The Answer / La Respuesta (Expanded Edition). Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
letter was for Sor Juana a purportedly friendly—and therefore wily and more painful—attack. It prompted her to explain and defend herself as she never had before—to write the Answer to Sor Filotea de la Cruz, the only avowedly self-descriptive piece of prose she produced. For her, the printed letter from the bishop of Puebla disguised as Sor Filotea, with its pretense of saintly guidance (St. Francis de Sales had used the same pseudonym to write to nuns), served as a public admonition and delivered a threat of persecution. Some scholars assume that the letter produced in Sor Juana a combination of anger, resentment, shock, hurt, contempt, and fear, and that these emotions precipitated a decision to silence herself that had already been forming within her.20 In any case, in the three months it took to write the unusual reply to “Sor Filotea,” Sor Juana created a text we now consider essential to a full understanding and appreciation of her genius.
From Spain the former vicereine, María Luisa, followed the events that seem to have led the poet to silence herself in the face of discouragement and inquisitional mentalities. The aristocratic Spaniard did all she could to come to the rescue. When the manuscript of Sor Juana’s theological critique was circulated in Spain, many people took the nun’s side or at least defended her right to argue. In Mexico, where Vieira was greatly favored by the Jesuits, Sor Juana was refuted with virulence, although she also had a few defenders. In Spain, the former vicereine marshaled seven respected theologians to praise the Crisis [Critique], as Sor Juana’s refutation of Vieira was now called. Disregarding the bishop of Puebla’s hyperbolic title (“Letter Worthy of Athena”), the marquise had it reprinted along with defenses and numerous poems of praise for Sor Juana, “Phoenix of America.” The laudatory pages comprised the initial third of the second volume of Sor Juana’s Obras [Works], a book that the author herself had cooperated in preparing so that some of her finest writing would see print. Behind the “Knight of the Order of Santiago” to whom Juana Inés was asked to dedicate the volume stood the tireless efforts of the ex-vicereine, who expedited publication in Seville, where she and her husband had considerable influence. But the paeans to Sor Juana’s talent and glory that prefaced this 1692 volume probably backfired, causing Sor Juana even more problems with her superiors in Mexico.
That same year, in 1692, Sor Juana sold her library and musical and scientific instruments, contributing the proceeds to charity. She wrote her last set of villancicos (carols), those to St. Catherine. Little more would come from her pen. Two years later, in 1694, she renewed her vows, signed a statement of self-condemnation, and reportedly turned to penance and self-sacrifice.
Was Sor Juana’s retreat from writing, study, and society a religious conversion? Was she under compulsion? How much the pressure came from without, how much from within is rigorously debated by scholars. It is notable that, at the end, Sor Juana took the ascetic path Núñez had earlier prescribed. In fact, in 1693 he became her confessor once again. Sor Juana’s life ended two months after his, in 1695, when she fell victim to an epidemic while caring for her sisters.21 The last of her three volumes of work was not published until five years later, in Madrid, in the first year of the new century.
A Poet-Scholar: Sor Juana’s Writing
Humorously quoting Ovid, Sor Juana described herself as a born poet—when she was spanked, her cries issued forth in verse—and claimed that she first spoke in rhyme and then had to learn to speak in prose. Part of her modern appeal resides in the amazing skill and grace with which she uses language. Her very survival as an exception, a courtly churchwoman, and her productivity and excellence as a writer, required adept handling of Mexico’s multiple linguistic codes, its ways of seeing and putting things—cultured and popular, legal and literary. Like her “father” St. Jerome, she read books, the world, and, to a lesser extent, people in classical as well as Christian terms. She absorbed, but as a female reader also resisted, the words of the ancients—the classical writers of Greece and Rome—and of the Bible and the church fathers as well. In writing she interpreted and revivified their style and thought, applying them to what was most relevant for her. She knew and emulated or mimicked such Spanish authors as Cervantes, Quevedo, Góngora, Lope de Vega, and Calderón de la Barca.22
Living in a world of real and verbal mirrorings, conscious of the specular role assumed involuntarily by women, Sor Juana crafted poetic mirrors and lenses that continue to reveal the submerged realities of her times. Her work reflects how actively the masculine culture assigned women secondary, invisible, silently reflective roles in society. Indeed, the poet frequently manipulated images of reflection and its associated phenomena. She painted portraits in words: to express love of María Luisa Manrique de Lara, to ridicule the preposterous exaggerations used to describe women in poetry, to disparage the expectation that women never age. Men put up mirrors, she showed, to view what they wanted to see. Hers bore a different image.
