Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz

Juana Ines de Asbaje y Ramirez de Santillana was born on November 12, 1651, in San Miguel Nepantla, a hamlet on the slopes of the volcano Popocatepetl in the Viceroyalty of New Spain, in what is now the State of Mexico ^[1]. Her mother, Isabel Ramirez, was a criolla woman who managed a hacienda leased from the church; her father, Pedro Manuel de Asbaje, was a Basque captain who played no role in her upbringing. Juana was born out of wedlock, a circumstance she later acknowledged plainly, and she grew up in her maternal grandfather's household at the hacienda of Panoayan ^[2].

Her grandfather's library changed the course of her life. By her own account, written decades later, she learned to read at about the age of three by following an older sister to lessons and persuading the teacher to instruct her as well ^[3]. She devoured the books at Panoayan, taught herself Latin in a handful of lessons, and reportedly cut her own hair as punishment whenever she failed to learn as quickly as she wished. Hearing that the University of Mexico admitted only men, the young Juana begged her mother to send her to the capital dressed in male clothing so she could attend. The request was refused, but the appetite behind it never left her ^[3].

Around the age of eight she was sent to Mexico City to live with relatives. Her learning soon attracted attention, and by her mid-teens she had been received at the viceregal court as a lady-in-waiting to Leonor Carreto, the Marquise de Mancera ^[1]. Court chroniclers recorded an episode in which the viceroy assembled roughly forty professors of theology, philosophy, mathematics, and letters to examine the teenager; she answered their questions with a poise that became part of her legend ^[2].

For a gifted young woman in seventeenth-century New Spain, the paths available were narrow: marriage or the veil. Juana chose the veil, and she was candid about her reasons. In her later autobiographical writing she explained that she felt a total disinclination to marriage and that the convent was the least unsuitable option for someone who wished above all to live alone with her books ^[3].

In 1667 she entered the Discalced Carmelites, an austere order whose rigors damaged her health, and she withdrew after a few months. In February 1669 she professed instead at the Convent of Santa Paula of the Hieronymite order in Mexico City, taking the name Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz ^[1]. The Hieronymite house was comparatively relaxed: nuns kept private cells, could own books, receive visitors in the locutory, and employ servants. Sor Juana remained there for the rest of her life.

Her cell became one of the intellectual centers of the viceroyalty. She assembled a personal library that contemporaries described as among the largest in the Americas, along with maps, musical and mathematical instruments, and scientific apparatus ^[4]. Scholars, courtiers, and successive viceroys visited her at the convent grille, and she carried on correspondence with writers and thinkers in Mexico, Peru, and Spain ^[2]. She also served the convent in practical roles, keeping its financial accounts as archivist and treasurer for years ^[4].

Any account of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz achievements has to begin with the sheer range of her output. She wrote secular love lyrics, religious poetry, villancicos (carol sequences) commissioned by the cathedrals of Mexico City, Puebla, and Oaxaca, full-length comedies for the stage, sacramental allegories, and prose polemics ^[1]. Her comedy Los empenos de una casa (The Trials of a Household), first performed in 1683, is regarded as one of the finest Spanish-language plays of the colonial period, and its sharp-tongued servant characters and cross-dressing plot still hold the stage ^[5].

Her most ambitious poem, Primero sueno (First Dream), published in 1692, runs to nearly a thousand lines and follows the soul's nighttime flight as it attempts, and fails, to comprehend the whole of creation in a single act of understanding ^[2]. Written in the dense baroque style associated with the Spanish poet Luis de Gongora, it is also an intellectual self-portrait: a map of the limits of human knowledge drawn by someone who had tested them. Critics from Octavio Paz onward have treated it as the summit of her art ^[4].

Her fame crossed the Atlantic during her lifetime, which was rare for any colonial writer and nearly unheard of for a woman. The first volume of her collected works, Inundacion castalida, was published in Madrid in 1689 under the patronage of her friend Maria Luisa Manrique de Lara, Countess of Paredes and former vicereine of New Spain ^[1]. A second volume followed in Seville in 1692, and a third, posthumous volume appeared in Madrid in 1700. Spanish readers called her the Tenth Muse and the Phoenix of Mexico, titles that appeared on the printed editions themselves ^[5].

