About Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
1. Introduction
The seventeenth-century poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz may not for many of you be the most well-known writer on the Introduction to Hispanic Texts course, and perhaps only a few of you will have thought of choosing her as as a writer to work on in supervisions. So, in this lecture, I hope to show you:
· why I think her work is well worth studying in depth
· something of the uniqueness of her poetry
· the relevance of her thinking today, particularly the appropriation of her work that has been made for modern feminism.
The title I have given this lecture is DIFFERENCE and INDIFFERENCE. Some of the initial ideas I'd like to gather around these two poles are:
DIFFERENCE in the sense of - sexual difference (she forces us to change the way in which we read the cannon of male writers) - linguistic difference (her work is not, as some have claimed, a mere copy of contemporary Spanish styles) - socio-cultural difference (her work is not reducible to European literature and themes)
INDIFFERENCE in the sense of - a feminine strategy of resistance to male appropriation - denial of fixed sexual roles - a telling silence in her work on questions of theology and religion.
2. Context
Before going any further, however, it is necessary to give some sense of a context for Sor Juana's poetry. You can gain a sense of this by watching the film, Yo la peor de todas, made by the feminist Argentine director María Luisa Bemberg (available in the language laboratory; see also the video clip included on this website). This is a fairly accurate dramatization of Octavio Paz's major study Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, o, las trampas de la fe, which remains the fullest account of her life and work to date, and which you should dip into. I can only outline some of the major points here:
Seventeenth-century Mexico, known then as Nueva España, was a highly autocratic society, ruled by viceroys sent from Spain and rotated in practice every seven or eight years.
DIFFERENCE in the sense of - sexual difference (she forces us to change the way in which we read the cannon of male writers) - linguistic difference (her work is not, as some have claimed, a mere copy of contemporary Spanish styles) - socio-cultural difference (her work is not reducible to European literature and themes)
INDIFFERENCE in the sense of - a feminine strategy of resistance to male appropriation - denial of fixed sexual roles - a telling silence in her work on questions of theology and religion.
2. Context
Before going any further, however, it is necessary to give some sense of a context for Sor Juana's poetry. You can gain a sense of this by watching the film, Yo la peor de todas, made by the feminist Argentine director María Luisa Bemberg (available in the language laboratory; see also the video clip included on this website). This is a fairly accurate dramatization of Octavio Paz's major study Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, o, las trampas de la fe, which remains the fullest account of her life and work to date, and which you should dip into. I can only outline some of the major points here:
Seventeenth-century Mexico, known then as Nueva España, was a highly autocratic society, ruled by viceroys sent from Spain and rotated in practice every seven or eight years.
The arch-bishop held great power, and the Santo Oficio, or Holy Inquisition, was greatly feared (Sor Juana mentions it in a famous letter, saying that she does not wish to get into trouble with it).
The religious climate of Nueva España was much more orthodox than in Spain: Catholicism was a well implanted religion in Spain, but in the Americas it was relatively new.
The colonial state was highly centralized:
the indigenous people were governed by specific laws, and there were special statutes for different ethnic groups -- blacks, mulattoes, indians, mestizos, creoles, and Spaniards
religious orders were governed by specific laws, as were virtually all different social groups
ownership of land was strictly controlled -- much was owned by the Church, while the state was interested in preventing the rise of large, powerful, creole land-owners who might represent a source of antagonism to the rule of Spain.
Mexico City had a population of roughly 100,000, of which 20,000 were Spaniards and creoles, and 80,000 were indigenous, mestizos, and mulattoes.
It was the centre of education, with the University, only open to men, founded in 1551.
It was the seat of the viceregal Court, rivaled in importance only by the court of the Viceroyalty of Perú in Lima.
The Court was the centre of the moral, literary and aesthetic codes and conventions, and it is impossible to understand Sor Juana's poetry without realizing its importance:
Octavio Paz says that, of the three central institutions of the country -- the University, the Church, and the Court -- the Court represented an aesthetic and vital way of life, a "dramatic ballet whose characters were the human passions, from the sensual to the ambitious, dancing to a strict yet elegant geometry" (in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, o, las trampas de la fe).
One of the major themes of Sor Juana's work is knowledge, and in particular the right of women to have access to learning. In the context of seventeenth-century New Spain, however, knowledge is a dangerous commodity and one that is carefully controlled by the religious hierarchy, rigorously policed by the Holy Inquisition. Scientific knowledge poses a threat to the basis of religious power, as does any interpretation of Scripture that runs counter to the prevailing orthodoxy. In the hands of a woman, any claim to knowledge is triply suspect because access to knowledge of the "Divine Order" (whether scientific or theological) is strictly mediated through a patriarchal hierarchy of men. It is hardly surprising, then, to find that Sor Juana's meditations on knowledge are peppered throughout her work with silence, hermeticism, and contradiction.
