Undoubtedly there were many more women writing works of literature in colonial Spanish America than those whose names appear in our records from Hispaniola (the presentday Dominican Republic), from Peru, and from New Spain (Mexico). And it is no accident that the names preserved derive precisely from those geographical areas where, in different periods, the major cultural centers were located. It was especially in these centers that women insisted on their right to be heard and read, along with the men who did most of the writing. If our records are fragmentary and sometimes names have been lost, this is due to a strong tradition that held literature to be a realm in which women were not supposed to be active, a tradition that was reluctant to accept those women who dared to cross cultural boundaries in their desire to make themselves known literarily. In Spanish America people generally followed the customs of Spain, where "Maidens and decent ladies were expected to live in the custody of severe domestic guard ians—husbands, fathers, or brothers—who, in order to keep their own manly honor above suspicion, were obliged to keep their charges under lock and key, in the tradition of Arabs and Turks, or to have them always accompanied by squires or duennas." Nonetheless, we need only recall that Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, our supreme example of the Hispanic woman's effort to participate in a literary world where she could measure herself intellectually with men, is neither a unique case nor a miracle; her case is "a peak, not in a plain, but in a mountain range." For reasons that may have something to do with the shift from Renaissance to Baroque thought, the fate of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz was fortunately not the same as that of the earlier Clarinda and Amarilis, literary names that are the only way we have of identifying two excellent Peruvian poetesses. Sor Juana, even though her literary reputation has suffered from the critical ups and downs of culteranismo, never had to conceal her own name and has always been fully recognized as a major figure in Mexican and Hispanic letters.

Sor Juana, as we know, openly and deliberately refused to be involved in the activities usually assigned to her sex when, as a nun, she insisted on devoting herself fully to the life of the mind. She … claimed her neuter status as a virgin, free from the domination of any man, and thus established her fundamental liberty:

(I don't understand these matters; all I know is that I came here so that, if in fact I am a woman, no one could find it out. I also know that, in Latin, only married women are called uxor or feminine, and that virgin is of common gender, neither masculine nor feminine. So

I do not consider it proper to be considered a woman, for I am not a woman to serve as wife to any man; and I only know that my body without inclining to one sex or another, is neuter or abstract, solely the dwelling of my soul.)

The final stanza reminds us of what Calderón himself had said: "So let them fight and study, for to be brave and learned is a matter of the soul, and the soul is neither male nor female." Maria de Zayas took advantage of this in her struggle for women in her day, as did Sor Juana later on in a poem she addressed to the Countess de Paredes (no. 403):

(Neither being a woman nor being far away keeps me from loving you, for, as you know, souls are ignorant of distance and of gender.)

To give the title of the "Tenth Muse" to Maria de Zayas and to Sor Juana (and to Anne Bradstreet, too, in colonial New England), favored in those days as a way of recognizing distinction in women who had made their mark in literature, was a somewhat ambiguous act. It combined the ideas of being abnormal and of being a woman or mother, reinforced in the case of Sor Juana by her status as a nun. We may wonder whether the glory accorded to this woman in her own day, in a post-Renaissance period, was due to her genius itself or to those Baroque ideas of being unusual, extraordinary, and amazing in a topsy-turvy world. She herself seems to have suspected this when, after several lines of false modesty, she writes the following (no. 506):

(Unless it be that my sex, so peculiar, could or would be the cause for the extraordinary to be accepted as perfection.)

Many different examples can be found in Sor Juana's writings of her active concern for women's status, of her identification with her sex. In fact, I think that we may say that the whole of her literary production is permeated by her feminine consciousness of her society's patriarchal character and of her exceptional status as a female writer and intellectual. I therefore cannot accept what has sometimes been asserted: that she wished to be identified with the masculine sex. Born a woman and an intellectual, what she did do was to assert herself and demand the same rights that were conceded to enlightened men. She did not resign herself to being a female poet with no rights or opinions of her own within the paternalistic system; she was a woman who offered, who continues to offer, "a series of suggested alternatives to the male-dominated membership and attitudes of the accepted canon." The conviction that she had of her own capacity and her consequent desire for recognition as a woman intellectually comparable to men led her to rectify, by her own practice, the prejudice against women and to demonstrate by example what a woman writer was capable of achieving within the level of Golden Age literature. She did all this in a way that still moves us, by not accepting her "natural" condition of being what a woman was supposed to be but by showing what a woman could become culturally. She did not write specifically for women "sewing by parlor lamp-light," but instead managed to place her books on the library shelves of her period's intellectual men. In her poetry and prose she uses the stylistic and syntactic devices found in her feminine predecessors in the New World, her "native land": false modesty, catalogues of illustrious women, contradictions, indirect ways of insinuating facts, sisterhood. But our Mexican nun, taking up the battle begun by women before her, did not limit herself to the more or less subtle characteristics of feminine writing; she went much further.

