Juana Inés de la Cruz

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Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz by Miguel Cabrera

Sor Juana (November 12, 1651 [or 1648, according to some biographers] – April 17, 1695), also known as Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz or, in full, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz de Asbaje (or Asuaje) y Ramírez de Santillana, was a self-taught Novohispana scholar, nun, poet, and a writer of the baroque school.

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[edit] Biography

Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz Old House in Amecameca, State of Mexico in Mexico

The second story on the central tower was added in the 1800's after her life in this hacienda where her grandfather and mother brought her to live as an infant.

Juana de Asbaje y Ramirez Santillana was a natural-born (illegitimate) daughter of a nobleman and her mother, of more modest means, in the small village of San Miguel de Nepantla, near Amecameca (modern-day México State). Her grandfather acquired this property and Juana was raised here from infanthood: a gifted child who hid in the hacienda chapel to read her grandfather's books from the adjoining library, something forbidden to girls; she learned Latin before she was ten, and as a handsome adolescent mastered Greek logic.

The farm is now an outstanding site to visit, it is newly restored and managed by Swiss owners as Hacienda Panoaya, and they also raise evergreen trees, have a fantastic visitor's park and have resurrected a ruin to something thrilling, with a volcano museum to top off the experience, being that the house and farm are sited facing the Iztaccihuatl volcano near Popocatepetl. The views are staggeringly beautiful, and full crops of corn from the original farm fields are siloed in the back of Juana de Asbaje's childhood haunts. Enormous cedar windbreaks flank the orderly ten or twenty-hecatare tracts, and a promenade through the rows of trees is akin to a surreal and timeless voyage in beauty and nature.

There is unending debate as to whether she had a personal romantic life nuanced in her poems, or whether it was allegorical. She did have to join a convent to properly attend to the education of her gifted mind, as schooling was otherwise unavailable for women of her time.

She was exceptional not only for her intelligence and beauty, but also because she wrote literature centered on freedom. In the poem "Redondillas" she defends a woman's right to be respected as a human being. "Hombres necios" (Stubborn men) criticizes the sexism of the society of her time, and pokes fun at men who publicly condemn prostitutes, among other things, but privately hire them. She also has a philosophical approach to the relative immorality of prostitution. This was exemplified when she posed the question, 'Who sins more, she who sins for pay or he who pays for sin?' In the romantic comedy entitled Los empeños de una casa about a brother and a sister entangled in a web of love, she writes using two of her most prominent themes, love and jealousy. Yet, these emotions are not presented in a moralizing way, but in the spirit of her lifetime interests, including the pursuit of liberty, knowledge, and rights for women and their education.

Her independent thinking alarmed the oligarchy of the Roman Catholic Church, especially dangerous when one considers the historical context; it was the time of the Counter Reformation and anyone who challenged society's values could easily get into trouble with the Church. Later, things came to a climax in 1690, when a letter was published that attacked Sor Juana's focus on the sciences, and suggested that she should devote her time to theology.

However, various powerful representatives from the Spanish court were her mentors and she was widely read in Spain, being named the Tenth Muse and was actually the most prominent poet of the American Continent, the first printing press of the American Continent was also printing her work in Mexico City.


In response to the clergy who sought to reprimand her, Sor Juana wrote a letter entitled Respuesta a Sor Filotea in which she defended women's right to any education they desired. But she soon found that the Catholic Church was not at all sympathetic to her views. The Archbishop of Mexico joined other high-ranking officials in condemning Sor Juana's "waywardness". Finally around 1693, Sor Juana appears to have decided to stop writing rather than risk any further Church censure. There is no evidence of her actually renouncing her devotion to letters, and the documents of self-humiliation to which she supposedly put her name in 1694 have the tone of mere rhetorical formulae (one of these is signed "Yo, la peor del mundo" [I, the worst in the world). However, she chose to sell all of her books, an extensive library of some 4,000 volumes, as well as her musical and scientific instruments. Afterward she stopped writing. In April 1695, the plague-infested convent caused her demise after ministering to the other sisters with disease and she is said to have died at four in the morning on April 17.

[edit] Sor Juana Festival

In 1994, the National Museum of Mexican Art initiated the Sor Juana Festival: A Tribute to Mexican Women. The multidisciplinary festival, which includes: literature, music, visual arts, dance, and theater, honors the legacy of Sor Juana Inés de La Cruz and pays tribute to the rich artistic accomplishments of Mexican women from Mexico and the United States. In 1998, the National Museum of Mexican Art initiated the Sor Juana Women of Achievement Awards, honoring women of Mexican descent with extraordinary artistic, cultural and academic achievements. The festival is currently celebrated in Chicago, Austin, Houston and San Antonio with plans of further expansion into other states, making it the largest Mexican performing arts festival in the country and the only festival of its kind dedicated to Mexican women.

[edit] Fictionalized biographical treatments

Sor Juana's life was portrayed in the 1990 film Yo, la peor de todas ("I, The Worst Women of All") directed by María Luisa Bemberg[1]. Sor Juana was played by Spanish actress Assumpta Serna. Her life was fictionalized in Alicia Gaspar de Alba's 1999 work Sor Juana's Second Dream : A Novel. A 2004 novel by Canadian author Paul Anderson, Hunger's Brides, also deals with the life of Sor Juana. A play was also written based on her life and decision to convert; Los pecados de Sor Juana ("The Sins of Sor Juana") written by Karen Zacarías. In addition to a play, an opera entitled, With Blood, With Ink with music by Dan Crozier and a libretto by Peter Krask was completed in 1990 and performed at the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University[2]. The opera takes place on the night of Juana's death and flashes back to various pivotal moments in her life. There have been two dramatized biographical television series called Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, in 1962 and 2006.

[edit] The Traps of Faith

Statue of Sor Juana in Parque del Oeste, Madrid, Spain

Arguably the most important book devoted to Sor Juana is by Octavio Paz (who won the 1990 Nobel Prize in Literature). Paz's book, titled Sor Juana Or, the Traps of Faith,[3] is a work devoted to a contemplation of her poetry, life, and times in the context of the "other" history of New Spain.

Octavio Paz describes how he had been drawn to her work most of his life. Paz had long been intrigued by the enigmas of Sor Juana's personality and career. Why did she become a nun? How could she renounce her lifelong passion for writing and learning? Paz knew that such questions could be answered only in the context of the world in which she lived, and so he begins his study with a portrayal of the life and culture of New Spain and the political and ideological forces at work in that autocratic, theocratic, male-dominated society, in which the subjugation of women was absolute.

Just as Paz illuminates Sor Juana's life by placing it in its historical setting, so he situates her work in relation to the traditions that nurtured it. Paz singled out the qualities that distinguish her work and mark her uniqueness as a poet. For Octavio Paz, Sor Juana's writings, like her life, epitomize the struggle of the individual, and in particular the individual woman, for creative fulfillment and self-expression.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Yo, la peor de todas at the Internet Movie Database
  2. ^ Ten Years On A Return to With Blood, With Ink by Peter M. Krask
  3. ^ translated by Margaret Sayers Peden (Harvard University Press, 1989 ISBN 0-674-82105-X / paperback, 1990 ISBN 0-674-82106-8)

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juana_In%C3%A9s_de_la_Cruz"
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