Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 2013, vol. 8

The Goddess Re-described: Louise Labé’s “Diana” and its Intertexts Deborah Lesko Baker

he austere figure of Diana, classical goddess of chastity and the hunt, Tfirst immortalized by Ovid’s poetic imagination and later transposed onto the conflictive dynamics of Petrarchan love, plays a central role in the Renaissance lyric whether her presence is explicitly or implicitly invoked. As Françoise Charpentier pointed out in her contribution to a 2002 volume devoted to the myth of the goddess in sixteenth-century France, Diana’s particular importance in the vibrant literary culture of Lyon between 1540 and 1560 was facilitated by the city’s active printing com- munity, its sixteenth-century humanist revival of texts of Latin antiquity, and its geographically proximate access to apposite Italian editions, most notably Boccaccio’s Genealogy of the Gods (first published in 1474) and the first printed edition of the Canzoniere (1470).1 Charpentier goes on to highlight the fundamental struggle between the ideological imperatives of the goddess of chastity and the god of love, Amour or Cupid — both armed hunters in their own right — in three Lyonnais texts that variously engage Diana as a focal point of their amatory itinerary: Maurice Scève’s first French imitation of Petrarch’s Canzoniere, the 1544 Délie, Pernette du Guillet’s elegy 2 in her 1545 Rymes, and Louise Labé’s sonnet 19 in

1 Françoise Charpentier, “Diane Lyonnaise,” in Le mythe de Diane en France au XVI siècle, ed. Jean-Raymond Fanlo and Marie-Dominique LeGrand (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2002), 25–26. To Boccaccio’s publication date that she specifically mentions, I have added the date of the Canzoniere’s first printed edition.

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her Oeuvres complètes.2 Among these texts, the goddess’s role is far more imposing in the love sequences of Labé’s male predecessors Petrarch and Scève and in the famous elegy of her female contemporary, all of whom specifically exploit the renowned telling of the story of Diana and Actaeon in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and all of whom have received extensive critical attention to their recasting of this myth.3 My essay, in contrast, will engage the problems of identification, reversal, vision, voice, and transgression at the heart of the Diana-Actaeon myth to develop a comprehensive new reading of Labé’s sonnet 19, one highlighting its implications for a new understanding of the appropria- tion by women writers of the Petrarchan lyric tradition. Given its sole direct naming of Diana in the author’s corpus, the sonnet has remained something of a conundrum, attracting considerably less detailed critical attention than others in her sonnet sequence, both because of its osten- sibly detached tone and the enigmatic relationship it poses between the female narrator and the goddess.4 Based on a three-part structure that first

2 Charpentier summarizes succinctly the conflictive values embodied by the two deities: “Ce sont les thèmes antagonistes de la chasteté et du désir amoureux que vont exploiter les poètes autour du motif de Diane” (“It is the antagonistic themes of chastity and erotic desire that the poets will exploit in respect to the Diana motif ”; my transla- tion). Ibid., 29. 3 As Leonard Barkan points out in his groundbreaking “Diana and Actaeon: The Myth as Synthesis,” English Literary Renaissance 10:3 (1980): 317–359, although Ovid’s account is neither the first nor necessarily the most representative of the classical versions of the story, “it is the version that signals the entrance of the myth on the main stage of cultural history” (318–19), and, by extension, to Renaissance poetics. In addition to his detailed reading of the Ovidian narrative here and in The Gods Made Flesh (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), Barkin also engages its appropriation by Petrarch and Scève in his critical trajectory (“Diana and Actaeon,” 335–38; 341). The Diana-Actaeon myth in general has received extensive critical attention recently in France, not only in por- tions of the Le mythe de Diane en France au XVIe siècle referenced above, but in Hélène Cassanova-Robin’s Diane et Actéon: Eclats d’un mythe à la Renaissance et à l’âge baroque (Paris: Champion, 2003). 4 The possible relationship of Labé’s poem to Ovid’s Diana-Actaeon myth is discussed only tangentially in the following three articles: Kirk Read, “Poolside Transformations: Diana and Actaeon Revisited by French Renaissance Women Lyricists,” in Renaissance Women Writers: French Texts/American Contexts, ed. Anne Larsen and Louise Labé’s “Diana” 151

analyzes the chronological unfolding of the sonnet, then examines selected invocations of Diana in Ovid, Petrarch, Scève, and Du Guillet, and finally places these intertexts in dialogue with Labé’s poem, I will argue that son- net 19’s ingenious re-staging of the Diana-Actaeon myth exposes a critical struggle between the respective positions of the female narrator and the authoritative goddess. This struggle reveals a suggestive coherence between Labe’s unique reference to Diana and her ambivalent dialogue with social norms and with the conventional positioning of women in male lyric prac- tice.5 I begin here by quoting the sonnet in its entirety:

Diane estant en l’espesseur d’un bois, Apres avoir mainte beste assenee, Prenoit le frais, de Nynfes couronnee. J’allois resvant comme fay maintefois, Sans y penser: quand j’ouy une vois, Qui m’apela, disant, Nynfe estonnee, Que ne t’es tu vers Diane tournee? Et me voyant sans arc et sans carquois, Qu’as-tu trouvé, o compagne, en ta voye, Qui de ton arc et flesches ait fait proye?

Colette Winn (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994), 44–52; Carla Freccero, “Ovidian Subjectivities in Early Modern Lyric: Identification and Desire in Petrarch and Louise Labé,” in Ovid and the Renaissance Body, ed. Goran Stanivukovic (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 30–33; Edith Benkov, “The Pantheon Revisited: Myth and Metaphor in Louise Labé,” Classical and Modern Literature 5.1 (Fall 1984): 28–29. Other commentaries on Labé’s sonnet 19 that do not engage the Diana-Actaeon myth include Charpentier, “Diane Lyonnaise,” 35–37; Gillian Jondorf, “Petrarchan Variations in Pernette du Guillet and Louise Labé,” The Modern Language Review 71.4 (Oct. 1976): 771–72; Daniel Martin, Signe(s) d’Amante: L’agencement des Evvres de Louïse Labé Lionnoize (Paris: Champion, 1999), 290–96; Jerry Nash, “Louise Labé and Learned Levity,” Romance Notes 21.2 (1980): 227–33; and Karen Wiley, “Louise Labé’s Deceptive Petrarchism,” Modern Language Studies 11.3 (Fall, 1981): 51–60. 5 I wish to express my appreciation for the vibrant feedback I received from audi- ences at the 2012 Renaissance Society of America Conference, as well as at Harvard and Northwestern Universities where I presented preliminary versions of portions of this article. 152 EMWJ 2013, vol. 8 Deborah Lesko Baker

Je m’animay, respons je, à un passant, Et lui getay en vain toutes mes flesches Et l’arc apres: mais lui les ramassant Et les tirant me fit cent et cent bresches.6

(Diana, standing in the thicket of a wood, Having struck down many beasts of prey, Was breathing in the cool air, surrounded by Nymphs. I was wandering idly, as I often do, Lost in my thoughts: when I heard a voice That called out to me, saying, dazed Nymph, Why have you not turned to Diana? And seeing me without bow and without quiver, What did you encounter, oh friend, on your path, That has seized your bow and arrows? I replied: I attacked a man passing by, And shot all my arrows at him in vain And then my bow: but he, gathering them up And shooting them back pierced me through hundreds of times. [My translation])

Coming directly — and curiously — just after the impassioned call for reciprocated physical and spiritual love in the anthology favorite, “Baise m’encor, rebaise moy, et baise” (“Kiss Me Again”), Labé’s sonnet 19 sud- denly transports the female narrator to an isolated natural and mythologi- cal setting. In the opening three lines, the narrator first pictures Diana in a moment of calm in her typical landscape, taking some air in the dark, sheltered thicket of a wood (“l’espesseur d’un bois”) following a victori- ous day at the hunt, with many animals struck down, the verb “assenee”

