| Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: A Woman of Genius |
| Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, poet, dramatist, scholar, and nun thirsted for knowledge from her | Párr. 1 |
| earliest years and throughout her life. As a female, she had little access to formal education |
| and would be almost entirely self-taught. Juana was born out of wedlock to a family of |
| modest means in either 1651 or, according to a baptismal certificate, 1648 (there is no |
| 5 | scholarly consensus on her birth date). Her mother was a Creole and her father Spanish. |
| Juana’s mother sent the gifted child to live with relatives in Mexico City. There her |
| prodigious intelligence attracted the attention of the viceroy, Antonio Sebastián de Toledo, |
| marquis de Mancera. He invited her to court as a lady-in-waiting in 1664 and later had her |
| knowledge tested by some 40 noted scholars. In 1667, given what she called her “total |
| 10 | disinclination to marriage” and her wish “to have no fixed occupation which might curtail |
| my freedom to study,” Sor Juana began her life as a nun with a brief stay in the order of the |
| Discalced Carmelites. She moved in 1669 to the more lenient Convent of Santa Paula of the |
| Hieronymite order in Mexico City, and there she took her vows. Sor Juana remained |
| cloistered in the Convent of Santa Paula for the rest of her life. |
| 15 | Convent life afforded Sor Juana her own apartment, time to study and write, and the | Párr. 2 |
| opportunity to teach music and drama to the girls in Santa Paula’s school. She also |
| functioned as the convent’s archivist and accountant. In her convent cell, Sor Juana |
| amassed one of the largest private libraries in the New World, together with a collection of |
| musical and scientific instruments. She was able to continue her contact with other scholars |
| 20 | and powerful members of the court. The patronage of the viceroy and vicereine of New |
| Spain, notably that of the marquis and marquise de la Laguna from 1680 to 1688, helped |
| her maintain her exceptional freedom. They visited her, favoured her, and had her works |
| published in Spain. For her part, Sor Juana, though cloistered, became the unofficial court |
| poet in the 1680s. Her plays in verse, occasional poetry, commissioned religious services, |
| 25 | and writings for state festivals all contributed magnificently to the world outside the |
| convent. |
| Sor Juana’s success in the colonial milieu and her enduring significance are due at | Párr. 3 |
| least in part to her mastery of the full range of poetic forms and themes of the Spanish |
| Golden Age. She was the last great writer of the Hispanic Baroque and the first great |
| 30 | exemplar of colonial Mexican culture. Her writings display the boundless inventiveness of |
| Lope de Vega, the wit and wordplay of Francisco de Quevedo, the dense erudition and |
| strained syntax of Luis de Góngora, and the schematic abstraction of Pedro Calderón de la |
| Barca. Sor Juana employed all of the poetic models then in fashion, including sonnets, |
| romances (ballad form), and so on. She drew on a vast stock of classical, biblical, |
| 35 | philosophical, and mythological sources. She wrote moral, satiric, and religious lyrics, |
| along with many poems of praise to court figures. Though it is impossible to date much of |
| her poetry, it is clear that, even after she became a nun, Sor Juana wrote secular love lyrics. |
| Her breadth of range—from the serious to the comical and the scholarly to the popular—is |
| equally unusual for a nun. Sor Juana authored both allegorical religious dramas and |
| 40 | entertaining cloak-and-dagger plays. Notable in the popular vein are the carols that she |
| composed to be sung in the cathedrals of Mexico City, Puebla, and Oaxaca. Sor Juana was |
| as prolific as she was encyclopedic. |
| Sor Juana placed her own stamp on Spanish 17th-century literature. All of the nun’s | Párr. 4 |
| poetry, however densely Baroque, exhibits her characteristically tight logic. Her |
| 45 | philosophical poems can carry the Baroque theme of the deceptiveness of appearances into |
| a defense of empiricism that borders on Enlightenment reasoning. Sor Juana celebrated |
| woman as the seat of reason and knowledge rather than passion. Her famous poem |
| “Hombres necios” accuses men of the illogical behaviour that they criticize in women. Her |
| many love poems in the first person show a woman’s disillusionment with love, given the |
| 50 | strife, pain, jealousy, and loneliness that it occasions. Other first-person poems have an |
| obvious autobiographical element, dealing with the burdens of fame and intellect. Sor |
| Juana’s most significant full-length plays involve the actions of daring, ingenious women. |
| Sor Juana also occasionally wrote of her native Mexico. The short play that introduces her |
