium. It proposes to re-place the subject of philosophy, and the subject of woman, through an alternative idea of the feminine voice in philosophy. It tries to reconfigure the female voice without negating its fated biological origin and traits, and yet avoiding the confining of thought to the constraints of gender divides. In terms of education, it shall argue for the conversation of justice as a way of cultivating the feminine voice in philosophy: as the voice of disequilibrium. This is an occasion of mutual destabilization and transformation of man and woman, crossing gender divides, and preparing an alternative route to political criticism that not only reclaims the rights of women but releases the thinking of men and women, laying the way for a better, more pluralist, and more democratic politics. The feminine voice can find a way beyond the dominance of instrumental rationality and calculative thinking in the discourse on equity itself. And it can, one might reasonably hope, have an impact on the curriculum of university education.

Download Full-text

Louise Labé

Renaissance and Reformation ◽

10.1093/obo/9780195399301-0104 ◽

2013 ◽

Author(s):

Kirk D. Read

Keyword(s):

Woman Writer ◽

French Renaissance ◽

Social Conventions ◽

Feminine Voice ◽

Women's Participation ◽

Humanist Education ◽

The Subject ◽

Louise Labe ◽

Robust Evidence ◽

Poetic Work

Louise Labé (c. b. 1522–d. 1566) is the most well-known and celebrated woman writer of non-noble birth from the French Renaissance. While her published work (Œuvres, 1555) is modest in length, the variety of genres she employs (epistle, sonnet, elegy, prose dialogue), the robust evidence of her proto-feminist vocation, her strength of voice, and her mastery of Petrarchan and Neoplatonic conventions have made of her a hugely important figure in the literature of this period. Labé was born in the early 1520s to a family of wealthy rope makers in Lyon, a city at the crossroads of the burgeoning cultural Renaissance given its situation between Paris and Italy. Daughter of Pierre Charly and second wife Étiennette Roybet who died shortly after Labé’s birth, Louise received an uncommonly thorough humanist education, most probably in a convent setting (Le couvent de la Déserte), where it is conjectured she may have been sent by her very young stepmother. The volume that Labé published with one of the premier printing houses of her day (Jean de Tournes) offers a stunning trove of evidence in both prose and poetry of a female writer’s negotiation of the literary and social conventions that challenged learned women of this time. The Œuvres are prefaced by the epistolary dedication to the young Lyonnais noblewoman, Clémence de Bourges, a manifesto for women’s participation in letters wherein she implores the ladies of Lyon to look above their distaffs and join the writer’s enterprise. This call to writing is followed by a much lengthier but no less fiercely gendered Débat de Folie et d’Amour (Debate of folly and love), a mythological play that enacts many of the epistle’s issues in allegorical form. Following the debate are three elegies and a sonnet cycle of twenty-four poems, all manifesting a deep engagement with contemporary literary conventions as told in a consciously feminine voice: In her poetic work Labé inscribes on several occasions her regional sisterhood (ô Dames Lionnoises). Labé’s final sonnet (and final words in the Œuvres) serves as both an entreaty and an apology to the women she invites into her literary project. On the very next page begins the inscription of twenty-four homages to her by male contemporaries, an insurance policy of sorts, against the tide of scandal and criticism attached to her work and reputation. Their success continues to be the subject of some debate, as Louise Labé has endured centuries of both criticism and praise, shifting most dramatically in 2006 with the proposition that her works were not at all hers but cooked up by a clever male collaborative. Such is the legacy of a powerful woman writer at odds with 16th-century social and literary conventions and norms of gender.

Download Full-text

Memory of a Speaker's Voice: Reaction Time to Same- or Different-voiced Letters

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology ◽

10.1080/14640747408400381 ◽

1974 ◽

Vol 26 (1) ◽

pp. 1-7 ◽

Cited By ~ 34

Author(s):

Ronald A. Cole ◽

Max Coltheart ◽

Fran Allard

Keyword(s):

Reaction Time ◽

Distinctive Feature ◽

Voice Quality ◽

Reaction Times ◽

Auditory Memory ◽

Female Voice ◽

Feature Similarity ◽

The Subject ◽

Letter Names ◽

Different Response

Subjects were presented with a sequence of two letters, each letter spoken in either a male or female voice. On each trial, the subject was required to indicate, as quickly as possible, whether the two letters had the same name. Reaction times (RTs) were faster for letters spoken in the same voice for both “same” and “different” responses, even when letters were separated by 8 s. These results are incompatible with the notion of physical and name codes in auditory memory since a “different” response should always be based on a comparison of letter names and should not be influenced by voice quality. It was also found that RTs were not influenced by the phonemic distinctive feature similarity of the letters.

Download Full-text

"Pardon me, but your teeth are in my neck": Giambattista Marino, Claudio Monteverdi, and the bacio mordace

Journal of Musicology ◽

10.1525/jm.2004.21.2.175 ◽

2004 ◽

Vol 21 (2) ◽

pp. 175-200 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Massimo Ossi

Keyword(s):

Female Voice ◽

First Person ◽

Claudio Monteverdi ◽

Female Speaker ◽

Giambattista Marino ◽

The Subject

Claudio Monteverdi's "Eccomi pronta ai baci" presents an odd pairing of a first-person female voice with a three-voice low male ensemble; in addition, the text, by Giambattista Marino, deals with the subject of the "bacio mordace" [biting kiss], and the female speaker invites her lover to kiss her but warns him against biting her. He of course betrays her, and the poem closes with her outraged complaint and vow never to kiss him again. The combination of text, singing voices, and expressive qualities invoked in the setting suggests that Monteverdi went beyond the conceit of Marino's madrigal in exaggerating the comic and parodistic (in the non-musicological sense of the word) aspects of the situation. In this essay, I explore the background of the kiss imagery, focusing specifically on the "bacio mordace" as an expression of "lover's furor" in Classical and Renaissance sources. I then relate the particular conceit of Marino's poem to Emanuele Tesauro's analysis of the dynamics of literary comedy: the device of decettione [deception or reversal] as part of the ridicolo [comedy] and its attendant burle [pranks]. Finally, I offer a reading of Monteverdi's madrigal in terms of Tesauro's definitions, in which I argue that the setting interjects an extra level of interpretation between the poet and the audience. This musical "filter" introduces new ambiguity into the poem's already equivocal situation, expanding its comic aspects.

Download Full-text