6 All quotations from Labé’s works are taken from Louise Labé: Complete Poetry and Prose, edited with prose translations and critical introductions by Deborah Lesko Baker and poetry translations by Annie Finch, The Other Voice Series (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). As indicated, I have used my own — more literal — translation of sonnet 19 rather than the elegant presentation of Annie Finch in order to provide clarity in my analysis of Labé’s diction. Louise Labé’s “Diana” 153

invoking the violent force with which she is known to fell her prey. Diana is in the company of her nymphs, who, thanks to the double sense of the participial adjective “couronnée,” both protectively surround the chaste goddess during her moment of repose and offer her a queenly crown for her triumphant chase. Then, in a first instance of Labé’s artful disruption of the anticipated stanza divisions, the narrator herself rather unexpectedly enters the scene in the final line of the first quatrain, wandering in what she describes as both a presently occurring and often repeated reverie (“J’allois resvant comme fay maintefois”).7 As her entrance spills over into the second quatrain up to a pregnant caesura, she depicts that reverie as a state of profound distrac- tion (“Sans y penser”). Both Kirk Read and Carla Freccero (see note 4) view Labé’s female narrator initially as an Actaeon figure, recalling in her dreamlike peregrinations Ovid’s idly wandering hunter as he inadvertently enters Diana’s space. But unlike Actaeon, in her absorbed state the speaker does not at first “see” Diana and her entourage but initially hears a voice, “une vois,” which therefore replaces, yet echoes with its sonorous effect, the conspicuously absent verb “voir.” Indeed, it is only the reader who has seen the goddess in her hidden abode. Thus, in one ironic sense, if the nar- rator initially appears as an Actaeon figure, one might say she is a “failed” Actaeon figure for not having made the visual contact with the goddess that in this gender-turned scenario is both expected and desired. It is ambiguous as to whether the voice that calls out to the narrator is actually that of Diana (referring to herself by name in the third person) or one of Diana’s companions. In my reading I take it to be Diana herself, since in Ovid’s text the goddess verbally addresses the wandering hunter who invades her space. Moreover, given that the narrator has not thus far seen or recognized Diana, it would not be surprising that the proud god- dess would feel compelled to speak her own name. In Diana’s vocal sum- mons here, the narrator is metamorphosed and assimilated into the female

7 Wiley notes Labé’s expertise in “condensing or extending rhythms”: “The anticipated breaks between quatrains and tercets . . . as well as the [syntactical and] emo- tional points of emphasis occur where we would not expect them”; see “Labé’s Deceptive Petrarchism,” 55–57. 154 EMWJ 2013, vol. 8 Deborah Lesko Baker group as a “Nynfe estonnee,” and is asked why she has not turned or found her way to the goddess. Given the plural sixteenth-century connotations of the adjective “estonnee,” the reader might wonder whether she is simply taken aback to be interrupted in her habitual reverie by this voice out of the blue, or whether she is profoundly dazed and confounded by something else.8 The catalyst of the emotion is revealed only as the scene plays out. Although our transformed narrator appears only to hear, and not see, her interlocutor, Diana sees (here I note the participle “voyant” in line 8) that this would-be sister-huntress has no weaponry and, verbally embracing her as a “compagne” or friend, immediately questions what assumed prey she has encountered on her path that has taken her bow and arrows. Just as in the final line of the first quatrain Labé has her narrator enter the scene suddenly, so likewise she here has her speaker begin her reply abruptly in the final line of the first tercet and then extends her response through the end of the sonnet. These last four lines transform the mythological land- scape of the poem from the goddess Diana’s chaste female cult of the hunt to a male-female confrontation over which the love god, Amour, hovers and implicitly dominates. Our narrator explains that she attacked a man passing by (“un passant”), and as she recounts how she fired her entire arsenal of arrows at him in futility (“en vain”), and, in an act of further des- peration, hurled her bow, the reader is uncertain as to whether her attack is an attempt by a virginal nymph in Diana’s company to protect herself from male intrusion or by a would-be female Cupid to smite the male passerby with a violent passion. What is certain, however, is that the act backfires on the female narrator, since the man retrieves and shoots back all these arms and, in a military breach suggested in the final word “bresches,” hyperbolically pierces the narrator’s very being in “hundreds and hundreds” of places. Having now reached the end of the strange temporal loop that has led us from a lyrical overture, setting the scene in the imperfect tense, to

8 Randle Cotgrave’s 1611 Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues gives the following among his meanings for the adjective “estonne(e)”: astonished, amazed, con- founded. Louise Labé’s “Diana” 155

its interruption by the encounter with the goddess, and finally to the nar- ration of the traumatic event further back in the past, we now understand the full scope of the reference to the narrator as “Nynfe estonnee”: she has literally been stunned and broken by the force of this violation.9 Whether this retaliation figures a male love object or a real or symbolic Cupid, what we find here, somewhat surprisingly, is that at the end of the poem — and after eighteen previous sonnets in which she has either lamented her amatory crisis or sought to transcend it — the narrator returns full circle to the beginning of her experience with an invocation of the Petrarchan innamoramento (act of “falling in love”), what François Rigolot calls “son rappel de l’épisode inaugural de l’amour lauréen” (“her recall of the opening episode of [Petrarch’s] passion for Laura” [my translation]), first recounted in elegy 1 and detailed even more dramatically in elegy 3.10 Looking back, then, to the narrator’s first distracted physical entrance in lines four and five of the sonnet, we can perhaps see her there as implicitly assuming the famous stance of the Petrarchan lover of Rime sparse 35, who “solo et pen- soso” (“alone and filled with care”) evokes his iterative wanderings among nature’s depths in a futile attempt to escape Love’s destabilizing wound.11 This posture is also reasserted by Labé in sonnet 17 as a flight from soci- ety: “Je fuis la vile, et temples, et tous lieus” [“I flee from town and temple, and everywhere”] (l. 1); the speaker is in search of relief from a long-time relational obsession against which she strives “des pensers amoureux me distraire” [“to distract myself from thoughts of love”] (l. 9). But if this imitative gesture represents an ironic dramatic reversal before the account

9 In Jondorf ’s words, “we gradually learn her story, working backwards in time. . . . [The] last line explains the whole preceding narrative, but also transforms it in retrospect.” See “Petrarchan Variations,” 772. 10 François Rigolot, Louise Labé Lyonnaise, ou: La Renaissance au féminin (Paris: Champion, 1997), 74. 11 The probability of this Petrarchan allusion (as translated by Durling, see note 16) is also mentioned by Wiley, “Labé’s Deceptive Petrarchism,” 56, and Martin, Signe(s) d’Amante, 291. The melancholic posture of Petrarch’s sonnet 35 is reasserted by Maurice Scève’s lover in Délie 262: “Je vois cherchant les lieux plus solitaires, . . . /Sentant ma vie en telle inquietude” (“I go searching the most solitary places, . . . /feeling my life in such disquiet,” ll. 1, 7 [my translation]. For the source of the brief Scève quote, see note 24. 156 EMWJ 2013, vol. 8 Deborah Lesko Baker

of the erotic attack in sonnet 19, even more unexpected is the climactic staging of the Petrarchan coup de foudre — love’s violent onset — at the end of a poem ostensibly privileging the space and sign of Diana, the towering figure of resistance to male passion. In looking back now to the original representation of Diana and Actaeon in Ovid and to figurations of Diana in Petrarch, Scève, and du Guillet, I would first re-emphasize one important, if obvious, point as we measure these texts in relationship to Labé’s sonnet. The mythology of Diana is inextricable from the theme of metamorphosis, and we have already seen that Labé’s poem is likewise imbued with transformations: first, the transformation of the wandering narrator (initially reminiscent of Actaeon) into a nymph; second, the attendant transformation of Diana’s (male) visual interdiction into (female) visual invitation; and finally the transformation of the mythological cadre of Diana’s triumphant hunt into the male lover’s and Amour’s triumphant conquest. First, to summarize briefly Ovid’s famous recounting of the story of Diana and Actaeon in Book 3 of the Metamorphoses, the hunter Actaeon, wandering idly through the forest, inadvertently (“sic illum fata ferebant” [l. 176] “for so fate would have it”) discovers Diana bathing unarmed in a spring within her sacred wood, surrounded by her company of nymphs who scurry to protect her.12 As he views the naked goddess, she, in turn, furious and embarrassed, uses the pool as her weapon and throws water on the trespasser to avenge his visual transgression, exclaiming “Now you can tell that you have seen me unveiled, if you can tell at all.” (“nunc tibi me posito visam velamine narres, / sit poteris narrare, licet!”)13 The drops of water catalyze Actaeon’s metamorphosis into a panic-stricken stag, who running from the scene, sees his transformed image reflected in a stream, understands his plight, and tries to give voice to his grief, but can only utter inarticulate cries — therefore revealing the sense of the goddess’s enigmatic