In 1690 the bishop of Puebla, Manuel Fernandez de Santa Cruz, published without her authorization a theological critique Sor Juana had written of a decades-old sermon by the celebrated Portuguese Jesuit Antonio Vieira. The bishop titled it the Carta atenagorica and prefaced it with a letter of his own, signed under the female pseudonym Sor Filotea de la Cruz, praising her intellect while admonishing her to devote herself to sacred rather than secular study ^[3].

Her reply, the Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz, written in March 1691, is the work on which much of her modern reputation rests. In it she recounted her lifelong hunger for learning, argued that the study of logic, physics, music, and mathematics prepared rather than distracted the mind for theology, and marshaled a catalogue of learned women from antiquity and scripture to defend a woman's right to study, write, and teach ^[3]. She noted wryly that even cooking had taught her natural philosophy, observing that Aristotle would have written more had he cooked. The Respuesta was not printed until the posthumous 1700 volume of her works, but it has since been read as one of the earliest sustained arguments for women's intellectual rights in the Western Hemisphere ^[4].

The same defiant intelligence runs through her famous satirical poem beginning "Hombres necios que acusais" (Foolish men who accuse), which indicts men for condemning in women the very conduct male desire provokes ^[2]. The poem remains among the most widely memorized verses in the Spanish language.

The publication of the Carta atenagorica drew Sor Juana into open conflict with powerful churchmen. Her longtime confessor, the Jesuit Antonio Nunez de Miranda, had already broken with her over her worldly writing, and the archbishop of Mexico, Francisco de Aguiar y Seijas, a severe moralist known for his hostility to secular theater and to women, disapproved of her fame ^[4]. Her strongest protectors at court had returned to Spain, leaving her exposed.

Around 1693 Sor Juana ceased to write for publication. In 1694 she renewed her religious vows, signed penitential documents (one, by tradition, in her own blood), and sold off her library and her musical and scientific instruments, with the proceeds given to charity ^[1]. Scholars continue to argue over how to read these acts: some see a coerced surrender to ecclesiastical pressure, others a genuine spiritual conversion, and others a strategic retreat by a woman who understood exactly how much room she had left. The discovery in the twentieth century of documents from her final years, including inventories showing she still possessed some books and money at her death, has kept the debate alive ^[4].

In the spring of 1695 an epidemic swept through the Convent of Santa Paula. Sor Juana stayed to nurse her sisters, contracted the disease herself, and died on April 17, 1695, at the age of forty-three ^[1]. She was buried in the convent, and her fellow scholar Carlos de Siguenza y Gongora delivered her funeral eulogy ^[2].

Interest in Sor Juana faded during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as baroque taste went out of fashion, then returned with force in the twentieth. Mexican scholars, led by Alfonso Mendez Plancarte, produced a modern critical edition of her complete works between 1951 and 1957, and the poet Octavio Paz devoted a landmark 1982 study, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz o las trampas de la fe (translated as Sor Juana: Or, the Traps of Faith), to her life and its meaning ^[4]. Feminist critics in Mexico, the United States, and Europe adopted the Respuesta as a founding text, and her image entered popular culture: since 1992 her portrait has appeared on Mexican banknotes, currently the 100-peso note ^[6].

Her physical world survives in part. The former Convent of Santa Paula in the historic center of Mexico City now houses the Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana, a private university named in her honor, and her birthplace at Nepantla is preserved as a cultural site; the town itself was renamed Nepantla de Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz ^[6]. Her life has inspired novels, plays, an opera, and the 1990 film Yo, la peor de todas (I, the Worst of All) by the Argentine director Maria Luisa Bemberg ^[5].

Anyone asking who was Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz encounters a figure who exceeded every category her age offered her: a self-taught scholar without access to a university, a court favorite who chose the cloister, a nun who wrote some of the era's most acute love poetry, and a colonial subject whose books were printed and reprinted in the imperial capital. The basic Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz facts, a hacienda childhood, a legendary examination at court, twenty-six years in a Hieronymite cell, silence, and an early death, frame a body of work that still speaks with unusual directness about knowledge, desire, and the cost of thinking freely ^[2].