The Answer / La Respuesta (Expanded Edition). Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
for taking the veil. They speculated airily on some unfortunate love affair. Yet early and extensive readings in Christianity, the experiences of many of the women in her family (including her own mother), and not least her consuming interest in satiating her intellectual appetite easily explain her “absolute unwillingness to enter into marriage” (Answer, par. 9). She first tried the strictly ruled and aristocratic Carmelite convent, but she became ill and had to leave. Within a few months, after recovering, she entered the more relaxed Hieronymite13 convent of Santa Paula, where she found some of the tranquillity she desired for study—the real love of her life.
The cloistered Sor Juana spent the rest of her days (from 1668 until 1695) in quarters whose comfort and amplitude made them seem more salon than cell. Attended by several servants and for ten years by a mulatta slave her mother had given her,14 Sor Juana entertained numerous visiting aristocrats, ecclesiastics, and scholars, conducted wide but now lost correspondence with many others, and held monastic office as mistress of novices and keeper of the convent’s financial records. News of that service survived along with such details as her extraordinary brilliance as a conversationalist. Several contemporaries claimed that listening to her surpassed reading her work. Much of her poetry was destined to be heard. State and church officials commissioned all manner of compositions for the observances of holy days, feast days, birthdays, and funerals. Sor Juana earned not only favor but a livelihood—for each nun had a “household” to support—by fulfilling such literary orders.
It is not hard to imagine what a day in the life of Sor Juana and her convent sisters included. The daily patterns for all nuns were set by the rules of the order. Upon becoming brides of Christ they vowed chastity, poverty, and obedience; but just as in Rome, where luxury surrounded the higher echelons of church officialdom, austerity was the exception in religious houses established by royalty. Actual practice at the wealthy convent of Santa Paula was far from ascetic. Laxity, as it was called, characterized observance in most convents of Mexico and Peru. Nevertheless, the normal day was punctuated by prayer time: it began at midnight with matins; lauds followed at 5:00 or 6:00 A.M.; then came prime, terce, sext, and none, the “little hours” spaced during the day; vespers were said at approximately 6:00 P.M.; and finally compline at 9:00 or 10:00 at night. There would be recreation periods, a time, often, for needlework. Periodically, nuns would go on retreat to remove themselves from the hustle and bustle of normal monastic existence. Sor Juana, as she mentions in the Answer, would retreat from time to time, to study and write.
Regular intervals were set for community work, prayer, confession, and Communion. Many holy feast days interrupted routines, calling for special masses, meals, and festivities. Pomp and circumstance accompanied the taking of final vows. Music—singing and playing instruments—and theatrical performances provided inspiration, religious instruction, and entertainment at all such events. Sor Juana was probably among the most visited of the nuns at her cloister. In addition to family members she received dignitaries from around the world, most notably the viceregal couple. She would often be called to the locutorio (grate) to meet her guests, among whom on occasion were representatives of the cabildo (cathedral council) with writing commissions.
In unstructured moments, some nuns chatted and gossiped; others subjected themselves to penances. Capable and creative, Sor Juana took the advantageous circumstances of her life and an ability to “condense [conmutar] time,” as she phrased it, and put them to what she considered better use. Conservative elements within the church in Mexico preferred penances.
Conflict Intensifies. Troubles, as we have seen, had started almost from the beginning of Sor Juana’s time in the convent. For more than a decade after taking the veil, she kept still in the face of the reports that her confessor was voicing disapproval of her scholarly and literary activities, even when he claimed they constituted “a public scandal.” She outdid herself in public visibility, however, when in 1680, after showing initial reticence, she accepted the responsibility of devising one of two architectural-theatrical triumphal arches that were to welcome the new viceregal couple (the other was entrusted to her friend Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora).15 The ambitiously mythological artwork, inscriptions, narrative poems, and prose explanations of her “Allegorical Neptune” both established her reputation throughout contemporary society and, because of the extraordinarily public nature of the occasion, deepened the rift with Núñez.
At last, in 1681 or 1682, Sor Juana decided to take steps to ease her plight and relieve her pent-up animosity—the result, she said, of holding back her reactions to his animosity. She would exercise her right to engage a new confessor. The letter she wrote to Núñez, distancing herself from him, bristles with ironic and prideful sarcasm. “Not being unaware of the veneration and high esteem in which Y[our] R[everence] (and justly so) is held by all, so that all listen to you as if to a divine oracle and appreciate your words as if they were dictated by the Holy Ghost,” she writes, “nor unaware that the greater your authority, the more my good name is injured,” Sor Juana sees no alternative but to change confessors. “Am I perchance a heretic?” she asks, concluding with further rhetorical questions: “What obligation is there that my salvation be effected through Y.R.? Can it not be through another? Is God’s mercy restricted and limited to one man, even though he be as wise, as learned, and as saintly as Y.R.?”16 On her own path toward salvation, with a more sympathetic confessor, Sor Juana spent the next decade studying and writing her most enduring works. The viceregal couple continued to visit almost every day, on their way to or from vespers, until they returned to Spain in 1687.
Love Poems to Lovers of Poetry. With patronage such as the viceroy and vicereine provided, Sor Juana was free to persevere in being a learned and literary nun. This was not so unusual from the standpoint of a long, scholarly, and even at times worldly women’s monastic tradition, but it was certainly uncommon in her place and time. No doubt the churchmen were further scandalized by her “unchaste” writings, by what her poems indicated about a vividly imagined if not a lived experience. Only verses that transposed courtly love into a divine framework of religious ardor, and clearly mystical writing infused with eroticism, were deemed orthodox by the censors. Sor Juana’s courtly yet personal poetry enlisted the Renaissance conventions of troubadour love lyrics and Petrarchan sonneteering to express deeply felt earthly friendship, kinship, and sexual attraction.
Little can be known directly about Sor Juana’s intimate loves, though speculation abounds. Finding that she wrote with an acute understanding of lovers and their emotional travails, readers have been convinced that she knew whereof she spoke. Did she have suitors at court? Did she suffer first-hand the sort of abuse and loss some descry in her poems? Was she in love with a man or men? With a woman or women? Biographical documentation is lacking. Her poetry attests first that she knew well the expectations of literary practice on these topics, and second, that the deepest personal ties she expressed were those to two recognizable figures: Leonor Carreto and María Luisa Manrique de Lara y Gonzaga, two vicereines (wives of the viceroys) of New Spain.
The social distance between Sor Juana and these two noblewomen, whom she wrote of lovingly and also served, was not unlike that of the Provençal troubadours (men and women) and their lords and ladies. That very distance allowed the poet to be explicit in expressing affection, providing a public barrier to the realization of such sentiments. These were widely perceived as relationships that could not be consummated. What other forms, besides the written, her expressions of feeling may have taken remains unknown. No one denies that Sor Juana displayed in her writing depths of emotion and erotic desire associated for us with intimate relationships.17
Notably, her most ardent love poems were dedicated to the two vicereines mentioned above. Well-educated and sophisticated readers, it was they who most energetically encouraged her scholarly and literary pursuits. When the first of the two aristocrats, the vicereine Leonor Carreto, Marquise de Mancera, died in 1674, Sor Juana had been in the convent for six years. But for almost the same number of years immediately before her entrance in the convent, Juana had been in Leonor’s service—a favorite companion at court. Sor Juana used the literary “Laura” as the marquise’s name in poems:
Death like yours, my Laura, since you have died,
to feelings that still long for you in vain,
to