12 The Latin citation and translation are taken from Frank Justin Miller’s Loeb Classical Library edition of the Metamorphoses, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 136–37. 13 While maintaining the original Latin from Miller’s edition, I have used the translation by A. D. Melville in the Oxford World’s Classics English edition of the Metamorphoses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 56. Louise Labé’s “Diana” 157 words. Unable to say who he is, he flees his hunting companions and his pursuing hounds, and his inarticulate cries turn to screams as his dogs tear his body to bits. The Ovidian myth of Diana and Actaeon thus turns on the tensions between solitary male visual transgression and a sacred, plural, female space; empowered female speech versus disempowered male speech; and specular self-recognition leading to subsequent self-fragmentation and death. Moreover, as Nancy Vickers, following Leonard Barkin, has con- vincingly argued, the story is one of “identification and reversal”: the male and female characters are aligned as hunters, but in their meeting Diana’s perception of being violated by the male gaze turns Actaeon into the most exaggerated form of the “hunted” as he is transformed into and dismem- bered as bestial prey.14 These fundamental Ovidian paradoxes, seen in the context of this identification-reversal paradigm, are central to the transpo- sition of the Actaeon-Diana myth in the Renaissance lyric from Petrarch to Labé. Turning to Petrarch, although features attributable to Diana are sug- gestively interspersed at many points throughout the Rime sparse, we see just two striking invocations of the goddess’s encounter with Actaeon, and we find, moreover, just as is the case with Labé, that Diana’s actual name only appears in the text once.15 First, in the short madrigal 52 — where

14 See Nancy Vickers, “Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme,” Writing and Sexual Difference, ed. Elizabeth Abel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 95–109, and “The Body Re-membered: Petrarchan Lyric and the Strategies of Description,” in From Mirror to Method, Augustine to Descartes, ed. John Lyons and Stephen Nichols (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England 2004), 95–104. Barkin discusses the notion of “equation” between Diana and Actaeon in “Diana and Actaeon,” 106, and The Gods Made Flesh, 45. 15 Vickers’s “Diana Described” and “The Body Re-membered” explore the two most direct instances of Petrarch’s use of Ovid’s myth in dialogue with some of the important critical responses to these two texts. In addition to the aforementioned work of Leonard Barkin, these responses by well-known Petrarch scholars include Robert Durling, Introduction to Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 27–29; John Freccero, “The Fig Tree and the Laurel: Petrarch’s Poetics,” Diacritics 5 (Spring 1975): 38–40; and Giuseppe Mazzotta, “The Canzoniere and the Language of the Self,” Studies in Philology 75 (1978): 277, 282–284. For a more recent 158 EMWJ 2013, vol. 8 Deborah Lesko Baker

Diana is named — the poet isolates a fundamental analogy, as Vickers points out, between Actaeon’s specular encounter with the naked bathing goddess and the lyric speaker’s sight of the inaccessible Laura, figured as a pastoral shepherdess about to wash her head veil:16

Non al suo amante più Diana piacque quando per tal ventura tutta ignuda la vide in mezzo de le gelide acque, ch’a me la pastorella alpestra et cruda posta a bagnar un leggiadretto velo ch’a l’aura il vago et biondo capel chiuda; Tal che mi fece, or quand’egli arde ‘l cielo, tutto tremar d’un amoroso gielo. (My emphasis)

(Not so much did Diana please her lover when, by a similar chance, he saw her all naked amid the icy waters, as did the cruel mountain shepherdess please me, set to wash a pretty veil that keeps her lovely blond head from the breeze; So that she made me, even now when the sky is burning, all tremble with a chill of love.)17

extensive study of the Diana-Actaeon myth in Petrarch, as well as Scève, see Cynthia Nazarian, “Actaeon Ego Sum: Ovidian Dismemberment and Lyric Voice in Petrarch and Maurice Scève, ” Metamorphosis: The Changing Face of Ovid in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Alison Keith and Stephen Rupp (Toronto: CRRS Publications, 2007), 199–222. Nazarian also alludes helpfully to several other critics who have sig- nificantly engaged with Petrarch’s use of the Ovidian myth: JoAnn Della Neva, Song and Countersong (Lexington, KY: French Forum 1983), 71–77; Stephen Murphy, “The Death of Actaeon as Petrarchist Topos,” Comparative Literature Studies 28:2 (1991): 137–155; and Arnold Preussner, “The Actaeon Myth in Ovid, Petrarch, Wyatt, and Sidney,” Bestia: Yearbook of the Beast Fable Society 5 (1993): 95–108. To these I would add the important work of Sara Sturm-Maddox in Petrarch’s Metamorphoses: Text and Subtext in the Rime sparse (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1985), 22–25. 16 Vickers, “Diana Described,” 102. 17 Petrarch’s texts and translations are from Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The “Rime sparse” and Other Lyrics, ed. and trans. Robert Durling (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976). Louise Labé’s “Diana” 159

Second, and more dramatically, in the final complete stanza of canzone 23, the so-called canzone of the metamorphoses, the speaker actually assimi- lates himself to Actaeon and retells the Ovidian story of Diana and the doomed hunter in the first person:

I’segui’ tanto avanti il mio desire ch’ un dì, cacciando sì com’ io solea, mi mossi, e quella fera bella et cruda In una fonte ignuda si stava, quando ‘l sol più forte ardea. Io perché d’altra vista non m’appago stetti a mirarla, ond’ella ebbe vergogna Et per farne vendetta o per celarse l’acqua nel viso co le man mi sparse. Vero dirò; forse e’ parrà menzogna: ch’i’ senti’ trarmi de la propria imago et in un cervo solitario et vago di selva in selva ratto mi trasformo, et ancor de’ miei can fuggo lo stormo. (147–160) (My emphasis)

(I followed so far my desire that one day, hunting as I was wont, I went forth, and that lovely cruel wild creature was in a spring naked when the sun burned most strongly. I, who am not appeased by any other sight, stood to gaze on her, whence she felt shame, and to take revenge or to hide herself, sprinkled water in my face with her hand. I shall speak the truth, perhaps it will appear a lie, for I felt drawn from my own image and into a solitary wandering stag from wood to wood quickly I am transformed, and still I flee the bellowing of my hounds.)

For the specific purpose of our intertextual study of Labé’s sonnet 19, it is essential to look at what Petrarch has both added to and subtracted from Ovid’s version. In both of these texts, Petrarch has significantly eroticized the visual transgression. In madrigal 52, he transforms the innocence of 160 EMWJ 2013, vol. 8 Deborah Lesko Baker

the Ovidian Actaeon’s accidental gaze by evoking the mythical hunter figuratively as Diana’s “lover,” and by attributing to his own speaker-hunter the pleasure of his vision of the “cruel” mountain shepherdess in the “burn- ing” heat of day and its oxymoronically resultant trembling “chill” of love. Likewise, in canzone 23, further accentuating the sense of his amorous “hunt,” he explicitly speaks of following his desire in excess (“I followed so far my desire”), of being unsatisfied by any sight other than this “lovely cruel wild creature,” and of hyperbolizing that glimpse in an act of trans- fixedness: “I, who am not appeased by any other sight, stood to gaze on her.” At the same time, in this riveting gaze of his beloved, Petrarch has written out of the Ovidian text the female nymphs who scream and try to form a fortress to protect their goddess, signaling the hunter’s violation. More striking still, Petrarch has silenced Diana’s own voice, removing the goddess’s doomful warning that in Ovid accompanies the water thrown on Actaeon’s face. Nor does Actaeon experience the specific moment of specular self-recognition by seeing his transformation into a stag mirrored in the stream. Rather, he experiences a moment of self-consciousness that comes from Petrarch’s knowledge of Ovid’s story. Switching to the present tense, Actaeon declares the ongoing price he will have to pay for his bla- tant, deliberate visual transgression: “I am transformed, I flee.”18 Petrarch’s speaker will continue to be enslaved and pursued by the desire to see again Diana’s forbidden image, but as Cynthia Nazarian shrewdly points out, he retains his own voice and in his own narrative averts (or at least indefinitely defers) dismemberment at the hands of his dogs.19 Indeed, in the Petrarchan speaker’s ongoing narrative throughout his poetic sequence, Nancy Vickers observes a posture in which he is simul- taneously “fearful of the price of seeing, yet to be paid, but still pleased

