The Answer / La Respuesta (Expanded Edition). Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
The classical structuring form follows the rules for writing and speaking set down by Greek and Roman rhetoricians and exemplified with citations from great writers and orators.
Both intensely personal and consciously public, the Answer is based on patterns of expression and composition set by the leading male figures of classical antiquity and early Christianity. But it also includes use of narrative modes common to women’s religious writing of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the sermon, Renaissance legal and rhetorical discourse, and high literary forms of her day. Polish and intricacy in mixing the style of the Baroque with earlier Christian and classical conventions contribute to the Answer’s strength and durability.
Sor Juana imitates the traditional nun’s vida (Life), “obediently” examining and confessing her conscience. She parodies elements of hagiography—saints’ lives—which the bishop was accustomed to read and which were expected in writings by nuns. Sor Juana likens herself to St. Teresa of Avila, insisting on the fact that they are both writers and women who rejected marriage. Indeed, there are parallels she did not state: both women deftly maneuvered in and around difficult situations with the church hierarchy and male superiors; both had friends in powerful places. Further, from our modern-day perspective, both have long been honored in Spanish letters. Despite her familiarity with convent style and her specific references to Teresa, there are limits to a comparison between the two. The Spaniard was a mystic; the Mexican, a scholar. Sor Juana did not found monastic houses for women or reform a religious order. She saw the convent as the least noxious of her options, twice saying so and twice finding it necessary to hedge that bold statement with an assurance of her respect for the religious state (pars. 9, 13). It is an intellectual calling, not a mystical or even a spiritual vocation, of which she gives an account. Sor Juana’s quest—not unlike the Woolfian room and income of one’s own—was for the time and the means necessary for creative reflection. Yet she employs the same stratagems of staged weakness and innocence (pars. 5, 13, 14, 34), of subterfuge, with which writing nuns negotiated ecclesiastic minefields. (See the section “Classical Rhetorical Models,” below, for further discussion of the conventions of religious language.)
By her account, Sor Juana’s wonder at God’s creation comes not through vision or revelation but through empirical observation and deduction; thus the natural, material world provides its own evidence of worth as God’s creation. With literary and theatrical flair (and significant topical influence, as Frederick Luciani has shown) she takes us through the tale of her early childhood, skipping her court years. Amazingly, her text raises women’s “ways of knowing” to the same level as the noble ancient science of philosophy and the emergent fields that were establishing new scientific principles.
Sor Juana also demonstrates a command of the sermon, one of the most popular forms of the period, in her impassioned reenactment of the scene from Calvary. She implies, in the tradition of the imitatio Christi (imitation of Christ), that her suffering was like Christ’s, making her judges’ charges against her seem as atrocious and deplorable as those hurled at Jesus. Thus, Sor Juana compounds her knowledge of biblical material, presented in sermon form, with the form of classical juridical appeal. Such appeals to emotion, she has learned from her study of classical rhetoric, are “necessary if there are no other means for securing the victory of truth, justice and the public interest.”32 Sor Juana’s distinctive “public interest” was the intellectual plight of women in her own time.
The Answer, pulling together strands from sermonic, biblical, and legal as well as literary genres, brings the tradition of humanist moralism to Mexican theology and anticipates a later genre, the polemical essay. It is significant that the Spanish writer Baltasar Gracián is the only male literary contemporary whom Sor Juana mentions in the Answer. A moralist, he was interested in the ethics of social behavior and associated with the most idealistic and cultured exponents of Hispanic letters. As a stylist and rhetorician he defended the conceptistas, poets who displayed intellectual, at times satirical, wit.
Rhetorical Forms. Sor Juana sets the stage for one of her last battles of wits with a battery of precise rhetorical strategies. She knows the rules and conventions governing literary, theological, exegetical (pertaining to exegesis, the detailed explanation of biblical texts), logical, epistolary (pertaining to formal letter writing), and juridical discourse—and she will use them. The essay is in fact and in appearance an epistolary text and follows strict patterns of presentation, well known in her time to those (men) with university training.
Religious Epistolary Address. Readers are liable to find some of the author’s stances, especially at the beginning and end of the Answer, both mystifying and off-putting. What appear to modern and secular eyes as self-deprecation, exaggerated humility, and convoluted politeness are more accurately understood as conventions of the age, standard modes of address among religious women and men, and courtly manners of a highly stratified colonial society. In Sor Juana’s day, formal letter writing was governed by strict rhetorical rules, including Renaissance adaptations of Greek and Latin models. (Vestiges of such rules are quite apparent today in French forms of address in letter writing; early in the twentieth century, formal English-language letters were still ended with the metaphorical “Your humble servant.”) Epistolary prose and verse were fashionable literary genres. Writing by nuns and clerics, especially when addressed to their superiors, followed established modes that included such metaphors of humility as “I lowlier than a worm” and, as Sor Juana wrote in a document on the Immaculate Conception of Mary: “I … the most insignificant of the slaves of Our Lady the Most Holy Mary” (OC 4.516). Finally, such expressions as “I could give you a very long catalogue of [my verses] … but I leave them out in order not to weary you” (par. 28), follow the standard avoidance of fastidium (tedium), as required by manuals of epistolary and forensic rhetoric.
Classical Rhetorical Models. The overall organization of the Answer is based on classical explanations of “the order to be followed in forensic causes [legal arguments].”33 It shows Sor Juana’s absorption and application of the Greek and Roman teachings of Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, and Quintilian (see annotations to pars. 1, 5, 23, 42). Sor Juana was convinced that in pursuing causes “which present the utmost complication and variety … [one had to become thoroughly versed in] the function of exordium, the method of the statement of facts, the cogency of proofs, whether we are confirming our own assertions or refuting those of our opponents, and the force of the peroration, whether we have to refresh the memory of the judge … or do what is far more effective, stir his emotions.”34 In accord with this model, the basic divisions of the Answer are as follows: after the introductory exordium (pars. 5–6), she moves into the narration (pars. 7–29); the proofs or arguments (pars. 30–43) precede the concluding peroration (pars. 44–46).35 Thus, although she is vulnerable to the accusations of her two “fathers” (Núñez, her former confessor, and Bishop Fernández, her erstwhile friend), in the Answer Sor Juana spiritedly demonstrates to them that men (triumphant conquerors, par. 43) are in much greater danger than women of falling prey to arrogance and illusions of grandeur, despite common prejudice to the contrary. Presumption and envy are similarly handled.
Quintilian was perhaps the most significant among the great teachers-of-teachers whose advice Sor Juana followed and whose methods she practiced in acquiring her much-prized reading and speaking skills.36 The first of the seventy-odd citations in the Answer (see par. 1) is from his Institutio oratoria. So is the strategically cited dictum “Let each one learn, not so much by the precepts of others, as by following the counsel of his own nature” (par. 39; emphasis added). With this quote she caps the paragraph that precedes the climactic rhetorical question of the essay:
If my crime lies in the “Letter Worthy of Athena,” was that anything more than a simple report of my opinion, with all the indulgences granted me by our Holy Mother Church? (par. 40)
On this phrasing lies the force not only of her own case, but the claim of all women, of “each one,” to interpretive power. To classical teachings of rhetoric and pedagogy she adds the weight of Hebrew and Christian authority, which she emphasizes (following the grammatical gender of Spanish) as maternal. Thus, by following the highly conventional authority