Sensitive to the reproduction of hierarchies in emblematic and rhetorical renditions of the various social and divine estates (such renditions circulated widely at the time), Sor Juana replaced figures at strategic points along the traditional echelons.23 She included the Virgin Mary, for example, in references to the Trinity, placing her at the pinnacle of the sacred and even the poetic pyramid; she traced a holy female lineage that went through Mary back to Isis; she sanctified Mother Nature and Discourse—language—itself. The widely accepted custom among Mexicans of expressing ardent reverence for their patron, the Virgin of Guadalupe (unacknowledged descendant of a Nahua mother goddess), provided a cover for Sor Juana’s at times almost heretical and pantheistic redeifications.
Colloquial and cultured, Sor Juana’s verse skillfully spoke to audiences throughout her vastly diverse society. The Catholic church therefore sought out her empathetic voice, her capacity to bring religious thought and legend to life and to make it playfully meaningful, comissioning her to write texts (villancicos) for holyday masses. To this day, nearly every schoolchild in Latin America learns stanzas from “Hombres necios que acusáis” [You foolish and unreasoning men],24 Sor Juana’s most popular poem.
Sor Juana’s verse spans the sublime and the frivolous and combines the languages of court and convent, Scholasticism and literature, medieval dogma and modern rationalism. A student of symbol and logic, she employed both in structuring works sacred and profane, dramatic and comical. She wrote burlesque sonnets, words for local dance tunes, and occasional poems to accompany gifts, as thank-yous, as entries to the numerous poetry contests, as celebrations of baptisms, birthdays, or the completion for a doctorate, and for inaugurations of churches. For her poems on love, jealousy, quarrels, absence, and yearning, she was favorably compared to the greatest poets of Spain.
Sor Juana’s complete works include sixty-five sonnets (including some twenty love sonnets, deemed by many to be among the most beautiful of the seventeenth century); sixty-two romances (of a style similar to ballads); and a profusion of endechas, redondillas, liras, décimas, silvas, and other metrical forms employed during Spain’s literary Golden Age.25 For dramatic performance, Sor Juana wrote three sacramental autos (one-act dramas) and two comedies (one a collaboration). In addition, she composed thirty-two loas (preludes to plays) that were sung and performed as prologues to the plays, as well as separately for religious and viceregal celebrations; two sainetes (farces) and a sarao (celebratory song and dance), performed between the acts of one of the plays; and fifteen or sixteen sets of villancicos (carols) for matins. Each of the last-mentioned contained eight or nine songs, elaborations of such religious themes as the Nativity of Christ, the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, and legends of Sts. Joseph, Peter, and Catherine of Alexandria.
In sketching Sor Juana’s biography we spoke of the “Allegorical Neptune,” the triumphal arch in honor of the arrival of the viceregal couple, the Marquis and Marquise de Mancera. A lesson in statehood, a guide to good government, the corresponding text alludes to the virtues princes and kings ought to possess, and it ascribes the Greco-Roman god Neptune’s beneficence to the teachings of his mother, the Egyptian goddess Isis.26 The viceroy is urged to be praiseworthy both as a husband and as a ruler; welcome is extended to the vicereine, and the ruling couple is spoken of as a unit. In her prose commentary Sor Juana expatiates on the complexities of symbolic language as used by the Egyptians, offering cues, in the