18 As Vickers puts it, “It is at this moment that Petrarch, with his characteristic use of an iterative present, situates his speaker. . . . The speaker is Actaeon, but more important, he is a self-conscious Actaeon.” (“Diana Described,” 99, and “The Body Re-membered,” 100). 19 In Nazarian’s words, “Actaeon survives and, all the more shockingly, narrates.” This conclusion to the Actaeon tale in canzone 23 leads her to posit that “Petrarch’s pseudo-Actaeon escapes obliteration and fatal silence by usurping the role of Ovid him- self ” (“Actaeon Ego Sum,” 207). Louise Labé’s “Diana” 161

by what he saw.” Moreover, she emphasizes that the “productive paralysis” born of this ambivalence determines a normative stance for countless lovesick poets of the Petrarchan generations.”20 Relating this stance to the male speaker’s concomitant erasure of Diana’s voice in canzone 23 and, by analogical extension, to madrigal 52, Vickers goes on to establish her well- known argument on the positioning of the female figure in Petrarchan poetics: “Silencing Diana is an emblematic gesture; it suppresses a voice, and it casts generations of would-be Lauras in a role predicated upon the muteness of its player.”21 As I will argue below in returning to Labé’s son- net 19, the Lyonnais poet challenges this conclusion: her female narrator, like her male counterpart, exposes a similarly “productive paralysis” in her coexisting allegiances to the powerful female goddess and the invincible god of love. In Maurice Scève’s 1544 volume, the beloved’s designation as Délie embraces more fully the multiple manifestations of Diana in the spheres of the heavens and the underworld. Nevertheless, she appears in several dizains in the incarnation of the chaste huntress, and it is on these specific dizains that I wish to focus. First of all, in an overarching sense, what is interesting vis-à-vis Petrarch and, by extension, Labé, is that the Ovidian text of Diana and Actaeon is never explicitly evoked in Scève’s verse. In the Délie, just as is the case with Narcissus, another Ovidian figure tortured by misfortunes of vision and voice, Actaeon is named and appears only in one of the periodic emblems in the collection, shown there being chased down by his hounds while in the midst of his transformation into a stag and accompanied by the motto Fortune par les miens me chasse.22 Yet, even

20 Vickers, “Diana Described,” 100. 21 Vickers, “Diana Described,” 108–9. 22 It is perhaps not by accident that both Actaeon and Narcissus are only named in pictorial emblems in Scève’s text: as Barkan reminds us, the stories of these two hunters are consecutive tales in Book 3 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and both involve mirror images and eventual bodily disintegration in a sacred, virginal setting. But unlike Actaeon, who has “two mirror images: Diana, who epitomizes his link to the divine, and the stag, [seen in the stream] who is his punished, transformed self,” Narcissus gazes on no external deity: his “own reflection is the vision that captures his essence and destroys him” (The Gods Made Flesh, 46–47). 162 EMWJ 2013, vol. 8 Deborah Lesko Baker

if dizain 168, which follows this emblem, treats the ungrateful reversal of allegiances that fate or fortune can inflict on the speaker and does not examine the consequences of an explicit male visual violation — thus gener- alizing Actaeon’s mythological plight — the Ovidian hunter, like Narcissus, is everywhere present in the Délie through what Cynthia Nazarian calls a “tapestry” of Actaeon-related motifs in the creation of Scève’s speaker. Among these key motifs are visual fixation, transgression, and the dynam- ics of speech and silence.23 In examining these issues in two poems where Délie is compared or assimilated to the virgin huntress, dizain 131 and dizain 327, we see that it is rather the transfixing power of her own eyes that captures would-be lovers, whereas typically Diana’s arms seize her prey. Therefore, in dizain 131, while the beasts in line 10 flee Diana, those hunted by Délie’s chaste glances persist in following her gaze:

Delia ceincte, haulte sa cotte attournée, La trousse au col, & arc, & flesche aux mains Exercitant chastement la iournée, Chasse, & prent cerfz, biches, & cheureulx maints. Mais toy, Delie, en actes plus humains Mieulx composée, & sans violentz dardz, Tu venes ceulz par tes chastes regardz, Qui tellement de ta chasse s’ennuyent; Qu’eulx tous estantz de toy sainctement ardz, Te vont suyuant, ou les bestes la fuyent. (dizain 131)

23 Nazarian, “Actaeon Ego Sum”, 208. Although in the context of Labé’s sonnet I will refer only to dizains where Délie appears as huntress or bather, insightful analyses of dizain 168 and its implicit links to the Actaeon myth have been undertaken by Murphy, “The Death of Actaeon,” 142–44, and Nazarian, “Actaeon Ego Sum,” 214, as well as by Doranne Fenoaltea, “Three Animal Images in the Délie: New Perspectives on Scève’s Use of Petrarch’s Rime,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 34 (1972): 424; and by Pierre Martin, “De Maurice Scève à Pernette du Guillet, ou le Jeu d’Actéon,” Le mythe de Diane en France, ed. Fanlo and LeGrand, 40–44. Louise Labé’s “Diana” 163

(Delia begirt, her coat worn high, Her quiver at her neck, now, and arrow in her hand, Chastely carrying out her day, Hunts, and takes many stags, hinds, and roe-bucks. But you, Delie, in acts more human Better composed, and without violent darts, You hunt with your chaste looks those Who tire so much of your chase: They are all burning in saintly manner for you, They go on following you, where the beasts flee her.)24

In contrast to the flight of the beasts from Diana, Scève’s use of the iterative present in that final line, “Te vont suyuant,” invokes a group of pilgrim-like, devoted lovers who recall the Petrarchan speaker’s ongoing pursuit to view again the forbidden lady. Even after being partially stricken by Actaeon’s curse, the lovers’ fervor for the lady transforms Petrarch’s “cruel wild crea- ture” into a figure who hunts “en actes plus humains” and “sans violentz dardz.” Building on this worshipful invocation of the huntress’s gaze, the speaker in dizain 327 narrates an ostensibly light-hearted scene in which the power of the beloved’s eyes is conjoined with the power of her voice:

Delie aux champs troussée, & accoustrée, Comme vn Veneur, s’en alloit esbatant, Sur le chemin d’amour fut rencontrée, Qui par tout va ieunes Amantz guettant: Et luy à dit, près d’elle volletant: Comment? Vas tu sans armes a la chasse? N’ay ie mes yeulx [,] dit elle, dont ie chasse, Et par lesquelz i’ay maint gibbier surpris? Que sert ton arc, qui rien ne te pourchasse, Veu mesmement que par eulx ie t’ay pris? (dizain 327)

24 Quotations from Scève’s Délie are taken from I. D. McFarlane’s edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966). Translations of these three dizains are by Peter Baker. 164 EMWJ 2013, vol. 8 Deborah Lesko Baker

(Delie in the fields, trussed up and attired, As a Hunter, going along and having fun, Encountered Love along the path, Who goes everywhere spying on young lovers: And he said to her, coming close upon: How’s this? You go unarmed to the hunt? Don’t I have my eyes, she says, with which to hunt, And with which I have surprised much game? What use is your bow, that procures you nothing, Seeing as all the same I took you with my eyes.)

