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which she versified, the verve and versatility of her style, and the irony with which she applied her wit gave her an enormous literary mobility.
Similarly, her status as a rara avis (strange bird), while setting her apart from others of her sex and class in the public regard, made possible the physical and psychic space in which she thought and wrote. Respect for exceptionality was in part a reflection of the profound seventeenth-century interest in unusual natural phenomena that viewed artistic talent and intellectual drive in females as fascinating abnormalities. Sor Juana learned to exploit the fact that she was catalogued as a prodigy; she both defended and derided the hyperbolic terms of praise her exceptionality attracted (see the poem “Válgate Apolo por hombre!” [May Apollo help you, as you’re a man!]). Known to this day as the “Tenth Muse,”3 in her own time Sor Juana was also called the “Mexican Phoenix.” Such epithets of exceptionality, though common enough, kept Sor Juana on a pedestal, provisionally protected yet isolated amid the ceremony and turbulence of Mexico City. Praised and envied, criticized and acclaimed, for twenty-six years she wrote for the court and for the church as one of the most celebrated writers in the Hispanic New World.
Early Years: Country and Court. Juana Ramírez y Asbaje was born—in 1648 or 1651—in Nepantla, some two days’ travel from Mexico City by mule and canal boat, on lands her grandfather leased from the church.4 There, perhaps more than most of her contemporaries, Juana was exposed early in life to all levels of culture. She experienced music, art, and magic, native and imported. She heard the liturgy in Latin, cultured conversation in Spanish, and colloquial communication, including indigenous, African, and ranchero (rural) dialects. Juana’s grandfather, Pedro Ramírez de Santillana, was a learned man, although his daughter Isabel Ramírez, Juana’s mother, was not educated. His large library fed the young Juana’s appetite for reading. By the time her elders wished to still her curiosity, she had become so knowledgeable that they could neither put a stop to her restless quest nor convince her it was inappropriate. From book learning she drew authority and legitimacy for differing in her studious propensities, views, and aims from other Catholics, women, and learned Criollos.5 Society’s stigmas against marisabias (Mary-sages [female know-it-alls]) could not destroy her intellectual bent. The charm of Juana’s own account (given in the Answer) of how she could read soon after she learned to walk, how she took to rhyming as others take to their native tongue, and how she became competent in Latin shortly after taking up its study has in the imagination of readers outweighed her insistence that her prodigious learning reflected tenacious effort even more than a sharp memory.
Tenaciousness may have been one of her mother’s legacies. Isabel Ramírez was a strong and smart woman. Illiteracy did not impede her from managing one of her father’s two sizable farmsteads for more than thirty years. She had six children, three with Pedro Manuel de Asbaje, Juana Inés’s father, and three with Diego Ruiz Lozano; to neither man, she stated in official documents, had she been married.
Before the age of fourteen, Juana wrote her first poem. Knowing that women were not allowed to attend the university in Mexico City (Respuesta / Answer, par. 8) she made the best of an isolated, self-directed schooling: she devoured books initially in Panoayán, where the family farm was located, then at court in Mexico City, and finally in the voluminous library she amassed in the convent. A convent was the only place in her society where a woman could decently live alone and devote herself to learning. Her collection of books and manuscripts, by the time she gave it away for charity near the end of her life, was one of the largest in the New Spain of her era.
According to Diego Calleja, a Spanish Jesuit priest who wrote her earliest biography, the young Juana while at court submitted to a public examination of her already notorious intellectual gifts by forty of the most knowledgeable men of the realm.6 She defended herself, reported Calleja, “like a royal galleon attacked by small canoes.”7 Sor Juana’s poetry sometimes expresses mistrust and mockery of her many admirers and defenders for seeing her in their own image and for turning her into a circus rarity: “What would the mountebanks8 not give, / to be able to seize me, / and carry me round like a monster, through / byroads and lonely places” (¡Qué dieran los saltimbancos, / a poder, por agarrarme / y llevarme, como Monstruo, por esos andurriales! OC 1.147: 177–80).
Were she to be compared with anyone, her preference—implicit in the numerous parallels she draws in her poems—would be the learned and legendary St. Catherine of Alexandria, who had also been subjected to an examination and who had furnished ultimate proof that neither intelligence nor the soul were owned by one gender above the other. Some of Sor Juana’s last compositions were songs of praise to the saint (see Selected Poems, below).
Entrance into the Convent. Juana gave her age as sixteen when after five years as lady-in-waiting at the viceregal court of New Spain, she entered the convent in 1668 to be able to pursue a reflective, literary life. Sor Juana Inés, as she became known, claimed that her parents were married and that her birthdate was November 12, 1651. The church establishment officially required legitimacy for nuns; youth supported her reputation as a rarity. A baptismal record for one “Inés, daughter of the church,” however, dated December 2, 1648, is generally accepted as hers; it lists an aunt and uncle as godparents. This earlier date establishes her age as nineteen when she entered the cloister. Modern awareness of the revised birthdate hardly tempers the myth of young Juana’s precocity; she can be considered no less “a marvel of intelligence.”9
Sor Juana’s confessor, Antonio Núñez de Miranda, was not one who would graciously admit defeat before her prowess. A powerful, intelligent, and extremely ascetic man, Núñez was also confessor to the viceroy and vicereine and to many other members of the nobility. For him, as for those vanquished by St. Catherine, gender determined duty as well as destiny; the use of reason was an exclusively masculine privilege. In a world where females were associated with the Devil and the flesh, intelligent and beautiful women especially were blamed for all manner of ills; to lessen the threat to men’s uncontrollable passions, they should be sent to a nunnery to embrace holy plainness and ignorance. If Núñez considered the young Juana’s position in the limelight at court dangerous and untenable, her continued study and writing after entering the convent, especially on worldly subjects, he judged nothing short of scandalous. Indeed, Sor Juana protested his reportedly having said “That had you known I was to write verses you would not have placed me in the convent but arranged my marriage.”10
Núñez, not being a relative, had no legal right to dispose of her thus. At first Sor Juana bore the humiliation of his remarks, she tells us. But as she achieved recognition and patronage from a new viceregal governor and his wife, who were closely connected to the Spanish king, Sor Juana gained confidence in herself. Eventually, she responded angrily to Núñez and relieved him of his duties to her as confessor.
Now her ex-confessor, Núñez nevertheless continued to hold sway in Mexican society. Sor Juana’s ultimate clerical superior in Mexico, Archbishop Francisco Aguiar y Seijas, was a legendary misogynist.11 Her friend and admirer Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz, the bishop of Puebla, donned the name “Sor Filotea” when he finally threw in his lot with those who demanded conformity. These three ecclesiastics wanted Sor Juana to stop writing and publishing with the latitude she had exercised. She was warned to be more like other women in the convents of Spanish America, who were supposed to serve as both subjects and agents of a regime undertaking massive imperialist endeavors. That is, nuns were to be subjects of the Spanish church and crown; to serve as agents of the church’s mission to Christianize heathens; to guard orthodoxy; and to ensure social obeisance. Beyond their spiritual roles, nuns—criollas like Sor Juana and even a few mestizas12—were also influential in economic, social, and educational spheres. They contributed to the arts, crafts, music, and cuisine of the larger community. They dealt in real estate, lent money, and employed servants and slaves, without whom most of their activities would have been impossible. Many nuns wrote. The very nature of a female community allowed them to develop voices that were separate from those of the priests and confessors who officially controlled their lives. Sor Juana, though, was unlike most other women in her intellectual ecumenism and religious rationality as well as her celebrity. She was envied and considered arrogant.
For