The Answer / La Respuesta (Expanded Edition). Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
expression that can be sumptuous or trenchant. To appreciate both these aspects of her texts, the reader must decipher a dense weave of allusion and imagery that characterizes her baroque style, together with the often subtle irony, parody, self-referentiality, and occasionally outrageous humor that characterize both her virtuosity and her overturning of literary conventions. The enigmas of Sor Juana’s biography, however, often take precedence over attention to her challenging and rewarding works themselves. A full reading of these complex texts requires that we identify what Sor Juana’s words meant in her day, even as we explore what they—and she—“mean” for our own context. The Introduction that follows lays out guidelines and pointers for understanding her frequently ironic and elegantly intricate turns of phrase.
Critical Milestones in Sor Juana Studies
Since our first edition of The Answer / La Respuesta (1994), numerous scholars have examined facets of Sor Juana’s life and works in relation to historical, political, cultural, and literary contexts that both facilitated and thwarted her ambitions, skills, and achievements. (See the biographical section, “Juana Ramírez / Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: A Life Without and Within,” in the Introduction.) New interpretations continue to emerge in conferences; monographs; single and collected essays; websites; dramatic productions; and musical, video, and monologic performances that join studies now regarded as classic. Of these many significant studies, we mention a few that we consider essential for those who wish to investigate further the specific issues that this volume addresses.
Time and again we return to the images that many of Sor Juana’s works prompt us to consider: the author, at her writing table, in a book-lined convent cell, pauses deep in thought; or she unstops her inkwell and resolutely plunges into it a quill pen. Frederick Luciani’s Literary Self-Fashioning in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (2004) takes up this theme to trace what he calls the author’s strategies of “self-textualization” as she projects and “personifies” her literary voice. His study traces in her works “self-portraits in the act of writing or reading, the metaphorization of her body and the overall reification of tropes in reference to the self … the mystification and demystification of her poetic calling, self-inscription within gender-bound literary traditions, and meditations on her own literary fame” (16). His study explores various poetic and prose works, including Sor Juana’s Answer to Sor Filotea, identified among her texts as that which conveys the most “detailed and explicit representations of the self” in a demonstration of “the act of reading, analysis, and writing.” For Luciani, The Answer constitutes “both a self-portrait and a performance” (80).
Sor Juana has too long been regarded as an anomaly, an “exceptional woman.” This concept of her does honor to the extraordinary nature of what she accomplished. Yet she herself recognized how this notion is enlisted by a patriarchal culture to “prove the rule” of most women’s lack of ability. We have only to look at her romance 49 (“Apollo help you, as you’re a man!” / Válgate Apolo por hombre! [pp. 190–191, below]), to see how wryly she critiques such isolating and “freakish” views of herself. Scholars are rediscovering how the apparently solitary Mexican writer’s work in fact existed in dialogue with the thinking and writing of other creative women intellectuals, thinkers not only of the ancient biblical and classical periods that she cites in the Answer, but also of her own seventeenth century. Stephanie Merrim’s Early Modern Women’s Writing and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1999) contextualizes Sor Juana by aligning her with several Spanish-, English-, and French-speaking contemporaries who similarly used multiple literary genres to take a strongly pro-female stand in the querelle des femmes, that long debate begun in the Middle Ages on women’s possession or lack of reason and moral virtue—and thus their fitness or unsuitability for education and political rule. Sor Juana stands out for the deftness and variety of her arguments in this tradition, in such texts as the Answer or the poem “Hombres necios” (pp. 164–165, below). As the republication of key texts from the period continues, it becomes increasingly possible to demonstrate points of contact in the thought of early modern women philosophers, theologians, poets, novelists, and dramatists from across Europe, colleagues of Sor Juana, a mapping that more accurately represents the period’s intellectual ferment than does the history we have inherited. As we grow in awareness of how writing circulated in manuscript as well as printed form, we recognize how women maintained vital contacts between courts, noble and bourgeois houses, and convents through travel and correspondence. Thus, we comprehend better how intellectual life was conducted generally and understand how women in particular overcame apparent isolation to engage in central cultural conversations with each other and with male interlocutors.
“Old” Works by Sor Juana in New Light
Some important works, neglected in Sor Juana studies until recently, have come to new attention since our first edition. For example, in 1692–93 Sor Juana wrote the Enigmas ofrecidos a la Casa del Placer (Riddles Offered to the House of Pleasure) at the request of a friend of her patron, the vicereine María Luisa Manrique, who in turn was no doubt doing a favor for a community of aristocratic Portuguese nuns. These twenty rhymed riddles provided opportunities for witty laughter and intellectual challenge during the monastic recreation hour, showing the latitude for nondevotional pastimes in certain cloistered orders of educated and principally upper-class nuns. (These entertainments were, by analogy, the crossword puzzles and sudoko for the privileged of the period.) The answers to these riddles all relate to love: courtly, requited and unrequited, and accompanied by emotions such as longing and jealousy (see Georgina Sabat de Rivers, “Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Los Enigmas y sus variaciones”; Jean-Michel Wissmer, Sombras 175–78; and Enigmas translated by Glenna Luschei). Discovered in the 1960s, these texts were omitted from Sor Juana’s Obras completas, and little attention was paid to them prior to 1995. In them, we find enticing traces of Sor Juana’s intellectual and literary correspondence with other learned women of her day. Future archival work may uncover more documents that fill in our picture of these vital connections.
A long-overdue consideration of Sor Juana’s religious writings and spirituality has led to a more nuanced appreciation of her significance not only as a witty baroque poet and rationalist thinker, but also as a theologian. While the values and emphases of a modern secular feminism and its generally nonreligious academic context brought about a recent “boom” in Sor Juana studies, they also worked to occlude some major features of her work—notably, those passages or entire texts that directly engage religious and spiritual topics. Previously, literary and cultural critics tended to overlook these in favor of secular works centered on themes of love, philosophy, or women’s cultural agency. However, in the early modern imperial Spanish territories, Catholic spirituality was central and not secondary to intellectual life. Devotional works constituted an esteemed and a highly popular genre. Scholarly and critical studies now pay more heed to such texts as Sor Juana’s religious drama (sacramental plays, or autos sacramentales), her liturgical villancicos that were set to music and performed as part of church services on feast days, and her lyric poetry on religious themes. In studying the The Devotional Exercises / Los Ejercicios Devotos of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (2005), for example, Grady Wray presents the first annotated, bilingual edition of a text that had remained little known, although the author herself placed it prominently among her achievements. Wray demonstrates that in the Exercises, just as in the Answer and other works, Sor Juana writes from a rich cosmos of classical antiquity, biblical and doctrinal learning, practical scientific exploration, and cultivated wit. The dynamics of gender politics permeates her spirituality, which centers on the Blessed Virgin of the Immaculate Conception: the epitomizing female “Mother of God,” present from the first moment of divine creation, who precedes all other human or natural existence. Thus, as we increasingly see, concerns present in the Answer ring out from other, previously less-regarded works as well.
Commentators long avoided or resisted a direct consideration of the more than forty love poems that Sor Juana addressed to women. Since our first edition, these have come into view as part of a vital cultural practice that produced women’s love poetry to women across sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe and its colonies. Sor Juana directed her poems to the vicereines within the context of an international Sapphic discourse that