Here Délie, fully dressed in hunting garb but nonchalantly walking along without weapons (“s’en alloit esbatant”), encounters winged Cupid on her path. Seemingly taken aback by the sight of the empty-handed huntress, he questions her pursuit of the chase without arms, in response to which she verbally asserts the captive force of her eyes — even on him — questioning in return the inferior power of his own bow: “Que sert ton arc, qui rien ne te pourchasse, / Veu mesmement que par eulx [mes yeulx] ie t’ay pris?”25 Her reply, extending through the final four lines of the poem, restores the Ovidian huntress’s voice elided in Petrarch and reconfirms her ability to answer the masculine challenge. Cupid’s charged mythical identity invests the surface levity of the scene with the darker power struggle between the inviolable female goddess and the indomitable god of love. If Cupid is audacious enough to stop and question the unarmed Délian huntress in dizain 327, he shows himself capable, a few poems later in dizain 335, of a much more serious transgression:

Pour la fraischeur Delie se dormoit Sur la fontaine, & l’Archier en personne, Qui dedans l’eau d’elle, que tant aymoit, Voit la figure, & aulcun mot ne sonne:

25 It is ironic that Délie here refers to what Charpentier terms the “hackneyed ama- tory metaphor” (“la métaphore éculée dans le langage amoureux”) of her ocular arrows as the weapons of her projected victory over the love god himself. (“Diane lyonnoise,” 32). Louise Labé’s “Diana” 165

Car en ce lieu sa mere il souspeçonne, Dont il se lance au fond pour la baiser. Hà, dy ie lors, pour ma Dame appaiser, Tu pleures bien cest Amour en ces eaux, Et si ne plaings le mien, qui pour se ayser, Se pert du tout en ces deux miens ruysseaulx. (dizain 335)

(Delie for its coolness went to sleep Above the spring, and the Archer himself, Saw her face, that he loved so much, In those waters, and not a word did he sound: For he suspected his mother might be in that place, So he dove in the depths to give her a kiss. Ha! I say now, to appease my Lady, It is fine for you to cry over Love in these waters, And not lament for me, who to bring some ease, Lose everything in my two streams.)

Scève now portrays Délie, for the only time in his volume, in the image of Diana seeking “fraischeur” in the fountain, echoing the “frais” that Labé’s Diana seeks in the cool air of the thicket after her hunt. Like Petrarch, Scève eschews any mention of the protective nymphs in Ovid’s text, and he departs sharply from the Ovidian model by picturing Délie actually sleeping on the fountain and announcing the intruder not as Actaeon but as Cupid himself, “l’Archier en personne.” Although rather playfully pre- sented, the violation is shocking: he gazes at the sleeping face in the water, and with no words of warning (“aulcun mot ne sonne”), he dives into the water to kiss her, performing in effect an act of ravishment. Moreover, the explanation offered by the narrator for Cupid’s act — that he believes the figure in the water to be his mother Venus — actually makes it more, rather than less, troubling, for it highlights the underlying relationship of the original Diana-Actaeon story to the “incest mechanism,” as Howard Daniel has argued: even an “accidental look” at forbidden female nudity (such as might occur between blood relatives), much less a purposeful invasion, 166 EMWJ 2013, vol. 8 Deborah Lesko Baker must be punished, just as Actaeon is punished by dismemberment.26 Ye t , there is no evocation of punishment for this Narcissus-like Cupid, who misreads the image in the water, for the poetic speaker breaks into the narrative, transforming the water that was Diana’s instrument of retalia- tion against Actaeon into the tears shed by Délie at this violation of her sanctity. These tears, in turn, blur her capacity to take pity on the veritable “rivers” of tears (“ruysseaulx”), which symbolize the suffering of the male lover, who has perhaps desired such an intimate contact — imagining him- self in the role of Cupid — but has not dared so boldly to transgress. Yet transgression there is in the speaker’s very viewing and recounting of the violation scene, and his loss of self (“se pert du tout”) in his tearful anguish suggests that the punishment of an Actaeon-like disintegration has been transferred onto him. As a final piece of the intertextual mosaic that will contribute to a re- evaluation of Louise Labé’s Diana and the Actaeon story, it is instructive to include the female Lyonnais poet long considered to be the closest real-life approximation to the multifaceted female figure of “Délie.” The posthu- mous collected Rymes (1545) of Pernette du Guillet engage in a well- known literary exchange with the male poet, whom she depicts as a beloved intellectual mentor and for whom the author’s purportedly unquestioned fidelity to her conjugal circumstances facilitates Scève’s poetic inscription of her in the chaste role of the inaccessible Diana. Like Petrarch and Labé, Du Guillet names that goddess only once in her volume in poem 43 (also known as elegy 2), in which her explicit exploitation of the Ovidian story of Diana and Actaeon — in contrast to its implicit presence in Scève and Labé — adds a striking female counterpoint to the male writings forming the backdrop of Labé’s sonnet.27 Let us first review the basic, four-stage unfolding of Du Guillet’s scene:

26 Howard Daniel, Encyclopedia of Themes and Subjects in Painting, s.v. “Actaeon” (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1971). Vickers applies Daniel’s linking of Actaeon and the incest motif to Petrarch (“Diana Described,” 273); Scève’s dramatization of this link is all the more powerful. 27 There have been a prodigious number of excellent commentaries inspired by this poem on both sides of the Atlantic, including those by Françoise Charpentier, JoAnn DellaNeva, Lance Donaldson-Evans, Philip Ford, Karen Simroth James, Ann Rosalind Louise Labé’s “Diana” 167

Combien de fois ay je en moy souhaicté Me rencontrer sur la chaleur d’esté Tout au plus pres de la clere fontaine, Où mon desir avec cil se pourmaine, Qui exercite en sa philosophie Son gent esprit. . . . (ll. 1–6)28

(Oh, how often have I longed to find Myself, when summer’s heat is most unkind, At the edge of a clear fountain pool — there My fancy takes me strolling, all aware Of one who’s [gentle mind is] focused on philosophy. . . .)29

In marked contrast to the past tense narratives that frame the incursions of the myth into Labé’s text and those of her male predecessors (with the exception of Scève’s iterative present in dizain 131), Du Guillet’s elegy por- trays the narrator’s iterative wish to wend her way to the Ovidian setting of Diana’s fountain spring as she wanders gradually away from the detached company of her male beloved, who is distracted by his own philosophical musings.

Jones, Lawrence Kritzman, Pierre Martin, Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani, Stephen Murphy, T. A. Perry, Kirk Read, Josiane Rieu, Colette Winn, and Cathy Yandell. Given my discus- sion of Du Guillet’s text specifically in respect to Labé, I will give full citations only for the essays to which I specifically refer in my own reading. For full bibliographical citations on all these contributions, see the notes to the poem in Karen Simroth James’s and Marta Finch’s new bilingual edition of Du Guillet’s Complete Poems, The Other Voice Series (Toronto: CRRS Publications, 2010), 268–69. To her compilation I would add the essay by Jondorf; see note 8. 28 Quotations from Du Guillet’s poem are taken from James’s and Finch’s 2010 edition. As James explains in her introduction, whereas most twentieth-century editions of the Rymes follow V-L Saulnier’s extensive 1944 study grouping and numbering of the poems within each genre, she has chosen to follow the 2006 Droz edition, which simply numbers the poems consecutively from beginning to end (69). Thus, the double identifi- cation of the text as poem 43 or elegy 2. 29 I have used Marta Finch’s beautiful translations from the 2010 edition, with very slight modifications (indicated in brackets) to clarify my excerpted quotations. 168 EMWJ 2013, vol. 8 Deborah Lesko Baker

Then, in a stunning move to attract her beloved’s attention and incite his response, she imagines jumping into the pool fully naked and serenad- ing him with a song sung to the accompaniment of her lute. Projecting his desired (and desiring) approach should his gaze result in an attempt to touch her, she would throw a handful of water onto his eyes and face, the charged gesture that identifies her with Diana:

. . . Et toute nue en l’eau me gecterois: Mais je vouldrois lors quant, et quant avoir Mon petit Luth accordé au debvoir Duquel ayant congneu, et pris le son J’entonnerois sur luy une chanson Pour un peu veoir, quelz gestes il tiendroit: Mais si vers moy il s’en venoit tout droict, Je le lairrois hardyment approcher: Et s’il vouloit, tant soit peu, me toucher, Lui gecterois (pour le moins) ma main pleine De la pure eau de la clere fontaine, Lui gectant droict aux yeulx, ou à la face. (ll. 16–27)

(. . . Then full-naked into the water leap. Oh yes, and I should like to have close by My precious Lute, well tuned to gratify: Familiar with its sounds, I would erelong Begin to sing for him a tender song — To see, in part, what his response might be, And if he made a beeline straight toward me, Boldly, I would allow him to draw near; But if he seemed to desire even a mere Touch of me — for a start, I’d fling at him A handful of pure, clear water from the brim Of the spring — into his face, his eyes.)