The Court, in which Sor Juana spent four years of her adolescence, was the point of contact with Europe and European aristocratic culture; the Church was the controller and censor of knowledge and culture as ideological instruments, and was at times in conflict with the more liberal atmosphere of the Court. Sor Juana's work negotiates a precarious feminine space between these competing institutions. For the culture they controlled was almost entirely a masculine culture. Its writers were men and its readers were men. The doors of the educational institutions were entirely locked for women. This is why it is so extraordinary that the greatest writer to emerge from Nueva España, the first great poet of Spanish America, should have been a woman.
4. Playing with form
To fully understand Sor Juana's work, it is necessary to understand something of the literary concerns of her time, and the way in which she plays with those concerns. Some of the main terms associated with the literature of Sor Juana's time are:
Gongorismo
Culteranismo
The Baroque
Gongorismo is a literary style named after the famous Golden Age Spanish poet Luis de Góngora. Sor Juana very much admired his work, and her great poem "Primero sueño" is in some senses a homage to Góngora's "Soledad primera".
Culteranismo is virtually synonymous with gongorismo: the style involves extreme complexity of imagery and metaphor, with neologisms and archaisms. In many ways it is a feast of language, an excess of the signifier over the signified, and it is one aspect of ...
The Baroque: this term is widely used to describe the music and literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and denotes a style in which an exuberance of detail represents a celebration of the signifying material of the work of art, be it wood, stone, paint, word, or sound.
Baroque art is obsessed with form to the extent that form itself can often become the content, the raison d'être, of the work of art
the wealth of detail and decoration become concerns in themselves, appear for their own sake rather than being motivated by the need to get a message across
Baroque poetry does not just employ metaphors of things, but instead metaphors of metaphors, or even metaphors of metaphors of metaphors
poems written in this style, such as those of Góngora and Sor Juana, do not just use tropes, but instead they trope their own troping activity (an ugly phrase, meaning simply that the very activity of using tropes and figures often becomes the subject of the art form, revelling in the excess of signifier over signified)
Baroque poetry delights in the rhythm and sound of words, in their materiality or palpability (the sense that you can almost feel or touch them)
modern theorists have defined this highlighting of the materiality of signs and sounds as one of the most basic aspects of all poetry -- the twentieth-century linguist Roman Jakobson defined poetry in this way when he wrote that "the poetic function promotes the palpability of signs".
It should now be possible to use some of these ideas in our discussion of Sor Juana's poems and their manipulation of literary form.
Poem 61 "Que pinta la proporción hermosa de la Excelentísima Señora condesa de Paredes" provides a very good example of a number of these concerns. The poem has a distinctive formal feature: it is written entirely in lines that commence with esdrújulas. These are words which are stressed on the antepenultimate syllable (three syllables from the end), and they are a relatively rare word form in Spanish (the technical word for them in English is "proparoxytone"). Examples are círculo, pólvora, fórmula, sílaba, but let's look at how Sor Juana uses them (these are the first four stanzas of an eighteen-stanza poem -- do not worry about the complex meaning of the words at this stage, just read it for its sound and let the images wash over you):
61
Pinta la proporción hermosa de la Excelentísima señora condesa de Paredes [. . .]
Lámina sirva el cielo al retrato, Lísida, de su angélica forma: cálamos forme el sol de sus luces; sílabas las estrellas compongan. Cárceles tu madeja fabrica: Dédalo que sutilmente forma vínculos de dorados Ofires, Tíbares de prisiones gustosas. Hécate, no triforme, mas llena, pródiga de candores asoma; trémula no en tu frente se oculta, fúlgida su esplendor desemboza. Círculo dividido en dos arcos, pérsica forman lid belicosa; áspides que por flechas disparan, víboras de halagüeña ponzoña.
[. . .]
The poem was probably written as a tour de force, a piece of verbal pyrotechnics designed to elicit the response "¡Vaya inteligencia!", and indeed it is extremely clever. Apart from the esdrújula form, clearly delighting in the rhythm and sounds of the words for their own sake, the poem sets up, in true Baroque style, a series of more and more elaborate images, similes, and metaphors, to describe the beautiful Lísida (Lysis), whose portrait is supposedly being "painted" by these lines. Many of these images push the bounds of similarity and comparison, threatening to swamp the "portrait" with improbable images. Many of the images are, indeed, comments on the poem's image-making process (its troping activity), and this time let's read with the emphasis on the meaning of the images (look at the translation if you need help):
Lámina sirva el cielo al retrato, Lísida, de su angélica forma: cálamos forme el sol de sus luces; sílabas las estrellas compongan. Cárceles tu madeja fabrica: Dédalo que sutilmente forma vínculos de dorados Ofires, Tíbares de prisiones gustosas. [. . .] Cátedras del abril, tus mejillas, clásicas dan a mayo, estudiosas: métodos a jazmines nevados, fórmula rubicunda a las rosas. Lágrimas del aurora congela, búcaro de fragancias, tu boca: rúbrica con carmines escrita, cláusula de coral y de aljófar.
