The Answer / La Respuesta (Expanded Edition). Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
Sor Juana’s 975-verse First Dream (referred to in the Answer simply as Dream) is generally considered the most important philosophical poem in the Spanish language. This symbolic, mirror version of the Answer had long been read as a poem of intellectual disillusionment. More recent readings see it as an exploration of “the available modes of human knowledge from the geometrical movements of celestial bodies to the intricate workings of the human body, through induction, logic, and intuition, all revealed as inadequate in the waking world,” and also as a refutation of “both the theory and the practice of objectifying women.”27 Critics today celebrate its originality and modernity, admire its statement “in favor of the human spirit’s right to unimpeded growth,”28 and proclaim “its vision not unlike Descartes’s… a fusion of theology, poetry, and science.”29
Dream, it should be noted, is the poem that Sor Juana herself most respected. It is an exaltation of the poet’s insatiable thirst to encompass all human knowledge:
Not being able to grasp
in a single act of intuition all creation;
rather by stages, from one concept to another ascending step by step…
(OC 1.350:590–94)
Sor Juana combined unparalleled skill—a seeming verbal magic—with a profound and woman-centered vision. Her originality lies in this combination: in the literary forms she gave to her insatiable, gender-conscious, intellectual curiosity. Sor Juana was passionately inquisitive about empirically observed phenomena and cognizant of the changing relationship of human beings to their environment that marked the dawning of the scientific age. She knew and wrote about the ancient pharmaceutical potions of the Greek physician and anatomist Galen (A.D. 130?–201?) and also mentioned indigenous Mexican herbal cures. With visitors from other parts of the Americas and from Europe she pondered and discussed astronomy, mathematics, mechanics, and medicine. She studiously pursued a knowledge of music and painting. All these concerns—her preoccupations and delights—found their way into her poems and prose.
Sor Juana’s Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz is often referred to as “autobiographical.” It might better be described as a rhetorically structured letter of self-defense. “Self,” however, is a term of our time and culture, not hers.30 In her differently psychological and thoroughly mannered religious age, the “self” she defends cannot be located in an “inner nature” or “consciousness” outwardly expressed. Rather, the author is defending a dearly held intellectual position, which is her concept of how theology can best be done: by studying the arts and sciences and by including women both as subjects of study and teachers of other women. In the following section, we present a detailed consideration of the many elements composing this complex text.
II. La Respuesta / The Answer: A Reading
This section presents essential elements of the immediate context, purpose, and style of Sor Juana’s Answer. Throughout, we aim to help the reader understand how Sor Juana made use of conventions available to her writing, where she was innovative, and how thoroughly her gendered sense of the world and of language permeates her text.
Sor Juana’s Art and Argument
Counterpoint typifies the structure of the Answer to Sor Filotea de la Cruz. In keeping with the Baroque literary context of the period and the complex urgency of Sor Juana’s purpose, the piece is polyvocal and polysemous—of multiple voices and meanings. Understanding requires that the reader perform several acts of “translation” and exercise a willingness to accept ambiguous complexity.
For many years the essay was read as a relatively straightforward text. Almost nothing the bishop wrote to Sor Juana, however, including his signing of the letter as “Sor Filotea,” nor anything Sor Juana answered, particularly regarding her place in the order of things, can be taken wholly at face value. The elaborate quality of the rhetoric makes simple readings insufficient. Letter, legal defense, treatise, and autobiographical essay,31 the Answer displays traditional learning and demonstrates the need for freedom of experimentation and opinion. For educated readers of the time, Sor Juana’s methods were familiar, but her message was pioneering; for us, only the message is familiar. We must keep in mind that like a classical ballet, the essay is carefully choreographed and costumed; it is at once sincere and strategic, simple and subtle.
Multiplicity of Meanings. Sor Juana’s prismatic method explores and exploits the interplay among words, their etymological roots and cognate forms, their denotations and connotations. For instance, especially in paragraphs 17 and 21 of the Answer, Sor Juana highlighted the cluster of Spanish words seña, señalar, señalada/o (whose meanings include, respectively, “sign,” “signal/ signify,” “significant”) that are related to the Latin signum (“sign, mark”; “token”; “miracle”). She plays on etymological connections between these words to describe the vulnerability of intelligence and poetic talent. In Christ she saw the quintessential model of intelligence and beauty. By citing the “signs” worked by Christ in the Gospels—“acts of a miraculous nature serving to demonstrate divine power or authority” (OED)—she inveighed against the persecution and vituperation that commonly victimize outstanding or “significant” human beings. Thus, outstanding powers of mind she likened to such “signs” of divine workings, to the miraculous. At the same time, in current terms, she underscores the functions of language as a system of signifiers and as a potent ideological force. Though unfairly fragmented, an excerpt will nevertheless serve as example:
…as for this aptitude at composing verses … even should they be sacred verses—what unpleasantness have they not caused me…. [A]t times I ponder how it is that a person who achieves high significance—or rather, who is granted significance by God … is received as the common enemy…. and so they persecute that person…. [In Athens] anyone possessing significant qualities and virtues was expelled…. [Machiavelli’s maxim was] to abhor the person who becomes significant…. What else but this could cause that furious hatred of the Pharisees against Christ? … O, unhappy eminence, exposed to so many risks! O sign and symbol, set on high as a target of envy and an object to be spoken against! (pars. 17–22)
Through the words and concepts sign/signify/significance, Sor Juana threads together ideas and analogies that are both simple and complex. The ideas concern language, human psychology, theological interpretations, power struggles, and threats to social structure. The analogies include connections drawn between pre-Christian (Hebrew, Greek, Roman) and Christian history and custom, between the Pharisees and the Mexican church hierarchy, between poetry and the accusation of blasphemy, and, not least, between Sor Juana and Christ.
Throughout the Answer as a whole, we can only guess at some points, jibes, and arguments Sor Juana makes, for we lack documents that would give us a fuller portrait of her involvement with the intricacies of the power struggles among and between Jesuits, bishops, Spaniards, and criollos. We do know about the struggle between Sor Juana and two church authorities (Núñez, the dismissed confessor, and Fernández, the bishop) with whom she had very close ties. But her formally educated contemporaries had an advantage, an everyday familiarity with both the Bible and classical mythology that we lack and that provided them with clues to coded meanings. When Sor Juana cited a passage or alluded to a mythological personage, her readers could contextualize immediately as we cannot, except by study. They would know what came before and after, who was related to whom, the significance of frequently used figures. Therefore, many more implicit meanings were probably understood in the author’s time and are not now. On the other hand, some levels of meaning may be clearer to twentieth-century readers than they were to Sor Juana’s contemporaries. Both she and we are conscious of discourse as an (en)-gendered process—that is, of attitudes about sex roles hidden in speech. We know that “mankind” both includes and hides women. We have learned, as she did, to cross boundaries and read between the lines.
Narrative Modes. Sor Juana disposes the elements of style with such ingenuity that they provide protective covering for her derision of stupidity and her attack on injustice. Too, this reasoned