This flight of fancy then goes into overdrive as she explicitly assumes Diana’s identity and wills her beloved’s transformation into Actaeon. However she Louise Labé’s “Diana” 169

rewrites the Ovidian story of his fate: rather than dismemberment and death as a stag (“cerf ”), he would face enslavement as her loyal servant (“serf ”), a subversion of the classical Diana’s power that transforms the narrator into a new Diana, an all-powerful goddess in her own right:

O qu’alors eust l’onde telle efficace De le pouvoir en Acteon muer, Non toutesfois pour le faire tuer, Et devorer à ses chiens, comme Cerf: Mais que de moy se sensist estre serf, Et serviteur transformé tellement, Qu’ainsi cuydast en son entendement, Tant que Dyane en eust sur moy envie, De luy avoir sa puissance ravie. Combien heureuse, et grande me dirois! Certes deesse estre me cuyderois. (ll. 28–38)

(. . . Oh, if that splash could have the effect Of transforming him into Actaeon! Not, however, that he be leapt upon As a stag — killed and devoured by his own hounds, But that he feel, through me, within those bounds, So changed — like a dear and loyal servant — And hold that conviction in thought so fervent, That Diana would know how envy devours, Feeling I’d deprived her of her powers. How happy I would think myself, how fine! — Surely, I might call myself Divine — A goddess!)

At this climactic point, however, the fantasy gives way to misgivings and ultimate rejection, as the female narrator questions the prudence of provoking the anger and retaliation of Apollo and the Muses by usurp- ing the beloved male poet’s deferential devotion that properly belongs to them as divine patrons of poetry. Her final imperatives insist that the 170 EMWJ 2013, vol. 8 Deborah Lesko Baker self-empowering vision be dispelled and that the beloved be freed to focus on his own poetic powers:

Mais pour me veoir contente à mon desir, Vouldrois je bien faire un tel desplaisir A Apollo, et aussi à ses Muses De les laisser privees, et confuses D’un, qui les peult toutes servir à gré Et faire honneur a leur hault choeur sacré? Ostez, ostez, mes souhaitz, si hault poinct D’avecques vous, il ne m’appartient point. Laissez le aller les neuf Muses servir, Sans se vouloir dessoubz moy asservir, Soubz moy, qui suis sans grace, et sans merite. Laissez le aller, qu’Apollo je ne irrite Le remplissant de Deité profonde, Pour contre moy susciter tout le Monde. . . . (ll. 39–52)

(But for my wish to reach full measure Would I want, really, to cause such displeasure To Apollo? also to his Muses, left Confounded with uncertainty — bereft Of one who’d gladly serve them for all time, Honoring their sacred chorus, so sublime? Away! away! O lofty longings, fall Away from me — he’s not mine after all. Let him go to the nine Muses deferring, Not some service under me preferring — Under me, of grace and merit hollow. Let him go, lest I provoke Apollo, Filling him with Divinity unfurled, To raise against me the entire World. . . .)

To synthesize, we see that Du Guillet’s inscription of her Diana-Actaeon scene in the self-protective conditional mode is immediately associated Louise Labé’s “Diana” 171

with the problem of transgression, both in the figuration of the female narrator’s fantasy and in the striking departure from her male models.30 She removes the circle of nymphs who so loudly safeguard Diana’s chastity in the Ovidian setting but exchanges them for the silent oversight of Apollo, the god of poetry and Diana’s brother, and another female collective, his Muses, both of whom, as we will see, play an ambivalent role similar to the company of nymphs in Labé’s sonnet. Indeed, Du Guillet’s Diana figure, as she visually follows from a distance the discursive wanderings of her pre- occupied poet-beloved, would appear at first to have no need for defense against male intrusion, being “escorted” by the virtuous purity accorded to her by these divine overseers: “. . . ains Bien accompaignee / D’honnesteté, que Vertu a gaignee / A Apollo, Muses, et Nymphes maintes. . . [ll. 9–11] (“Rather, escorted / By Integrity — which Virtue from assorted / Nymphs, from Apollo, and the Muses won — ”). But on some level psychically unsatisfied by her beloved’s distrac- tion, she wishfully metamorphoses into the Ovidian and Petrarchan Diana — but literally inviting the return of the male gaze in what JoAnn DellaNeva and Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani have called the “exhibitionism” of her seductive, naked serenade, an un-veiled expression of her own sen- sual desire.31 Du Guillet’s “desiring” Diana not only transgresses the code of chastity of the Ovidian goddess, as does Labé’s narrator, in her admission of her failed seduction, but her vocal articulation of that desire, as with Labé,

30 Virtually all the aforementioned commentators of this poem address the cen- trality of the conditional mode as a strategy permitting the assertion of both the female narrator’s sensual desire and her powers of self-expression, including the power to “rewrite” the Diana-Actaeon myth in what Ann Rosalind Jones calls “an extraordinary fan- tasy of gender transgression.” See “Surprising Fame: Renaissance Gender Ideologies and Women’s Lyric,” The Poetics of Gender, ed. Nancy Miller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 82. Jones elaborates further on the implications of this fantasy in her classic The Currency of Eros: Women’s Love Lyric in Europe 1540–1620 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 100–3. 31 See JoAnn DellaNeva, “Mutare/Mutatus: Pernette Du Guillet’s Actaeon Myth and the Silencing of the Poetic Voice,” Women in French Literature, ed. Michel Guggenheim (Saratoga, CA: Anma Libri, 1988), 50, and Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani, “Parole d’Echo? Pernette au miroir des Rymes,” L’Esprit Créateur 30.4 (Winter 1990): 68. 172 EMWJ 2013, vol. 8 Deborah Lesko Baker

undercuts the typical silence of the lady in Petrarchan poetics theorized by Nancy Vickers, thus suggesting, at least temporarily, her unwillingness to conform to the mute role that the male lovers of the Canzoniere and the Délie had assigned to her.32 Moreover, as her fantasy moves to its apex, Du Guillet’s narrator lays claim to changing the myth of Actaeon and Diana itself. Her will to enslave the male poet-beloved as her servant, rather than sentence him to death as a stag, reverses the female power dynamic: the heretofore omnipotent goddess is placed in a subservient position of “envy” in face of the newly-seized divine ascendancy of Du Guillet’s Diana figure. This ascendancy is based, as Colette Winn would have it, on a “superior- ity” won by the transformative play on words between “cerf ” and “serf.”33 The phonological equivalence of the two terms underscores their shared semantic association with the destabilization of both authority (whether social or lyric) and voice (whether literal or poetic).34 Yet at this very moment of imagined celestial ascendancy, the narrator starts actively to unravel her own fantasy, going so far as to diminish her own stance to one “qui suis sans grace, et sans merite” (l. 49) (“one who is of grace and merit hollow”). On one level, this questioning of her usurpation of the poet-beloved’s “service” to the nourishers of his inspiration, Apollo and the Muses, and her calling for the release both of her would-be “serf ” and of her own longings seem gestures of magnanimous sacrifice for his