May Heaven serve as plate for the engraving portraying, Lysis, your angelic figure; may the sun turn its beams into quills, may all the stars compose their syllables. Your skein of locks is as a prison-house, a Cretan labyrinth that twists and curls in webbings of golden Ophirs, in Tibbars of fair prison-cells. [. . .] Your cheeks are April's lecture halls, with classic lessons to impart to May: recipes for making jasmine snowy, formulas for redness in the rose. In your mouth Aurora's chill tears are kept in a many-scented vase; its rubric is written in carmine, its clause penned in coral and pearl.
Translated by Alan Trueblood
Just looking at the vocabulary of the poem, there are many words to do with form, method, style, writing -- some eighteen in all (e.g., retrato, forma, cálamos [=quills], sílabas, compongan, triforme, transforma, fórmula, cláusula, etc.). These suggest that the poem is as much about the act of portraying Lysis as it is about the countess herself.
Perhaps even more interesting than this emphasis on form is the imagery of labyrinths and prisons that runs throughout the poem. Words associated with prison and fixing are: cárceles, dédalo (labyrinth), prisiones, confinantes, congela, aprisiona, Tántalo (Tantalus, imprisoned in Hades), clausura. It is as if the very attempt to fix the image of Lysis in words represented a kind of imprisonment, with the beloved caught both in the labyrinths of poetical language and in the prisonhouse of desire.
While I have looked at this poem in terms of its play with form, issues of gender are also subtly hinted at. Addressing the beloved as Lísida (Lysis) clearly places the poem within the rhetorical conventions of Golden Age love poetry, but those conventions now threaten to become a subtle prison. It is the woman who is trapped within an incarcerating linguistic system, fixed and represented, but somehow lost behind the elaborate symbolic system. Moreover, the lines which absurdly compare the beloved's cheeks with a University Classics lesson are not just rhetorical play: Sor Juana was acutely aware that women were excluded from the lecture halls of the University (she declared in her famous letter that from an early age she had been aware of this as an injustice). To force the comparison between female beauty and the seats of learning from which women were excluded is to create a jarring image which must call into question the conventional assignments of femininity and aesthetics, masculinity and knowledge, as well as call into question the very modes of representation that depend on such a system.
Poem 126 is a simpler, but very intense, version of the ideas presented in the previous poem:
126 En un anillo retrató a la señora condesa de Paredes; dice por qué
Este retrato que ha hecho copiar mi cariño ufano, es sobrescribir la mano lo que tiene dentro el pecho: que, como éste viene estrecho a tan alta perfección, brota fuera la afición; y en el índice la emplea, para que con verdad sea índice del corazón.
Note the ambiguity of the word sobrescribir here: the poem and/or portrait (for the poem claims to be a miniature painting on a ring, of the type that lovers might have sent to each other when separated by long distances) is an over-writing, a writing in excess, which threatens at the same time to overwrite or expunge that which it would express -- her affection and love. The theme of this poem clearly illustrates the baroque idea of excess -- here writing or painting as an excess of the signifier, an overflow which does not 'fit' the body.
You should now be able to do for yourselves similar analyses for poems 127, 102, and 195.
Check more in Amazón
You Foolish Men
You foolish men who laythe guilt on women,not seeing you're the causeof the very thing you blame;
if you invite their disdainwith measureless desirewhy wish they well behaveif you incite to ill.
You fight their stubbornness,then, weightily,you say it was their lightnesswhen it was your guile.
In all your crazy showsyou act just like a childwho plays the bogeymanof which he's then afraid.
With foolish arroganceyou hope to find a Thaisin her you court, but a Lucretiawhen you've possessed her.
What kind of mind is odderthan his who mistsa mirror and then complainsthat it's not clear.
Their favour and disdainyou hold in equal state,if they mistreat, you complain,you mock if they treat you well.
No woman wins esteem of you:the most modest is ungratefulif she refuses to admit you; yet if she does, she's loose.
You always are so foolish your censure is unfair;one you blame for crueltythe other for being easy.
What must be her temperwho offends when she'sungrateful and wearieswhen compliant?
But with the anger and the griefthat your pleasure tellsgood luck to her who doesn't love youand you go on and complain.
Your lover's moans give wingsto women's liberty:and having made them bad,you want to find them good.
Who has embracedthe greater blame in passion?She who, solicited, falls,or he who, fallen, pleads?
Who is more to blame,though either should do wrong?She who sins for payor he who pays to sin?
Why be outraged at the guiltthat is of your own doing?Have them as you make themor make them what you will.
Leave off your wooing and then, with greater cause,you can blame the passionof her who comes to court?
Patent is your arrogance that fights with many weaponssince in promise and insistenceyou join world, flesh and devil.
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