On only a few occasions did Sor Juana speak out directly against men. The most famous examples of this are her quatrains beginning Hombres necios (Foolish Men), and even this poem can be seen as part of the pastoral tradition, in combination with her feminist concerns. What really mattered to her was to give to the feminine sex a literary and intellectual status equal to that of men, as can be seen explicitly or implicitly throughout her works.

In the light of all this, and especially of recent feminist criticism focusing on the modes of expression used by the writer as woman, it is revealing to reread Sor Juana's beloved "papelillo" or "scrap of paper," her Sueño or Dream. It is true that, in this, her most important poem, she presents intellectual concerns that are not limited to woman but belong to the human race in general, concerns always considered essential to man's thought, such as how to establish knowledge of a universal sort. In so doing, she converts her protagonist, the Soul, into pure intellect engaged in reflections of a universal sort. But at the same time we can detect—and not only in the definitive last line of the poem, "el mundo iluminado, y yo despierta" (the world bathed in light, and the feminine I awake)—other emphases and characteristics that give evidence of the woman behind the pen that did the writing: "Feminine values penetrate and undermine the masculine systems that contain them." Rosa Perelmuter Pérez, arguing against the impersonal character of the poem, has found in the Sueno many deictics that indicate the more or less veiled presence of the writer as she intervenes in the poem's discourse.

The first thing to attract my attention in this rereading of the Sueño was the preponderance and importance of feminine characters and of feminine nouns. Naturally, in the latter case it is a matter of Spanish grammar: all of us have to use nouns of both genders. And yet it is not easy to explain the fact that this poet, perhaps unconsciously, preferred feminine nouns in a proportion far exceeding that of masculine nouns. As for the feminine characters, what is most interesting is the significance she attributes to them, their relevance within their context, and their importance. If multiplicity and variety, besides being Baroque, can be considered characteristics of women's writing, there is no doubt that Sor Juana was doubly at home as she wrote this poem.

Immediately after the opening lines, with two feminine nouns—"Piramidal, funesta, de la tierra / nacida sombra …" (the funereal, pyramidal shadow born of the earth, that tries in vain to scale the stars [also feminine])—the moon makes her appearance, but the shadow cannot reach her either (lines 9-13):

que su atezado ceño
al superior convexo aun no llegaba
del orbe de la diosa
que tres veces hermosa
con tres hermosos rostros ser ostenta …

(whose dark frown could not even reach the upper curve of the orb of that goddess who shows herself to be thrice beautiful with three beautiful faces …)

The moon is presented in her triple mythological role of the goddess of three faces: as Hecate in the sky; as Diana on Earth; and as Proserpina in the underworld. Thus, Sor Juana establishes, from the beginning of the poem, a universe where woman rules as a cosmic force. (And she will return to Proserpina later on, as we shall see.)

In this prologue, which we have entitled "Night and the cosmos go to sleep," the birds of night are the next to appear. Unlike other such passages in Golden Age poetry, these birds are all associated with mythological figures, and all of them except Ascalaphus are female. Although all of these figures, the sinister companions of Night, are presented with negative connotations, we can perceive a tone of sympathy for the feminine characters. It is probably no accident that Sor Juana, an illegitimate daughter who hardly knew her father, lists among the birds of night a certain Nyctimene, punished by being turned into an owl for her crime of incest with her father (lines 27-28):

la avergonzada Nictimene acecha
de las sagradas puertas los resquicios …

(shameful Nyctimene lurks about the cracks in the sacred doors …)

Our nun-poet seems to present a somewhat ambivalent image of this character. On the one hand, she tries to attenuate her crime, perhaps in a gesture of feminine solidarity, by using the adjective "avergonzala" which evokes our sympathy insofar as it suggests arrepentida (repentant or remorseful), which, according to the Diccionario de autoridades, was one of the word's meanings in the Golden Age. But, on the other hand, in the lines that follow she also calls Nyctimene "sacrilegious" as she relates her to the chaste, intellectual figure of Minerva, where olive oil (the olive tree is referred to periphrastically as "el árbol la Minerva", Minerva's tree). Nyctimene drinks from the temple's lamps.