32 When Délie restores the Ovidian Diana’s voice elided by Petrarch in dizain 327, her interlocuter is not the Scevian speaker but the love god over whom she claims the upper hand in their power struggle. 33 “Le procès du même et de l’autre; Pernette du Guillet et le mythe ovidien de Diane et Actéon,” Les Représentations de l’Autre; du Moyen Age au XVIIe siècle, ed. Evelyne Berriot-Salvadore (Saint-Etienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Etienne, 1995), 265. 34 Much has been made of Du Guillet’s appropriation of what Barkin reminds us is the “ancient pun of cervus and servus” (The Gods Made Flesh, 330). See the remarks by DellaNeva (“Pernette du Guillet’s Actaeon Myth,” 51–52); Donaldson-Evans, “The Taming of the Muse: The Female Poetic Voice in Pernette du Guillet’s Rymes,” Pre-Pléïade Poetics, ed. Jerry Nash (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1985), 94; Lawrence Kritzman, “Pernette du Guillet and a Voice of One’s Own,” The Rhetoric of Sexuality in the Literature of the French Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 25–26; and Winn, “Le procès du même et de l’autre,” 270. Louise Labé’s “Diana” 173 artistic well-being — and even an admirable gesture of self-control. Yet on another level, these rhetorical strategies reflect an awareness of how transgressive the fulfillment of her fantasy would be in terms of both the social and the literary codes governing the roles of sixteenth-century women and what Jones calls “their injunction to silence and invisibility.”35 Indeed, that same Apollo and those same Muses who gently chaperoned the narrator in her pastoral foray with the beloved are also the figures of male authority and female allegiance to that authority. They might cen- sure her for using the site of Diana’s sacred fountain, first for displaying and expressing the sexual desire that opposes the goddess, and then for appropriating her identity to rewrite the Actaeon story that powerfully upholds her chaste dominion. Finally, despite the indelible potency of Du Guillet’s hypothetical scene, the ultimate refusal to rewrite the myth — the implicit, if strategic, admission that her new Diana is a “failed” Diana, even when told under the protective guise of fantasy — is necessary to guard against Apollo’s wrath, which might otherwise “raise against [her] the entire World,” threatening the author ironically with a symbolic version of Actaeon’s hunted fate.36

How, finally, can we further relate these observations concerning identification, reversal, vision, voice, and transgression in Ovid’s Diana and Actaeon myth and their interpolations in Petrarch, Scève, and Du Guillet to the brief, unique staging of the narrator’s encounter with the goddess in Labé’s sonnet 19? As both Read and Freccero note, Labé’s text begins by following the Ovidian model of situating Diana among her nymphs, that is,

35 Jones, “Surprising Fame,” 79. For a detailed overview of the social and literary codes under which early modern women lived and wrote, see the first section of Jones’s article (74–81) and chapter one of The Currency of Eros (11–35). 36 As Karen James argues, the specter of censure does not efface the vibrant expres- sion of Du Guillet’s sensual and poetic desire: “The poet may be concerned about public censure of a woman who dares to envision such power for herself, hence the claim of humility in line 49 and the recognition of the importance of public opinion in line 52. Despite these claims, however, the vision of power remains.” See “On veult responce avoir: Pernette du Guillet’s Dialogic Poetics,” A Dialogue of Voices: Feminist Literary Theory and Bakhtin, ed. K. Hohne and H. Wussow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 179. 174 EMWJ 2013, vol. 8 Deborah Lesko Baker

in a plural female space into which the distracted, Actaeon-like, female nar- rator enters. In addition, Labé follows Ovid in empowering Diana’s voice, although the goddess’s vengeful prediction of Actaeon’s doom becomes instead an ostensibly sympathetic verbal gesture toward the narrator. In calling out to her as “Nynfe estonnee” in line 6, the goddess thus identifies her with the group at large and, in addressing her in line 9 as “compagne,” indicates that she is welcomed as a “friend” in the female sisterhood. The re-framing of Diana’s voice within the restored Ovidian set- ting of surrounding nymphs marks a significant departure from the more distant “overseeing” presence of the Muses and nymphs in Du Guillet’s elegy in which Diana’s actual presence is erased. This departure reflects a crucial difference of positioning between the two Lyonnais women writers whose works were brought out by the same publishing house of Jean de Tournes just ten years apart. As Karen James and Kirk Read have documented, Lyonnais humanist Antoine de Moulin’s preface to the 1545 Rymes, addressed to the “Ladies of Lyon,” offers an account of how Du Guillet’s personal writings were found in disarray and shown to him by her husband after her premature death. However, Labé’s own preface to her 1555 Oeuvres complètes, addressed to her female Lyonnais compatriot Clémence de Bourges, attests to her complicity in their publication and to her assumption of a public role championing education and self-expression for women.37 In contrast to the private pose maintained by Du Guillet in

37 In referring to “ce petit amas de rymes (“this little bundle of rhymes”), Antoine de Moulin describes how he was moved to share “ce peu de commencement, que son affec- tionné mary a trouvé parmy ses brouillars en asses povre ordre, comme celle, qui n’estimoit sa facture estre encor digne de lumiere (‘this meager beginning that her devoted husband found in rather poor order among her scattered papers, as one who did not yet consider her work to be worthy of publication’ [trans. K. James]” (James and Finch, eds., Complete Poems, 84–85). As James’s introduction notes, “the presence of a grief-stricken, devoted husband would effectively forestall critics inclined to spread ugly rumors about a woman writing love poems (. . .) to a man other than her husband” (13). On the other hand derogatory public reaction would not be so easily forestalled by Labé’s dedicatory letter and verse, which, in Read’s words “betray the spirit of a woman conscious and proud of her publication” (44)–a body of work that “transcends the private realm of a concealed literary correspondence and takes on the polemics and the risks of a woman’s public voice” (52). Louise Labé’s “Diana” 175

her poetic dialogue with Scève, the notion of active female solidarity is cru- cial to Labé’s social ethos. Indeed, Diana’s address to the narrator in sonnet 19 as “compagne” recalls Labé’s dedicatory letter, where she first uses the term to suggest the partnership role that she hopes women will be able to play alongside men in public and private spheres: “ne devons nous estre dedaignees pour compagnes, tant es afaires domestiques que publiques” (“we should not be scorned as partners, in domestic as in public affairs”). She goes on to insist emphatically that women must “spur one another on” to seek equal intellectual footing with men: “nous faut il animer l’une l’autre à si louable entreprise.”38 Such solidarity is also central to Labé’s personal ethos. In the second part of her letter, she urges women to give voice to their thoughts and feelings through writing, since this is a more a dependable and permanent source of satisfaction than other sensual pleasures — what she calls “les autres voluptés.” She then puts this theory into poetic practice in her pleas to her female audience for compassion and mutual support in the face of love’s trials, most famously in her first elegy:

Dames, qui les lirez, De mes regrets avec moy soupirez, Possible, un jour je feray le semblable, Et ayderay votre voix pitoyable. (ll. 43–46)

(Oh Women who read these words, Come sigh with me for the sorrows you have heard And maybe one day I’ll do the same for you, Helping your pitiful voices to sound more true.)

As we keep this plea in mind, Diana’s vocal summons in sonnet 19 thus sets up a positive preliminary identification of the narrator with her coterie. This leads Kirk Read to propose that the role of Diana and her community of nymphs in this poem “speaks to the privilege of female community and its power” and “may, in an important way be read as emblematic of the author’s desired and often directly summoned community of Lyonnais

38 “Dedicatory Letter,” Complete Poetry and Prose, ed. Lesko Baker, 42–43. 176 EMWJ 2013, vol. 8 Deborah Lesko Baker

women contemporaries.” He goes on to posit that the narrator’s solicita- tion by Diana and her nymphs becomes the textual inscription of a kind of “utopian vision” for the relationship that Labé would wish to cultivate with her female public.39 There is much appeal in this rich interpretation. I am, however, drawn ultimately to view Labé’s textual inscription here through a less positive lens. For there is an important issue and reversal in Diana’s vocal summons to the narrator in lines 7, 9, and 10. The goddess must call her, because the would-be nymph, isolated from the group and lost in her yet unexplained distraction — a distraction materially emphasized by its odd placement in the separation between the first two stanzas — does not see her and her troupe, as she might be expected to, or as she “ought to” in Carla Freccero’s words.40 This sense of expectation — and perhaps puzzle- ment — is raised by Diana’s interrogative posture, recalling the forceful stance of the huntress Délie in Scève’s dizain 327. She poses two questions: why have you not turned toward Diana? and what have you found on your path that made you lose your arms, the emblems of your allegiance to the female group? So, whereas in Ovid and Petrarch the male hunter Actaeon’s seeing Diana constitutes his transgression, here there is an implicit sense that the narrator’s not seeing, or at least not seeking to find her way to Diana and her supportive entourage, is itself a transgression. Similarly, Du Guillet’s usurpation of the sacred fountain to subvert the goddess’s chaste, austere identity could be seen as an equivalent violation of proper female decorum — one that she defuses by its inscription, and then renunciation, in fantasy — a fantasy in which the “real” Diana never appears. In the con- text of the actual encounter with the goddess, as Labé’s narrator describes it, Diana’s interrogation could therefore be taken not so much as a compas- sionate gesture reaching out to a lost member of her female group but as an indirect recrimination for the narrator’s divagation from her path and the sisterhood. Diana’s second question, moreover, anticipates the power- ful reversal described in the final lines of the poem: the narrator’s bow and arrows, instead of pursuing prey have become prey, just as she herself