| religious drama El divino Narciso blends the Aztec and Christian religions. Her various |
| 55 | carols contain an amusing mix of Nahuatl and Hispano-African and Spanish dialects. |
| Sor Juana’s most important and most difficult poem, known as Primero sueño, is | Párr. 5 |
| both personal and universal. The date of its writing is unknown. It employs the convoluted |
| poetic forms of the Baroque to recount the torturous quest of the soul for knowledge. In the |
| poem’s opening, as night falls, the soul is unchained from the body to dream. Over the |
| 60 | course of the night’s dreaming, the soul attempts unsuccessfully to gain total knowledge by |
| following the philosophical paths of Neoplatonism and Scholasticism. As the sun rises and |
| routs the night, the dream fades, and the body awakens, but the soul determines to persist in |
| its efforts. The last lines of the poem refer to a female “I,” which associates the foregoing |
| quest with its author. In fact, the entire 975-line poem, thick with erudition, attests to the |
| 65 | nun’s lifelong pursuit of learning. |
| The prodigiously accomplished Sor Juana achieved considerable renown in Mexico | Párr. 6 |
| and in Spain. With renown came disapproval from church officials. Sor Juana broke with |
| her Jesuit confessor, Antonio Núñez de Miranda, in the early 1680s because he had publicly |
| maligned her. The nun’s privileged situation began definitively to collapse after the |
| 70 | departure for Spain of her protectors, the marquis and marquise de la Laguna. In November |
| 1690, Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz, bishop of Puebla, published without Sor Juana’s |
| permission her critique of a 40-year-old sermon by the Portuguese Jesuit preacher António |
| Vieira. Fernández de Santa Cruz entitled the critique “Carta Atenagórica”. Using the female |
| pseudonym of Sister Filotea, he also admonished Sor Juana to concentrate on religious |
| 75 | rather than secular studies. |
| Sor Juana responded to the bishop of Puebla in March 1691 with her magnificent | Párr. 7 |
| self-defense and defense of all women’s right to knowledge, Respuesta a sor Filotea de la |
| Cruz. In the autobiographical section of the document, Sor Juana traces the many obstacles |
| that her powerful “inclination to letters” had forced her to surmount throughout her life. |
| 80 | Among the obstacles she discusses is having been temporarily forbidden by a prelate to |
| read, which caused her to study instead “everything that God has created, all of it being my |
| letters.” Sor Juana famously remarks, quoting an Aragonese poet and also echoing St. |
| Teresa of Ávila: “One can perfectly well philosophize while cooking supper.” She justifies |
| her study of “human arts and sciences” as necessary to understand sacred theology. In her |
| 85 | defense of education for women in general, Sor Juana lists as models learned women of |
| biblical, classical, and contemporary times. She uses the words of Church Fathers such as |
| St. Jerome and St. Paul, bending them to her purposes, to argue that women are entitled to |
| private instruction. Throughout Respuesta, Sor Juana concedes some personal failings but |
| remains strong in supporting her larger cause. Similarly, in the same year of 1691, Sor |
| 90 | Juana wrote for the cathedral of Oaxaca some exquisite carols to St. Catherine of |
| Alexandria that sing the praises of this learned woman and martyr. |
| Yet by 1694 Sor Juana had succumbed in some measure to external or internal | Párr. 8 |
| pressures. She curtailed her literary pursuits. Her library and collections were sold for alms. |
| She returned to her previous confessor, renewed her religious vows, and signed various |
| 95 | penitential documents. Sor Juana died while nursing her sister nuns during an epidemic. |
| Her story and accomplishments, however, have helped her live on. She now stands | Párr. 9 |
| as a national icon of Mexico and Mexican identity; her former cloister is a centre for higher |
| education, and her image adorns Mexican currency. Because of rising interest in feminism |
| and women’s writing, Sor Juana came to new prominence in the late 20th century as the |
| 100 | first published feminist of the New World and as the most outstanding writer of the Spanish |
| American colonial period. A woman of genius who, to paraphrase Virginia Woolf’s famous |
| recommendation for the female author, succeeded under hostile circumstances in creating a |
| “room of her own,” Sor Juana remains avidly read and deeply meaningful to the present |
| day. |
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| Referencia: |
| Merrim, S. (2019). Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Mexican Poet and Scholar. Encyclopedia Britannica. |
| [Fecha de consulta: 6 de febrero de 2020]. Recuperado de |
| https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sor-Juana-Ines-de-la-Cruz |
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