To Her Vicereine, and to Learning

In the Hieronymite convent of San Jerónimo, Mexico City, a woman who had entered religion as the only room large enough for a library wrote as if paper were a second cloister. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz was a poet of New Spain’s baroque: silken, exact, capable of a joke that cut the century. She was also a correspondent of power. María Luisa, Countess of Paredes, vicereine, became patron, editor at a distance, and the addressee of poems that use the names Lísida, Fili, a lady who can leave.

The love sonnets are not a code waiting for a single modern key. Petrarchan address, court patronage, convent friendship, and erotic speech toward a woman occupy the same figures. Detente, sombra de mi bien esquivo, stay, shadow of my elusive good. The beloved is a shade, a magnet, a sweet fiction by which the speaker painfully lives. To flatten this into a secret-lesbian sticker is to steal the baroque’s right to be several things. To deny the erotic address, because a nun is inconvenient, is another theft.

In 1691 she wrote Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz, a letter answering a bishop who had published a rebuke under a woman’s name. It is one of the great intellectual letters in Spanish: a defense of a woman’s right to study, a memoir of a child’s hunger for letters, a careful politics of humility that is not humble. “I do not study in order to write, still less in order to teach… but only to see whether by studying I may become less ignorant.” The sentence is courtesy and steel.

Colonial gender is not a backdrop. She is a criolla intellectual in a viceregal city, in a Church that will, by the mid-1690s, press her toward silence. The Countess returns to Spain and sees the poems into print. Friendship here includes the material fact of a book. Desire includes the fact of a voice that knows how to linger on a woman’s name.

Hold the sonnet and the letter together. One says: stay, shadow. The other says: let me read. A life is not required to choose which of those is the real one.