Let us now read closely four lines from this passage which refer to the daughters of Minyas, who worked so hard that they ignored the festivities due to the deity of Bacchus and were punished by being transformed into bats (lines 47-50):

aquellas tres oficïosas, digo,
atrevidas hermanas,
que el tremendo castigo
de desnudas les dio pardas membranas …

(I mean those three industrious, daring sisters who received the awful punishment of dark, naked membranes …)

According to the above-mentioned dictionary, oficïoso meant both of ficious and industrious. This is the ambiguity underlying Sor Juana's treatment of the three sisters: she recognizes the hardworking virtue of their overzealous vice, which cost them so dearly. The word "to mendo" (awful) seems to imply that the punishment was disproportionate to the crime. This ambiguity or doubt in the mind of the poet is emphasized by her presence in the word "digo," a rhetorical figura correctionis that makes us aware of the writer's self-consciousness.

As for the figure of Ascalaphus, "el parlera ministro de Pluton" (Pluto's garrulous minister), who betrayed Proserpina and hence was transformed into an owl by her, I will only note at this point that the poet has chosen a masculine character who was punished for what has been considered to be one of the vices most characteristic of women: being too talkative.

As she follows the coming of night, which slowly covers the whole world, preparing it for sleep, Sor Juana next speaks to us of the sea (lines 86-94):

El mar, no ya alterado

…..

y los dormidos, siempre mudos, peces,
en los lechos lamosos
de sus obscuros senos cavernosos,
mudos eran dos veces;
y entre ellos, la engañosa encantadora
Almone …

(The sea, no longer disturbed … and the sleeping fish, always mute, in the slimy beds of their dark and cavernous recesses were twice mute; and among them, the deceptive enchantress Almone …)

The latter is the only fish to which the poet attributes a name, a name that places her within a mythological tradition according to which she was known as deceptive. At the same time, in contrast to this negative attribute, the poet asserts the ambiguous charm of the enchantress.

As we enter the section of the poem that deals with man's intellectual sleep or dream (for in Spanish the word sueño is related etymologically and semantically to both Latin words somnus and somnium), the poet devotes a series of beautiful lines to the evocation of sleep's, and death's, leveling power, which ranges from the grammatically feminine symbol of power (line 184: "la soberana tiara," the sovereign tiara) to the grammatically feminine symbol of humility (line 185: "la pajiza choza," the straw hut). Immediately afterward there comes to center stage "el Alma" (the Soul), also grammatically feminine, although it theoretically represents the neuter intellect which joins both sexes and genders, as for example in line 293: "su inmaterial ser y esencia bella" (her immaterial being and beautiful essence; the first noun masculine and the second feminine). But, as a matter of fact, the Soul, "de lo sublunar reina soberana" (line 439: sovereign queen of everything under the moon), which will be the protagonist of this Baroque attempt to grasp the whole cosmos in a philosophical or scientific way, is a constantly feminine character that, like Sor Juana herself, combines intelligence and beauty in "sus intelectuales bellos ojos" (line 441: her intellectual, beautiful eyes).

In the lines that follow, which deal with the lighthouse of Alexandria, feminine nouns are emphasized even more: "la terse superficie" (the smooth surface) of "la azogada luna" (the quicksilvered plateglass) upon which Fantasy does her industrious labor (lines 280-91):

así ella, sosegada, iba copiando
las imágenes todas de las cosas,
y el pincel invisible iba formando
de mentales, sin luz, siempre vistosas
colores, las figuras
no sólo ya de todas las criaturas
sublunares, mas aun también de aquellas
que intelectuales claras son estrellas,
y en el modo posible
que concebirse puede lo invisible,
en sí, mañosa, las representaba
y al Alma las mostraba.

(Thus she calmly proceeded to copy the images of all the things, and her invisible brush began to sketch, with mental, lightless color s always showy, the outlines not only of all sublunary creatures, but also of those which are bright intellectual stars, and insofar as the invisible can possibly be conceived of, within herself she skillfully represented them and showed them to the Soul.)

This whole passage is highly significant as an example of how the nun's baroque language, centered around a feminine protagonist, becomes scientifically analytical and precise.

