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Celebrating Love, Desire, and Melancholia: The Sonnets of Louise Labé

As Ann Rosalind Jones has observed, “To be a woman writer at all during the sixteenth century was to be an exception” (“City Women” 299). Louise Labé, born circa 1520 in Lyons (–1566), employed her intellectual faculties and physical resources to change these circumstances for her female friends and readers. Labé’s writings, and her sonnets in particular, can be interpreted as a personal voyage and a journal in which she intends to illustrate and demonstrate how to love, desire, and mourn and, most importantly, how to write about it. Women can cross the boundaries of reading, into the new world of writing: they can become authors themselves and express their feelings and desires, including their most hidden erotic yearnings, which should operate as the inspirational and generational mechanism that produces written and, therefore, more lasting words. Labé’s sonnet sequence is an invitation to enter the sphere of her personal and intimate world of love and desire, and it represents the writing where the narrator best and most completely exemplifies her intentions, and in which poetry is at its finest. The sonnets can indeed be studied as a microcosm of Labé’s poetics, in which the three major themes, love, desire and melancholia, are diversely expressed at length and with passionate language. The sonnet sequence is also the