Sor Juana Or, the Traps of Faith

by Paz, Octavio; Peden, Margaret Sayers

• ISBN13: 9780674821064
• ISBN10: 0674821068
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1990-01-02
• Publisher: Belknap Pr

Summary

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 Ineacute;s 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 proteacute;geacute;e. 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.

Table of Contents

Prologue: History, Life, Work

The Kingdom of New Spain

A Unique Society

The Dais and the Pulpit

Syncretism and Empire

A Transplanted Literature

Juana Ramirez, 1648-11668

The Ramirez Family

May Syllables Be Composed by the Stars

The Trials of Juana Ines

Taking the Vows

Sor Juana Ines De La Cruz, 1669-1679

Life in the Convent

Political Rites

The World as Hieroglyph

Sister Juana and the Goddess Isis

Sor Juana Ines De La Cruz, 1680-1690

Flattery and Favors

Council of Stars

Religious Fires

The Reflection, the Echo

Realm of Signs

Different from Herself

The Tenth Muse

Hear Me with Your Eyes

Ink on Wings of Paper

Music Box

The Stage and the Court

The Float and the Sacrament

First Dream

The Traps of Faith

An Ill-Fated Letter

The Response

And the Responses

The Siege 29 The Abjuration Epilogue Toward a Restitution

Appendix Sor Juana: Witness for the Prosecution

Notes on Sources Spanish Literary Terms

Notes

Index

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