Another feminine noun worthy of note is the pair of pyramids that, as the poet explains (line 403), "especies son del alma intencionales" (are the intentional faculties of the soul) aspiring to reach the "Primera Causa" (line 408: First Cause), a feminine noun here used to refer to a traditionally masculine God as creative power. A similarly feminine circumlocution for God the Creator is "Sabia Poderosa Mano" (line 670: the Wise and Powerful Hand). And close to God we find Thetis, a mythological sea goddess and mother figure, performing an essentially female function as she offers "sus fértiles pechos maternales" (lines 627-28: her fertile maternal breasts) to vegetation, the first level of Creation, extracting "los dulces … manantiales de humor terrestre" (lines 630-31 : sweet springs of earthly water) as nourishing irrigation. And before finally mentioning the human being as the culmination of Creation, she refers to him or her by means of these feminine abstractions: "Naturaleza pura" (line 661: the essence of Nature), "bisagra engarzadora" (line 659: the linking hinge, that is, the mediator between God and subhuman creatures), and "fábrica portentosa" (line 677: the prodigious structure), a series of three feminine nouns displacing the usually masculine man. Similar feminine circumlocutions are found in "espantosa máquina inmensa" (lines 770-71: immense and fearful machine) for the cosmos, and "cerulea plana" (line 949: blue sheet of paper) for the sky, replacing Gongora's similar but masculine metaphor (Soledad I, line 592: "papel diáfano del cielo").

Let us now review a few lines appearing in the section we have entitled "Intellectual Sobriety," a section particularly rich in feminine characteristics. Sor Juana, who was probably at this point following the Florentine Platonic tradition that asserted knowledge to be impossible unless revealed to the soul, has by now in her poem described two different methods of seeking truth—Plato's intuitive method and Aristotle's discursive or analytical method—both of them failures. She goes on to say (lines 704-11):

(These levels, then, [the Soul] would try sometimes to analyze, but other times she dissented, judging it to be excessively daring for one to analyze everything who could not understand even the smallest, accessible aspects of the most tangible natural phenomena …)

She goes on to offer us two examples of those simple aspects of nature that the human mind is incapable of comprehending: the underground course of a spring, personified mythologically as Arethusa, and the feminine flower.

Arethusa, a Nereid or nymph who was transformed into a spring so that she could flee the persecution of the river Alpheus, had asked Diana, the chaste goddess, to help her escape in this way, to go underground and there to proceed (lines 715-22):

deteniendo en ambages su camino
—los horrorosos senos
de Plutón, las cavernas pavorosas
del abismo tremendo,
las campañas hermosas,
los Elíseos amenos,
tálamo ya de su triforme esposa,
clara pesquisidora registrando …

(as she slowed down and began to wander about—examining as a bright investigator the dark chambers of Pluto, the frightful caverns of the awful abyss, the beautiful Elysian fields so pleasant, now the wedding bed of his threefold bride …)

This bride is, of course, Proserpina, the daughter of Ceres, goddess of agriculture and abundance. Proserpina (Persephone in Greek) was abducted by Pluto, the god of the underworld, while she was playing on a meadow with her sisters, and was taken away to "the awful abyss." Arethusa, turned into an underground spring as she passed through "the dark chambers of Pluto," saw her down there, and when she came to the surface in Sicily she told Ceres where her daughter was. Ceres, wishing to save her favorite daughter, begged permission from Jupiter, Proserpina's father, to go down into the underworld to rescue her, but he set one condition: that Proserpina must not have eaten anything in Pluto's realm (a harsh condition discriminating against woman, strangely reminiscent of the fruit forbidden to Eve). When Ceres reaches the underworld, Proserpina was beginning to eat a pomegranate and had in fact already swallowed a few grains. The person who told Jupiter about this was Ascalaphus, later changed into an owl by Proserpina as punishment. After all that had transpired, the only thing Ceres could settle for was to have her daughter stay with her for half of each year, spending the rest of the year at the side of the man who, by rape, had made her his bride.

It is impossible, it seems to me, to attribute to mere chance the fact that Sor Juana chose precisely such mythological characters as these to illustrate the intellectual argument of her great poem. Their relevant characteristics are the motherly love identified with Ceres, the bond of sisterhood between her and Arethusa, Proserpina's filial loyalty to her mother, and also the abundance represented by the mother figure; and these feminine figures suffer at the hands of the masculine figures who intervene in their lives. Let us read closely the following passage, in which "the bright investigator" of the underworld reports to Ceres the whereabouts of her daughter (lines 723-29):

útil curiosidad, aunque prolija,
que de su no cobrada bella hija
noticia cierta dio a la Rubia Diosa,
cuando montes y selvas trastornando,
cuando prados y bosques inquiriendo,
su vida iba buscando
y del dolor su vida iba perdiendo.

