The Wicked Weeping Woman: A Reconsideration of Women's Agency in the Lament

Abstract

Drawing on philosophical frameworks of agency, autonomy, and vulnerability as developed by feminist opera scholars, this paper examines the use of the lament in the expression of female unhappiness through a comparison of the representations of the sorceress Alcina in Francesca Caccini’s La Liberazione di Ruggiero dall'isola d'Alcina, and George Frideric Handel’s Alcina. This paper begins by exploring how Caccini’s Alcina’s lament, “Ferma, ferma crudele,” exposes her journey through anger, confusion, and finally grief over her lost love. Alcina’s vulnerable expression of grief inspires another woman to join her in lamenting, an act which instills Alcina with greater emotional agency. The paper then considers Handel’s Alcina, suggesting that his Alcina’s aria, “Ombre Pallide,” functions as a lament rather than an invocation aria. The presence of lament characteristics following her abandonment of the musical conventions of the invocation aria see Alcina gain the freedom and autonomy to act without her self-destructive magical powers, showing that this loss of power is actually her liberation. Ultimately, these considerations question existing assumptions that composers reject lament conventions in order to lend agency to their women characters, and create space for nuanced understandings of women’s vulnerability and agency.