The Answer / La Respuesta (Expanded Edition). Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
eroticism. Through these poems women demonstrate an active cultural agency, as they rework longstanding poetic vocabularies in order to lay claim to a female authority of learning, wit, engagement, and soul.
The Mystery of Sor Juana’s Last Years
Sor Juana’s sketchily documented final years continue to receive various and conflicting interpretations. Did she voluntarily renounce her lifelong commitment to intellectual activity in favor of devotional practice, or was she obliged to appear to do so by pressures brought to bear by powerful superiors? Did she, despite ecclesiastical censure, manage to maintain a more limited but still-sustaining library? Were her final compositions written with the knowledge of continued support from important figures within her own convent, in Mexico, and in Spain? In delineating likely scenarios for these events, some scholars emphasize her persecution by ecclesiastical authorities, who gained the upper hand when her viceregal patrons returned to Spain. Others point to the fact that Mexico City itself was in a crisis that may have contributed to a shift in priorities on Sor Juana’s part. At the time, corruption and mismanagement led to hoarding; hunger; and a popular uprising, which the government violently suppressed. Some scholars suggest that, bereft of support and surrounded by an atmosphere of panic, and possibly also motivated by inner spiritual convictions that had ripened over time, Sor Juana chose to set aside scholarly study and literary creation for devotional pursuits. However, such a dedication of her time and energies could have been undertaken as an exploration rather than an intentionally final path, with her untimely death intervening to make a provisional choice seem decisive.
In attempting to clarify these questions, we do well to view Sor Juana’s decades-long relationship with her confessor Antonio Núñez de Miranda in more subtle terms than has been customary among critics up to now. Sor Juana’s letter to Núñez (sometimes called her “Spiritual Self-Defense”; see Scott, Madres del Verbo / Mothers of the Word, 53–82) suggests that their relationship was at one time marked by affection and admiration as well as by tension and conflict. He had wanted her to follow the path of Saint Francis in abandonment of worldly concerns; she saw herself closer intellectually to Saint Augustine and to her monastic “father,” Saint Jerome, whose writings displayed classical learning and engagement with as well as detachment from worldly matters. Other models for Sor Juana included her immensely learned contemporary the polymath Jesuit writer Athanasius Kircher, as well as the celebrated Spanish writers, her immediate predecessors, Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca, Gracián, and Góngora. Sor Juana wished for herself, and by extension other qualified women, to be able to pursue any realm of reason and inquiry open to the men of her context: theological disputation; literary creativity; and the sciences, including fields of knowledge new at the time (the physics of sound and vision, for example).
Núñez and Fernández de Santa Cruz, the bishop of Puebla, as well as the openly misogynist archbishop Aguiar y Seijas who did not believe in study for women, however, admonished nuns to conform more strictly to the rules of monastic life than was then the practice in many Mexican convents, where these clerics hoped to carry out stringent reforms. As “Sor Filotea’s” letter insists, women should write, if at all, exclusively on subjects appropriate to their state (see Appendix, pp. 222–223). The male ecclesiastics wished to prevent the spread of interest in “science,” that is, of all secular knowledge, among convent women. The exemplar such clerics held for this limitation of convent achievement to the display of virtue rather than learning was a kidnapped and enslaved woman, Catalina de Jesús, originally from India, whose example of Asian forms of obeisance in a Catholic context (kissing the shoes of ecclesiastics, giving alms, manifesting subservience in all behavior) won their praise. Sor Juana’s friend and literary rival, Carlos Sigüenza y Góngora, wrote that nuns should behave and be considered as angels, inhabitants of a “Paraíso celestial” (Heavenly Paradise), the title of his book on a Mexico City cloister.
In 1995, the historian Elías Trabulse initiated a process, to date unconcluded, of publishing an historical-biographical reinterpretation of the last years of Sor Juana’s life. Earlier views represented her either as voluntarily entering a period of sacrifice and reflection in response to inner conviction or as having been forced into silence and defeated abandonment of her former activities by church authorities. Trabulse’s work sparked heated controversy. How did Sor Juana spend those years, and to what extent did she retreat from intellectual activity? Trabulse has suggested that she found ways to continue her intellectual pursuits despite her outward compliance with a penance imposed upon her. He further points out that an affirmation of faith in Catholic doctrine, published after her death by Archbishop Aguiar y Seijas under an epigraph indicating that she had signed it with her own blood on the occasion of giving up scholarship and writing, in fact, mentions nothing about study. (The document is found in Obras completas, vol. 4, 518–19.) Since it was published after her death, she could not retract it, which Trabulse implies she might have done had she not succumbed to illness. However, as of this writing, full supporting documentation for these interpretations has yet to be released and various aspects of Trabulse’s propositions have been contested.
Marie-Cécile Bénassy-Berling’s “Actualidad del sorjuanismo: 1994–1999” provides what is, to date, the most complete summary available of this biographical controversy. She describes the situation at the end of Sor Juana’s life as follows:
Es obvio ahora que interviene de modo decisivo la autoridad eclesiástica pero, paralelamente, tenemos la certeza de que, hasta el final, la poeta ha conservado una buena dosis de libertad de criterio, y, sobre todo, una entereza de carácter poco común que manifestaba con mucho tino y destreza. En otros términos, la agresividad del clero es cierta; sin embargo, la capacidad de resistencia de la monja es mayor de la que suponíamos. (It is now clear that the authority of the church steps in decisively, but at the same time we are certain that to the very end the poet preserves a large measure of freedom of opinion and above all, an uncommon strength of character, exercised with superb judgment and skill. In other words, there is certainly aggressiveness from the clergy; however, the nun’s resistance is greater than we had supposed). (278)
Bénassy-Berling reminds us that certain facts should be kept in mind, including that Sor Juana never publicly abjured intellectual activity; and that far from being stripped of worldly means, responsibility, or prestige, she, in fact, maintained to the end of her life both control over her personal finances and her role as convent accountant, managing copious sums for the community and negotiating with the world beyond its walls. (284) Bénassy-Berling concludes, “Nuestro parecer personal es que lo principal para Sor Juana era expresarse de una vez, llegar a la cumbre de la fama como lo merecía, sucediese luego lo que sucediese” (My personal opinion is that Sor Juana’s chief objective was to express herself clearly once and for all, and to reach the height of the fame as she deserved, whatever the outcome might be). In other words, Sor Juana seems to have chosen, in the Answer and the subsequent villancicos dedicated to Saint Catherine of Alexandria (excerpted in our Selected Poems section), to express herself brilliantly and boldly on the topic of her own and other women’s learning—pulling out all the stops in these late works. Subsequently, the writer may have had recourse to some subterfuge, seen as necessary for self-preservation, or as Bénassy-Berling puts it, “las maniobras de defensa personal en que era muy perita, incluso encontrando su salvación en una mentira de que no era responsable” (maneuvers for self-defense, at which she was so adept, including finding her salvation in a lie for which she was not responsible). (286) It is conceivable that she may have sought safety from further institutional censure, by appearing to conform to a model of sanctity that was in any case imposed on her. In sum: if the Answer forecasts a decision to silence herself, it seems at least equally to protest in advance the imposition of her silence.
We await further scholarship to make a thorough assessment of these or other speculative versions of the end of Sor Juana’s life. They stand as a potent reminder that we do not yet know, if we ever shall, precisely what transpired in her last years. It seems likely that she sought means to continue on her life’s path, which for decades had involved a thoughtful balancing of intellectual, literary, devotional, and community pursuits, with as much integrity as possible. For example, it is notable that her Enigmas were produced in the framework of communication with the convent community in Lisbon in 1692, after she wrote the Answer—that