(a useful curiosity, though prolix, which yielded positive news of her beautiful unfound daughter to the Blond Goddess when, searching high and low through woods and forests, inquiring of meadows and groves, she was seeking for her beloved and was losing her life in grief.)

In addition to Sor Juana's usual emphasis on the positive characteristics of her feminine figures, here we have a striking example of her capacity to bring together in a single complex reflection two different aspects of her own personality: her concern about being a woman and her concern about being an intellectual. Let us recall what she tells us in her Reply to the bishop about the scientific discoveries she made while she was in the kitchen or on the playground watching girls spin a top, discoveries leading her to consider the advantages of being a woman and having access to fields of observation closed to men, to a fuller perspective on the world: "If Aristotle had been a cook, he would have written a great deal more." In this case, too, Sor Juana's ultimate purpose is to give us an example to illustrate a philosophic point about the limitations of human knowledge, an example based on observing underground water coming up from a spring. For this she chooses a feminine character, Arethusa, and brings her into a personal relationship involving intimate maternal feelings of suffering for a lost daughter.

The other example she uses to illustrate the same epistemological concerns is that of the "breve flor," or short-lived flower, a variation on a similar feminine theme: when she mentions "her fragile beauty," we cannot help thinking of the traits traditionally attributed to woman as a "weak and lovely being." It is easy for us to imagine, behind the following lines of Baroque poetry, a seventeenth-century nun bent over a flowerpot on the window-sill of her convent cell, concentrating her attention on the most beautiful carnation, and trying in vain to comprehend it (lines 733-41):

… mixtos, por qué, colores
—confundiendo la grana en los albores—
fragante le son gala;
ámbares por qué exhala,
y el leve, si más bello,
ropaje al viento explica,
que en una y otra fresca multiplica
hija, formando pompa escarolada
de dorados perfiles cairelada …

(not knowing why mixed colors—combining crimson with white light—adorn it with fragrance; why it exhales perfumes and unfold in the wind its loveliest thin garment, multiplying itself in one new daughter after another, forming a frilly fringe fluted with bold streaks …)

She notes, incidentally, the flower's reproductive function, multiplying itself in daughters, and then immediately decides to follow the Renaissance poetic tradition of comparing the carnation's combination of red and white to women's cosmetics, using the flower as an exemplum in a sermon against the dangers of deception (lines 751-56):

preceptor quizá vano
—si no ejemplo profano—
de industria femenil que el más activo
veneno hace dos veces ser nocivo
en el velo aparente
de la que finge tez resplandeciente.

(a reproof perhaps in vain—if not a bad example—of feminine wiles that make the deadliest poison doubly noxious in the deceptive veil of a fictiously glowing complexion.)

These are the incidental thoughts that occur to Sor Juana as she comments on how problematic it is for human science, which cannot understand a single, simple object, to try to comprehend the entire universe. From the topos of the rose, traditionally compared with woman because of her fleeting, fragile beauty and her cosmetics, the poet moves in a sophisticated leap to epistemological questions of philosophy. This gives us insight into how an extraordinary nun in New Spain invents a new feminine rhetoric to theatricalize everyday aspects of women's lives, making them significantly relevant to the adventures of scientific thought.

Let us turn now to the final section of the poem, the dramatic battle between night and day. Before the appearance of the "father of burning light" in line 887, Sor Juana has three feminine characters precede the sun: Venus, the planet goddess representing intelligence, love, and female beauty; Aurora, the goddess of the dawn; and Night, also, like Aurora, presented as an Amazon (lines 895-906):

(But first the lovely peaceful star of Venus broke the dawn, and the fair bride of aged Tithonus—an Amazon clad in many rays, armed against the Night, lovely while daring, brave though tearful—showed her beautiful forehead crowned with morning light, a vigorous though tender prelude to the fiery star …)

Venus leads the way and helps Aurora show her ray-crowned head in an attack on Night. Aurora sheds tears of dew, in a traditional way, but Sor Juana is innovative in having her armed and brave, vigorous in her onslaught as she leads the fight against Night—also an Amazon, but dark (lines 914-16):

y con nocturno cetro pavoroso
las sombras gobernaba,
de quien aun ella misma se espantaba.

(and with her fearsome nocturnal scepter she ruled the shadows, which frightened even her.)

