Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Extended Biography
Sor Juana Inés de la CruzExtended BiographyYou may wish to share this biography with students, or just to read it for your own information.Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz was born in 1648 outside of Mexico City in the village of San Miguel de Nepantla. The region had once been the site of a thriving Aztec Empire. However, the century before Juana’s birth, Spanish conquistadors invaded and destroyed the ancient Aztec Capital of Tenochtitlan (1519-1521). Juana’s very existence as well as the trajectory of her life and work was the product of this cultural, political, and religious clash (or collapse?). As the daughter of a Spaniard father and a criolla mother, Juana found herself in a privileged position, able to move between the worlds of her Mesoamerican ancestors and the developing colonial realities of “New Spain.” For example, she became fluent in the ancient language of her Aztec ancestors, Nahuatl, and memorized the villancicos (songs) and oral traditions that had been passed down from these Pre-Columbian Nahua people at a very young age. At the same time, she learned how to speak, read, and write in Spanish, Latin, and Greek. Though as a young girl she was not supposed to receive a formal education, Juana had access to her grandfather’s personal library filled with books from across Europe. By the age of eight, she wrote her first poem, Eucharist, and by her early teens, she was reading Greek philosophy. At the age of sixteen, Juana left her grandmother’s hacienda for Mexico City where she became a lady-in-waiting in the court of the Viceroy, Antonio Sebastian de Toledo. Both the Viceroy and his wife, Leonor Carreto, were taken by Juana’s charm and intelligence. There, she continued to educate herself, write poems, and engage in intellectual debate. However, as she grew more familiar with the unchecked power of men in the Spanish colonial court, Juana also realized her ability to study, write, and speak as a young woman was exceptional. At just seventeen years old she began advocating for a woman’s right to education and wrote what is arguably her most controversial poem, Hombres Necios (You, Foolish Men), in which she “refuted the patriarchal assumption that women were irrational and argued instead that it was men who were irrational and foolish.”1Though she received many marriage proposals, Juana chose the only option available to women at the time who wished to study: entering the convent. The options available to Juana proved very different from those available to women just one or two generations before. For example, her grandmother (who owned her own hacienda) had the option to stay single (soltera), but by the time Juana came of age, she had no choice but to marry within her caste or become a nun in the Catholic Church where she would become “the bride of Christ.” In either case, women fell under the authority and supervision of men. Juana wrote:I took the veil because, although I knew I would find in religious life many things that would be quite opposed to my character (I speak of accessory rather than essential matters), it would, given my absolute unwillingness to enter into marriage, be the least unfitting and the most decent state I could choose, with the assurance I desired of my salvation.2Juana ultimately found a home at The Convent of Santa Paula in 1669. Among her female peers, Juana was well-respected. She became the “head mistress, archivist, and treasurer, re-elected twice for a total of nine years.”3During her years of service, Juana continued to write poems, songs, letters, and plays for both the Church and vice-royal court. She also inherited her grandfather’s library and continued to add books to the collection. She became 1 Theresa A. Yugar, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Feminist Reconstruction of Biography and Text (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2014), 78.2 Yugar, Sor Juana, 83. Also quoted in: Asunción Lavrin, “Sexuality in Colonial Mexico: A Church Dilemma,” in Asunción Lavrin (ed), Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 51.3 Yugar, Sor Juana, 85.
2Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz - Extended Biographyinterested in science, and even conducted her own experiments. Through her constant pursuit of knowledge as well as in her secular and religious writings, Juana continued to challenge the patriarchal authority of her society and religious institution. She became particularly fascinated with St. Catherine of Alexandria, the patroness of philosophers and young virgins. Using the saint as an example, Juana wrote, “She studies, and disputes, and teaches, thus she serves her Faith; for how could God, who gave her reason, want her ignorant.”4Such subversive comments and actions created mounting tensions between Juana and her male confessor, Núñez de Miranda, as well as the Bishop of Puebla, Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz. Her political protections began to collapse during the 1680s. In 1690, Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz published and circulated two of Juana’s letters without her consent. Most damning was the second letter: a theological treatise and critique of the well known Portuguese Jesuit Antonio de Vieyra’s theological interpretation of the greatest fineza(the [greatest] demonstration of love) of Christ.5 In her critique, Juana offered an interpretation that “threatened the Church doctrine prescribed for women in that she reclaimed the agency of all individuals, male and female, in their choice to engage, or not, in a relationship with God.”6 In response, Church authorities strictly censored Juana’s work. They took away her personal library and sold it for alms, and also confiscated any secular or scientific objects she had acquired to be destroyed. In 1694, Juana stopped writing altogether and was forced to retake her vows as a nun and sign a number of penitential documents. She died a year later on April 17, 1695 while helping care for nuns suffering from plague. Sor Juana’s writings not only gained renown in both Mexico and Spain during her lifetime, but they have also had a significant afterlife. Several scholars have credited Juana for contributing and shaping the Baroque literary and artistic movement. The empiricism central to her secular writings have also been said to border Enlightenment thinking. Taken together, her body of work aimed to connect the personal and universal, rational and emotional, secular and religious, Mesoamerican and European. In many ways, her life represents a microcosm of the broader colonial world she encountered. Today, her hometown has been renamed Nepantla de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in her honor. 4 Yugar, Sor Juana, 88. Electa Arenal and Amanda Powell, The Answer, 161-163.5 Yugar, Sor Juana, 91. Octavio Paz, Sor Juana: Or, the Traps of Faith (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1988), 390-395, 414.6 Yugar, Sor Juana, 92.