The Answer / La Respuesta (Expanded Edition). Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
say. Playing on saying / not saying and knowing / not knowing, she skirts direct contention with the powers that be and posits alternative “female” viewpoints.45 Throughout, she plumbs another silence, the “silence of treachery”—that of those who did not defend Christ, of those who would not speak up for her.46
Sor Juana inverts and reassigns the usual gender attributions with regard to the issue of silence. As we have remarked, the Answer may imply a decision to silence herself. She was intent when writing it, however, on speech: on proving the sanctity of her lifelong pursuit of knowledge. Even St. Paul, she shows, encouraged desirable silence for both sexes: “And in truth … the ‘Let [them] keep silence’ was meant not only for women, but for all those who are not very competent” (par. 33).
Our reading suggests that at the writing of the Answer, after twenty-five years of public service to crown and cross, Sor Juana was garnering only accusatory and menacing threats. (Here, we agree with interpretations such as those of Dorothy Schons and Dario Puccini.) At this point in her life, she seems to have decided it would be best to follow in the footsteps of her learned foremothers and forefathers—Fabiola (par. 31) or Gregory of Nazianzus (par. 42)—and retreat. But she would not do so before setting the record straight, by belittling antifemale rules and edicts—those of the Council of Trent, for instance—as age-old “prejudice and custom.”47 The established order of gender relations was time-bound and relative, she showed, pointing out that even-older and more venerable traditions and viewpoints, wiser and more sacred laws—those of the “great Author,” as she calls God (par. 12)—supported her thinking.
The Defense of Education for and by Women. Sor Juana argues for the existence of an older and more authoritative source in talking about the dangers for women of not having older women to teach them. Cannily, she speaks as though her audience had already accepted that women should be taught in the first place. To dispel the antagonisms excited by criticism she employs jest (pars. 5, 28, 32). She handles the theme of sex and gender at times through direct exposé, at others, she performs a subtle inversion of the expected double standard regarding the dangers of sexual abuse, the portrayal of eroticism in spiritual literature (considered to be as dangerous for men as for women), the significance of socialization for the patterning of masculine and feminine behavior and dress, and the different status of sexuality in ancient cosmology, in the Bible, and in early Christianity. Here, Jesus Christ is beautiful (par. 19); the Virgin Mary is wise (par. 42). Christ’s beauty is gazed at by a woman (par. 20); a man inscribes, in terms of the human body, the intelligence of a woman (par. 31). Unexplained inversions of grammatical gender in the Bible are remarked upon (par. 38); the kitchen is the scene of philosophical ferment and scientific experiment (par. 28); women, if only to underscore the prohibitions, are imagined at the university and the pulpit (par. 32).
In the Answer, Sor Juana’s strongest statement regarding how nuns should spend their time comes indirectly. Dr. Arce, a noted university professor, had expressed regret that cloistered women were forced to waste their intellect memorizing and repeating—reproducing the past—rather than investigating and applying “scientific principles”:
[Our good Arce] relates that he knew two nuns in this City, one … who had so thoroughly committed to memory the Divine Office, that … she would apply its verses, psalms, and maxims … to all her conversations. The other … was so adept in reading the Epistles of my father St. Jerome … that Arce says: “I thought that I heard Jerome himself, speaking in Spanish.” … [A]nd he grieves that such talents should not have been set to higher studies, guided by principles of science. He never mentions the name of either nun, but he presents them in support of his verdict that the study of sacred letters is not only permissible but most useful and necessary for women, and all the more so for nuns. (par. 41)
Thus, Sor Juana has another authority deplore monastic attitudes about learning. And no wonder: this position directly contradicts what the bishop in his letter held up as desirable.
Reinterpreting “public interests” that have led to the contemporary state of affairs is both Sor Juana’s theme and her practice. She limits her explicit criticism to the stifling mindlessness, to the arrogant and error-ridden policies that are harmful to women. But even the crisis of Mexico City—a crisis brought on by inefficiency and bad government as well as natural disasters—may have been on her mind. Tactically, she speaks from a position of weakness in order to claim a different discursive space—for instance, the spaces where women cook (par. 28) and children play games (par. 27)—and she carries on a conceptual “game” to the end of the Answer, validating what women know and say.
From the beginning of the Answer, as Jean Franco notes, “the transparent fiction of the pseudonym ‘Sor Filotea’ … [permits] an exaggerated deference to the recipient who is supposed to be a powerless woman and thus [exposes] the real power relations behind the egalitarian mask.”48 Under the rhetoric of humility and obedience we read a refusal of her word to those who would keep her voiceless. By the end of the next year, perhaps as a result of a combination of factors, including self-conversion in the face of coercion, disenchantment, and frustration—there are as many interpretations as there are critics—she will turn inward and follow the tradition of the founders of her order. But she has had the last and the lasting word.
As she did in the 1681/82 letter, in the Answer Sor Juana uses many tactics to unmask the semantics of repression. She stands her—women’s—ground with great and ironic humor: “and I believe this will make you laugh. But in truth, my Lady, what can we women know, save philosophies of the kitchen? … [O]ne can philosophize quite well while preparing supper. I often say, when I make these little observations, ‘Had Aristotle cooked, he would have written a great deal more’” (par. 28). Sor Juana creates a new “intellectual space,” cleared from the prohibitions against women’s full and free participation in the university, the legal court, the public sphere of intellect and power. Further, she adds to that domain the kitchen, the dormitory, the nursery—places where women teachers can teach girls. She clears the space so that she, and any “competent” woman (her term) can do what all the exemplary women she cites in her Answer have done, as seers, writers, lawyers, judges, and so on—exercising abilities for which they have been venerated. In this new and inclusive sphere, nothing—no virtue, no talent, no vice—is to be the exclusive terrain of either sex. From the beginning to the end of her Answer, she goes about exemplifying and persuading in order to prove this point. Notably, she allows even historical, and indeed contemporary women, too, to receive veneration. We can descry much more of her intricate web when we realize that a marked pattern of significant, gender-related issues characterizes the passages that precede and follow the portions of authoritative (particularly biblical) texts she cites, as we show in the notes. She means her examples to resonate with the wider weave of those issues.
In the letter to her confessor, Sor Juana had mentioned St. Jerome’s positive attitudes toward the learned women in his circle; in the Answer, she takes the opportunity to develop that theme more fully. Jerome was a prominent medieval source for misogynistic argument; thus, her citation of “her holy Father” is strategically drawn. She does not quote the same line of Jerome as the bishop, who emphasizes women’s subjection to men. But she does make different use of some of the bishop’s examples. While he acknowledges St. Jerome’s praise of studious women and separates himself twice from “commonplace censorship” of the practice of letters in women, the bishop’s aim is to curtail that very practice. Sor Juana, on the other hand, uses St. Jerome’s praise of women like herself to establish a venerable tradition of women’s participation in many fields of culture; she also implicitly compares herself to this father of her order.
Sor Juana said, in her letter to Núñez: “If I have read the secular prophets and orators (an impudence of which St. Jerome himself was guilty), I also read the Holy Doctors and Holy Scriptures.” When he writes as “Sor Filotea,” the bishop cites St. Paul with respect to women’s teaching. Sor Juana extends this dialogue, demonstrating that official and popular opinion on the subject of women’s talking and teaching is based on old misinterpretations. Without a direct word, but implicitly and by analogy, the Answer shames the bishop, her confessor, and all of their cohorts for running the risk of being