Limbajele iubirii în memoriile Lenei Constante

This study examines the protean nature of the language of love in Lena Constante’s two memoirs, The Silent Escape and The Impossible Escape, while recontextualizing the relationship between ethics and aesthetics. It explores how language functions as a compensatory mechanism, enabling both withdrawal into the self through depersonalization and liberation through openness. By comparing Constante’s “language of love” with that of her fellow female prisoners, the study identifies stylistic features that transform language into a space of escape. Although these women experienced different personal and emotional trajectories, their narratives converge toward a poetics of absence and distance, revealing shared textual representations of love and suffering. Beyond documenting the horrors of the communist prison system, Constante’s memoirs display a distinct aesthetic dimension, expressed through the creation of linguistic codes, irony, syntactic structures, and innovative uses of language. The article ultimately highlights the fundamental features of women’s prison discourse, focusing on the intersections between erotic imagination, political oppression, and the identity fractures produced by the violence of language.