The Autobiographical Project As Self-definition

Born Juana Ramírez de Azbaje, the illegitimate child of a Mexican-born mother, she began life on the margins of the rigidly hierarchical Counter-Reformation culture of Nueva España. In a society that was itself in a process of transition and self-definition, separated as it was from the European centers of the dominant culture, Sor Juana defined herself, and determined the course of all but the last two years of her life, within the possible modes of existence. She devoted much of her life to writing secular and religious poetry and to the study of theology, speculative philosophy, and natural science, all unusual for a woman and dangerous even for male writers in a Counter-Reformation Hispanic environment. The contradictions and silences in her writing are indications of the tensions generated by her confrontations with Counter-Reformation doctrines of humility, obedience, and ignorance as preferable to heresy. Sor Juana's self-definition extends even to the fact that most of the biographical details we have come from her own account in the Respuesta a Sor Filotea [response to Sor Filotea]. This is her view of herself, her self-portrait created in the image by which she chose to be remembered, written between the lines of an erudite letter defending her right to study and to make her work available to others.

Aware of how potentially disruptive a self-defined and articulate woman could be, Sor Juana's confessor, Antonio Núñez de Miranda, "having recognized her singular erudition together with her not inconsequential beauty . . . used to say that God could not send a greater scourge to Mexico than if he had allowed Juana Inés to remain in the public and secular world."^[5] The term Father Núñez de Miranda used was "la publicidad del siglo," and the theological debate in which the nun engaged in 1690 did bring her into the public sphere, not completely by her own choice.

Ironically, the confrontation with the church hierarchy ensuing from this particular debate began with the apparent encouragement of her superiors in 1690, when she wrote a critique of a sermon by the Portuguese Jesuit Antonio de Vieyra on Christ's greatest gift to mankind. Where her pursuits in the enclosed convent world intersected with the politicized sphere of theological discourse outside, the nun found herself trapped in a public light that, for a woman in her context, meant scandal. Her critique came to the attention of Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz, Bishop of Puebla, who published it without the nun's knowledge under the title Carta Atenagórica , meaning "worthy of Athena." At the same time he criticized Sor Juana for her participation

in theological debates, in a letter signed "Sor Filotea," applying St. Paul's prescription that women should keep silent and study only for the sake of learning, not with the purpose of teaching others. He advised Sor Juana to abandon secular studies for theology.

Sor Juana's defense, the well-known Respuesta a Sor Filotea (1691), confronts the issue of women's right to study and courageously affirms her scholarly dedication. Her clarity of reasoning, eloquence, and erudition are evident in this defense. But she also renounced her scholarly pursuits soon after writing the Respuesta and dispersed her library, one of the most extensive in the Americas at the time. The reasons for this renunciation are not clear, but most probably were a combination of pressure from ecclesiastical authority and a change in the power structure that had previously supported her work. Although the Respuesta was not published, only circulated, during Sor Juana's lifetime, her confessor Father Núñez withdrew his support from Sor Juana soon afterward.

Sor Juana's self-depiction and justification in the Respuesta is itself daring and dangerous, and each representation of her choices has a purpose. For example, she says that she was willing to dress as a boy in order to go to school and learn Latin. Latin was not only the language of learning but also the language of power, and her erudition won her entrance into the court of the viceroy and his wife, who became her patrons. While she was learning Latin at home, she says, she cut off an inch of her beloved hair each time she did not progress sufficiently: her perception of the relationship between female identity and access to power is evident. She was acclaimed and welcomed in the secular world, but decided to enter the convent because, as she says, given the "total antipathy she felt for marriage," convent life seemed "the least unsuitable and the most honorable" way of life she could choose. As the title of Electa Arenal's study of Sor Juana and other nuns of the period indicates, the convent was a "catalyst for autonomy," an environment in which, at least for a time, she could engage in intellectual work.^[6]

But in her self-representation, Sor Juana also depicts herself as defiant and unable to repress her intellectual curiosity. Having chosen religious life as a setting for intellectual work, she found that the church objected to her studies in natural science, the secular area of speculative philosophy that could not be controlled by theological doctrine and would eventually challenge it openly. When ordered to renounce her studies for a few months, Sor Juana says, she was unable to resist the pursuit of knowledge and made inadvertent scientific observations in the cooking of an egg or the contemplation of perspective in a convent dormitory. She jokingly speculates on how much more Aristotle would have written had he entered the kitchen.^[7] Her intellectual activity, ranging from the everyday to the most esoteric areas of theology, astronomy, mathematics, and speculative philosophy, brought her into areas the church hierarchy considered dangerous and potentially

heretical. Thus, there could be no adequate rebuttal to the implicit accusations in the letter by "Sor Filotea"; the nun's obedience to the church meant renunciation of the very intellectual work that had motivated her decision to renounce the "world" and enter the convent.

The interaction of the "world" and the convent in Sor Juana's life was complex and multidimensional. All her work, with the exception of the, Primero Sueño [First Dream ], as she explains in the Respuesta a Sor Filotea , was written on commission for religious or court festivities. Like most writers of her time, she was dependent upon the benevolence of her patrons, in her case patrons in the highest secular and religious positions. Unlike that of her male counterparts, her very writing—even her popular villancicos written for ecclesiastical festivities—was an act of defiance. She was a nun of the Jeronymite order, which allowed her the time and freedom to study and to receive educated and powerful visitors in her "salon," in the convent's public locutorio , where she could discuss intellectual and artistic questions. Nonetheless, her vows ultimately bound her to obedience to her superiors. When she was accused by the bishop of Puebla, disguised as a sisterly adviser, of devoting herself too much to worldly pursuits, the offense was clearly not her love poetry or her commissioned works for public ceremonies but her theological writing, her participation in an area where women as scholars were not permitted, and the accusation served as a warning that ultimately silenced her.

She refers to silence, and the dangers of misunderstanding its meaning, in her Respuesta , leaving the perceptive reader to wonder what she left unsaid:

. . . casi me he determinado a dejarlo al silencio, pero como éste es cosa negativa, aunque explica mucho con el énfasis de no explicar, es necesario ponerle algún breve rótulo para que se entienda lo que se pretende que el silencio diga; y si no, dirá nada el silencio, porque ése es su oficio: decir nada.

She then refers to St. Paul's experience of hearing words that he could not repeat:

No dice lo que vio, pero dice que no lo puede decir; de manera que aquellas cosas que no se pueden decir, es menester decir siquiera que no se pueden decir, para que se entienda que el callar no es no haber qué decir, sino no caber en las voces lo mucho que hay que decir.

[I . . . was sorely tempted to take refuge in silence. But as silence is a negative thing, though it explains a great deal through the very stress of not explaining, we must assign some meaning to it that we may understand what the silence is intended to say, for if not, silence will say nothing, as that is its very office, to say nothing . . . . [St. Paul] does not say what he heard; he says that he cannot say it. So that of things one cannot say, it is needful to say at least that they cannot be said, so that it may be understood that not speaking is not the same as having nothing to say, but rather being unable to express the many things there are to say.]^[8]