Literary and Historical Context in Ronsard's Sonnets pour Hélène

Abstract

AbstractThrough her name and position at court Hélène de Surgères brings to Ronsard’s last collection of sonnets two conflicting referential systems: a literary tradition in which, beginning with the Iliad, Helen is a figure of love and war and a more or less realistic imitation of events in French society and the court of Charles ix. Ronsard adopts a local court convention in which love for Hélène allows successful evasion of the miseries of the civil wars, but he criticizes the convention by displacing its allegorical intent—transcendence of mundane and temporal difference—with an irony that internalizes and preserves that difference. Thus the irony, in aiming to avoid the referential contexts, actually marks them as ineradicable. Instead of presenting a platonizing view of the lady, the Sonnets pour Hélène reveal in her an inescapable contradiction that also is within the poems’ je and its constructions.