Pleberio's Lament for Melibea and the Medieval Elegiac Tradition

Abstract

The final act of La Celestina begins by presenting to the reader a picture of Melibea's mother, Alisa, still unaware of her daughlter's suicide. Pleberio, the father, enters grief-stricken. He has not only witnessed Melibea's act of self-destruction; he has listened to her last words, and he has questioned her servant, Lucrecia. He knows by this time all that the reader knows about the love that existed between Calisto and Melibea, and the fatal intervention in that love affair of Celestina and her cohorts. Alisa asks her husband the cause of his grief. Instead of recounting the events, he plunges into the long final monologue which so beautifully expresses his anguish. Pleberio's lament has been under fire in recent years. Professor Marcel Bataillon, in La Celestine selon Fernando de Rojas (Paris, 1962), finds the ending artificiel 'a notre humble avis. In insisting with Gallic clarity on the un-Spanish clarity of Rojas' didactic purpose he is bound to reject the concluding scene as illogical. Since Rojas aimed at demonstrating the way in which unrestrained sexual love spread disorder to the whole of the society in which it occurred, it seems absurd to Bataillon that the final words should condone the illicit love, and cast the blame not on the lovers but on Fortune and on the world in which they lived. Such an ending contradicts the high moral purpose of a work compuesta en reprehension de los locos enamorados, que, vencidos en su desordenado apetito, a sus amigas llaman y dizen ser su Dios. Obviously, he says, Pleberio is