Upon the attack of "la bella precursora signífera del sol … tocando al arma todos los süaves / si bélicos clarines de las aves" (lines 917-20: the fair forerunner and standard-bearer of the sun … sounding in alarm all the sweet yet warlike clarions of the birds), the Night "ronca tocó bocina / a recoger los negros escuadrones / para poder en orden retirarse" (lines 936-38: sounded her hoarse horn for the black squadrons to gather and be ready to retire in order). But they were unable to do so since the Sun's arrival was already imminent (955-58):

y llegar al ocaso pretendía
con el (sin orden ya) desbaratado
ejército de sombras, acosado
de la luz que el alcance le seguía.

(and so she tried to reach the west with her now shattered and disorderly army of shadows, attacked by the light that was pursuing them.)

But Night—and this is most significant—was only temporarily defeated (lines 959-66):

Consiguió, al fin, la vista del ocaso
el fugitivo paso,
y—en su mismo despeño recobrada,
esforzando el aliento en la rüina—
en la mitad del globo que ha dejado
el sol desamparada,
segunda vez rebelde dertermina
mirarse coronada …

(Her fleeing step at last brought her in sight of the west and—recovering even as she fell, taking courage in defeat—in the half of the globe that the sun has left unoccupied she decides, again rebellious, to have herself crowned as queen.)

The dramatic quality of this final scene depends primarily on the two feminine characters, Aurora and Night. The intervention of the sun (and Sor Juana could not have avoided considering Apollo a supremely masculine figure), though narrated in beautiful verse, is relatively passive (lines 943-49):

(The sun arrived in fact, closing the circle that he drew in gold on sapphire blue: from a thousand points multiplied a thousand times, a thousand golden rays—lines I mean of bright light—shone from hisluminous circumference, drawing straight edges on the sky's blue sheet …)

What is emphasized in these lines is the light projected by the sun. However, the poet avoids presenting the sun as a personal individual or specific mythological character, as Phoebus or Apollo, while this is precisely what she does with Venus, and especially with Aurora and the Night. Since woman has been credited with an ability to endure and adapt in a flexible way, characteristics also attributed to Baroque culture, I should like to point out something that has not, I believe, been commented on before, and that is the Night's attitude toward defeat: she undertakes the battle knowing that she is going to lose but also knowing, at the same time, as Sor Juana had remarked before apropos of Phaeton (lines 785-826), that she can repeat her efforts interminably, like Sisyphus, "segunda vez rebelde." If the sun is a masculine character, the Night is feminine; if daytime belongs to the sun, the Night takes courage from defeat and succeeds the sun in endless rotation. This poem is a dream that will be repeated night after night, the obverse of daily activities under patriarchal vigilance. Sor Juana was fully aware of the literary tradition of the dream as reality, of the close relationship between what we do during the day and what we dream of doing at night. The daylight classical brilliance of the Renaissance had given way to twilight zones of light and darkness in the Baroque period. The nun's dream is not the ethical Bildungstraum of Calderón's La vida es sueño (Life Is a Dream); it is an epistemological dream that reveals the impossibility, for human beings, of comprehending the universe and at the same time urges persistence in the face of defeat as a sufficient compensation for that impossibility.

Night as a character is given emphasis by being placed at the end of the poem; in this way the poet reinforces what she had said apropos of Phaeton. Both of these figures represent an urge to succeed and to rebel, even though in vain, to strive to comprehend the universe, which was Sor Juana's own major aim in life. This is the aspiration incarnated in these two figures. Like Phaeton and like Night, the nun decides to repeat in her poem what she indefatigably tries to do with every new day that begins, even though she accepts in advance the inevitability of defeat: during long and patient hours she studies, affirming in this way her right to existence as effort, and she does this centuries before Camus and his existentialist theories. As Octavio Paz says [in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, o Las trampas de la fe, 1982], El Sueño is a poem that represents "the last example of one genre and the first of another." In a world that made no space available to woman as a thinking being, it was a woman, a nun, who, by making use of every recourse available to women, offered new solutions to the old problems of man, inscribing herself fully within a universal human problematic. With Sor Juana, Woman (with a capital W) enters the literary history of the Spanish-speaking world; after her, no one could exclude the female intellectual from Spanish American letters. If it is true that the writings of women have always been heroic, it has never been truer than in the case of this extraordinary nun who concludes her long philosophical poem, unique in Hispanic literature, by asserting her faith in womankind with her single explicit reference to her feminine self, a reference made by means of the first-person singular pronoun modified by a feminine past participle, the last word of El Sueño:

… quedando a luz más cierta
el mundo iluminado y yo despierta.

(leaving the world illuminated by a more certain light, and me awake: [author's] emphasis)