Student Question
Which passages from Sor Juana's work illuminate her cultural power and what do they suggest about her and her legacy?
Quick answer:
When looking for passages that display Sor Juana's cultural power, you don't need to look much farther than her poem "Hombres Necios que Acusais" or "You Foolish Men". This poem shows her independent spirit and her determination to enact change. She was adamant about being treated as equal and allowed an education.
Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz was a writer, poet, composer, philosopher, and nun. She was born in Mexico in 1651 and was among the first great Mexican writers.
During the time of Sor Juana's prominence, women were discouraged from pursuing an education and speaking up for themselves. Sor Juana was not willing to conform, instead pointing out the double-standards and impossible social norms women were expected to follow. Here's a great quote from her poem "You Foolish Men":
No woman wins esteem of you:
the most modest is ungrateful
if she refuses to admit you;
yet if she does, she's loose.
In the same poem she writes:
your censure is unfair;
as she had to constantly fight to make her voice heard. She also demonstrates her power in the poem "Since I'm Condemned":
But as I die without resisting
my unhappy lot, my only wish
is you allow...
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me choose the death I like.
Let my death be of my choice,
for your mere choice
continues me in life.
This stanza demonstrates her character well. She sees the injustice in the situation and determines that she will not protest, but she will maintain a sense of independence even to death. If she must be punished, she'll be punished on her terms.
Another place to find examples of Sor Juana's power and her place in the culture of the time is her "Reply to Sor Filotea."
In this essay, she defends a letter in which she had criticized a sermon and received much criticism for her words. She establishes ethos by first explaining her academic background, writing:
...when I was six or seven years old, and already knowing how to read and write along with all the other skills that women learn such as embroidery and sewing...
She then explains why she decided to become a nun and why she should be allowed to express her opinions despite being a woman. She explains her love for learning and shows that she is learned and just as intelligent as any man. She lists the names of many Biblical women who were allowed to teach and learn.
In short, there are many examples from Sor Juana's writings that show her independence, determination, and bravery. She wanted to be heard, and she wanted to open the way for other women to be able to learn and teach as well.
References
What passages from Sor Juana's work illuminate her cultural power and suggest insights about her, her world, and her legacy?
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz writes on a wide range of subjects with a combination of passionate intensity and intellectual enquiry. These qualities make her seem both modern and timeless. The main thing she tells us about seventeenth-century Mexico is that it was not very different from our own culture. In terms of her social commentary, Sor Juana was an early feminist, who commented scathingly on the patriarchal society in which she lived with poems such as "You Foolish Men." This contains criticism of male behavior towards, and views of, women which are echoed in twentieth and even twenty-first century feminism:
With foolish arrogance
you hope to find a Thais
in her you court, but a Lucretia
when you've possessed her.
What kind of mind is odder
than his who mists
a mirror and then complains
that it's not clear.
Thais was a Greek courtesan, a companion of Alexander the Great. Lucretia was the model of Roman virtue, a woman who would rather die than submit to the advances of a man to whom she was not married. Sor Juana exposes the hypocrisy of men by showing that the kind of woman they want, sexually available and adventurous but at the same to perfectly pure and chaste, not only does not exist, but could not possibly exist. Her point that men make every effort to seduce women, then complain that they are impure, is a similarly modern one.
However, Sor Juana is timeless as well as modern. Her long philosophical poem, First Dream, articulates the bewilderment of the human soul, faced by the incomprehensibility of the universe. While her contemporaries in New England were coming up with trite sectarian answers to the same ultimate questions of meaning, Sor Juana's responses combine universality with negative capability in her poetic exploration.