Summary
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s composition “Carta atenagórica” (1690) was published by the Bishop of Puebla, Don Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz, without her advance knowledge or permission. His opinion of her work was not to be mistaken: He prefaced her essay with his own composition a letter to Sor Juana urging her to give up her secular scholarship since women ought to dedicate their reading and writing—if they must do it at all—to the study of religion. The Bishop’s letter, written under the pseudonym Sor Filotea de la Cruz, purported to be a woman’s loving advice to a fellow nun, but was, in fact, a thinly veiled exercise of authority and a vehicle for the Church to put Sor Juana in her place.
Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz (1691) is Sor Juana’s reply to the Bishop. Deemed “indispensable” by Sorjuanista scholar Frederick Luciani (“Selected Works” 143), this text is often read as an “articulation of women’s intellectual capacities and rights” (143). Yet though Sor Juana refers frequently to secular philosophers and historical figures, she always returns to the safer ground of theology. The all-encompassing power of the Catholic Church made it necessary for her to integrate her scholarship into her religiosity. This essay shows aspects of Sor Juana’s work that only reveal themselves as singular on close examination and, as I argue, as “proto-feminist.” The article pays particular attention to the extent of Sor Juana’s religious zeal and her stated belief that God had designed her to be inclined toward the pursuit of knowledge in every form.
José Negroni Cicerchia
https://doi.org/10.17613/nfwg-vn02
José Negroni Cicerchia teaches Latin American literature and film at Rice University. His main research interests are in postmemory literature, specifically autofiction authors who are the children of victims of the Argentine dictatorship in the 1970s. He received his Ph.D. in Spanish with a concentration in Latin American literature at the University of Houston in May of 2023. He has written extensively about contemporary Argentine literature, translated the Peruvian author Sergio Galarza, and has a forthcoming article on the career of Rodrigo Hasbún (co-screenwriter of The Visitor, 2022). He is currently working on a research project that draws comparisons between Argentine autofictionists and the Chilean second-wave postdictatorial writers referred to as “Pinochet’s children” by scholar Ana Ros. His project examines the ways in which Chilean writers, raised by their parents in a compromised political environment, came to terms with their parents’ complicity, in some cases even benefitting from it, as Pinochet’s vicious regime remained unchecked. Having been raised in Argentina by activist parents, the genre of autofiction has long intrigued him personally.