Mexico's leading poet, essayist, and cultural critic writes of a
Mexican poet of another time and another world, the world of
seventeenth-century New Spain. His subject is Sor Juana Ines de la
Cruz, the most striking figure in all of Spanish-American colonial
literature and one of the great poets of her age.
Her life reads like a novel. A spirited and precocious girl, one
of six illegitimate children, is sent to live with relatives in the
capital city. She becomes known for her beauty, wit, and amazing
erudition, and is taken into the court as the Vicereine's protegee.
For five years she enjoys the pleasures of life at court--then
abruptly, at twenty, enters a convent for life. Yet, no recluse,
she transforms the convent locutory into a literary and
intellectual salon; she amasses an impressive library and collects
scientific instruments, reads insatiably, composes poems, and
corresponds with literati in Spain. To the consternation of the
prelates of the Church, she persists in circulating her poems,
redolent more of the court than the cloister. Her plays are
performed, volumes of her poetry are published abroad, and her
genius begins to be recognized throughout the Hispanic world.
Suddenly she surrenders her books, forswears all literary pursuits,
and signs in blood a renunciation of secular learning. The rest is
silence. She dies two years later, at forty-six.
Octavio Paz has 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? Such
questions can be answered only in the context of the world in which
she lived. Paz gives a masterly 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. With critical authority he singles out
the qualities that distinguish her work and mark her uniqueness as
a poet. To Paz her writings, like her life, epitomize the struggle
of the individual, and in particular the individual woman, for
creative fulfillment and self-expression.
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