Technik der (Selbst-)Klage und Funktionen des Mitleids in den Elegien der Louise Labé

Abstract

Lamentation is of utmost importance for the elegy as well as for an elegiac ‘tonality’ in poetry. A closer look at Louise Labé’s three elegies shows, however, that it is the technology of self-lamentation through which the suffering of the lyric Self, that is thematized in the elegies, is expressed in a particular way. Thereby, self-lamentation has different functions – to find comfort, to preserve the memory of the bemoaned and to receive glory through the affect-regulating, self-consolatory expression of suffering that is conveyed by the afflicted voice of the lyric Self. The specific expressivity of the (self-)lamentation excites compassion in the female-coded Model Reader and evokes practices of a compassionate community that is constituted in the extratextual realm. The asymmetrical compassion-relation overlaps also with the Petrarchist discourse. Labé’s elegies create a temporal and emotional continuum of the compassion function that extends from deplorable historical-mythological heroines over the lyric Self to the potentially lamentable group of the Dames Lionnoises and the Model Reader.