39 Read, “Poolside Transformations,” 48–49, 51. 40 Freccero, “Ovidian Subjectivities,” 31. Louise Labé’s “Diana” 177

has been transformed, like Actaeon, from huntress to hunted. In contrast, Du Guillet hints at but avoids this metaphorical transformation by her concluding acquiescence to conventional male and female authority and by the subjugation of her own expression to that of her poet-beloved. At the end of her poem, unlike Ovid’s Actaeon, who loses his capacity to speak, and unlike Du Guillet’s narrator, who displaces the importance of her own speech, Labé articulates through her narrator this reversal (from huntress to hunted) by re-telling the coup de foudre, in which Amour’s counterattack renders the narrator powerless and supplants Diana’s pri- macy. This response, which reveals what she has seen and later experi- enced, contains several subtle features that contribute to the ambivalence between support and disapproval noted in Diana’s questioning and that result in anxiety in the voice of the speaker in respect to the threat of nega- tive judgment — the same anxiety heard in the poet’s various lyric pleas to the collective of Lyonnais women.41 First, as an effect of the second instance of Labé’s destabilizing the anticipated stanza divisions, a sense of malaise accompanies the unexpected start of the speaker’s reply in the final line of the first tercet. She seems almost to interrupt, perhaps a bit nervously, the goddess’s second question: “Je m’animay, respons je, à un passant.” Here the verb “animer,” used so spiritedly to evoke reciprocal female encouragement in my earlier brief quote from the dedicatory letter, is repeated in its less common reflexive form and sense, indicating the speaker’s solitary attack and her separation from the group. One is struck by the ambiguity of this attack, since as already noted earlier, it could reflect either self-protection against male violation, demonstrating allegiance to the cult of Diana, or an attempt to inflame a man with passion, demonstrating a defection to the cult of Venus and Cupid. Furthermore, the use of the term “passant” is similarly vague: is it an unknown man, is it a long-known object of the nar- rator’s desire, or is it the love god himself, preparing for his counterattack,

41 See François Rigolot, “Louise Labé et les ‘Dames Lionnoises’: Les Ambiguités de la Censure,” Le Signe et le Texte: Etudes sur l’Ecriture au XVIe Siècle en France, ed. Lawrence Kritzman (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1990), 13–25; Ann Rosalind Jones, The Currency of Eros, 173–77; and Deborah Lesko Baker, The Subject of Desire: Petrarchan Poetics and the Female Voice in Louise Labé (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1996), 98–107. 178 EMWJ 2013, vol. 8 Deborah Lesko Baker

already recounted in elegy 3 with the same force of physical rupture against the armed female speaker-warrior who says: “La bresche faite, entre Amour en la place” [“The breach now made, Love enters in”] (l. 65)? Might the speaker want to preserve this ambiguity, at least in her confrontation with the goddess, so as not to provoke judgment that she has betrayed Diana for Amour? Moreover, in the final tercet, where she begins each line rather breathlessly with the polysyndeton “Et, Et, Et,” she clearly seeks sympathy from her female interlocutor by stressing the utter vulnerability of her posi- tion. The futile gesture in which she flings not only her arrows but also, as an almost comically pitiable afterthought, her bow facilitates the man’s very counterattack. At the same time, that charged polysyndeton may suggest, despite the narrator’s courageous retelling, the menacing return of inarticulate sounds, an evacuation of voice in which the beginnings of punishment for Actaeon’s transgression play under the surface of the text. The “bresche” opened by Amour in elegy 3 has now been multiplied into the “cent et cent bresches” of the final line of sonnet 19. Might this multi- plicity of wounds figured as the very tearing apart of her body suggest, too, as Edith Benkov has proposed, that the narrator has assimilated a measure of Actaeon’s fate? Although, like Petrarch’s speaker, she lives to tell about it, she is punished both for what she has not seen (Diana and her company) and for what she has seen (the male passant, Cupid’s avatar) and then seeks to “overpower” — rather like what Cupid sees and tries to possess in Scève’s dizain 331 but without the attendant punishment.42 In this light the narrator’s transgression could thus be viewed as dou- ble: not seeing or pursuing the path to Diana and her company and seeing and pursuing the path of Love. If what I have called the ironically “failed” Actaeon figure of the narrator at the beginning of the poem, oblivious as she is to Diana, incurs a certain Actaeon-like destiny at the end of the poem as the huntress who failed to conquer the “beast” (indominable Love), she likewise represents the image of a “failed” Diana, enacting the ultimate uncrowning of the “crowned” goddess (l. 3). In that final abrogation of

42 Edith Benkov, “The Pantheon Revisited: Myth and Metaphor in Louise Labé,” Classical and Modern Literature 5.1 (Fall 1984): 29. Louise Labé’s “Diana” 179 filiation with Diana, the reciprocal, mirror-like gestures of her attack on the male passerby and his counterattack make her recognize, like Actaeon, her own identity: not of the conventional male speaker mired in the ten- sion between desire and fear but of a woman who, although conquered by love, will not hesitate to pursue love in return. The un-Petrarchan lady hinted at by Du Guillet in her hypothetical undoing of the traditional Diana, but now viscerally revealed in Labé’s sonnet 19, leaves the author vulnerable and exposed to the celestial standard bearers of her lyric tradi- tion and to the arena of public opinion. With the narrator’s articulation and recognition of who she is, filtered through the various reversals of her relationship to Actaeon and the chaste goddess, the poem ends, the voice of the questioning Diana falls silent, and one is left to wonder if in this silence there is censure, recalling, though in contrast to, the goddess’s verbal vindictiveness in Ovid. This silent censure is analogous to the unspoken, anticipated one that Labé fears and tries to avert from her female readers elsewhere in her verse, most trenchantly, perhaps in her concluding sonnet 24’s renowned opening imperative: “Ne reprenez, Dames, si j’ai aymé” (l. 1) (“Do not reproach me, Sisters, that I have loved”). Of course, the mythological figure of Diana will remain the hardest to convince of Amour’s omnipotence and of the compassion-worthy vul- nerability even of those who purport to follow her, and the narrator would not issue such imperatives to the goddess of virginity and chastity. But it is, I think, in the pregnant space of Diana’s closing silence, coming on the tails of Labé’s most forceful rejection of the male Petrarchan paradigm of love as transgression in sonnet 18, that we can predict not only the god- dess’s authoritative censure but the narrator’s ongoing apprehension in her ambivalent struggle for social and amatory legitimation. And yet, there is a profound divergence here from the Petrarchan male speaker’s conflicted struggle between the fascination and repulsion provoked by his desire, the struggle that gives birth to the dominating lyric model founded, as we have seen Nancy Vickers argue, on the valorization of the ever-suffering male lover at the expense of the erasure of female speech. Rather, Louise Labé’s subtle depiction in sonnet 19 of her own anxieties in the arenas of 180 EMWJ 2013, vol. 8 Deborah Lesko Baker heterosexual love and gender solidarity transcends the limits of this model by at once restoring the authoritative voice of the goddess Diana to reassert the call for allegiance among women and by empowering the voice of the female speaker to narrate the vulnerabilities of her own erotic crisis.