Seizing the Gaze: The Carpe Diem Topos in Sor Juana Inés De La Cruz’s “A Su Retrato”

SEIZING THE GAZE: THE CARPE DIEM TOPOS IN SOR JUANA INES DE LA CRUZ'S II A SU RETRATO" Betty Sasaki Colby College My first serious encounter with Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz occurred in college, when I took a seminar dedicated solely to her work. My professor, a renowned scholar of colonial literature, was an ardent admirer of SorJuana and her work. On the first day of class, he invoked Sor Juana's name with the epithet that would be repeated continuously throughout the semester: "Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz was a beautiful woman." Among the most memorable classes of the term was one in which we discussed the sonnet I will be examining in this study, 11 A su retrato." One of her most well-known works, "A su retrato," reads, at first glance, as a masterful but conventional development ofthe Baroque theme of desengano. Written as a response to her portrait, the poem warns the reader against the deceptiveness of appearances by underscoring the discrepancy between the representative object (the painting) and the subject of representation (the person portrayed). In a conventional gesture of literary homage, SorJuana adapts the final verse of Luis de Gongora' s famous carpediemsonnet to her own last line, a dramatically stark move that closes the poem with the finality of a tombstone being rolled into place. By way of beginning the class, my professor ordered us, first, to look at a facsimile of the portrait included in the edition we were using. Then, with his typical sermonic gravity, he began to read the sonnet out loud. Este, que ves, engafto colorido, que del arte ostentando los primores, con falsos silogismos de colores es cauteloso engafto del sentido; este, en quien la lisonja ha pretendido excusar de los afios los horrores, y venciendo del tiempo los rigores triunfar de la vejez y del olvido: es un vano artificio del cuidado, es una flor al viento delicada, es un resguardo inutil para el hado; 6 es una necia diligencia errada, es un afan caduco y,bien mirado, &> Betty Sasaki C!:8 es cadaver, es polvo, es sombra, es nada. (90) His voice rose through the cuatrains, inflecting each line with a compelling, but confusing, mixture of literary admiration and spiritual enchantment . Being extremely myopic, he had to hunch over the text in an awkward embrace as large drops of perspiration gathered on his face. In that moment, he seemed to be weathering a storm of his own, private passion , completely unaware of us, his students, who did not know what to think of this oddly intimate moment of textual exegesis. When he reached the final verse, which resoundingly concludes that her portrait is a corpse that will finally and inevitably dissolve into dust, shadow and nothingness, his voice slowed down dramatically, became barely more than a whisper, as he descended the rhetorical ladder of Sor Juana's seemingly heartless gesture of self-erasure. Despite the fact that he had probably read this sonnet hundreds of times before, the last verse seemed to catch him by surprise. He had failed to hold onto the elusiv~ object of his desire, and his disillusion and disappointment were immediate and real. Sor Juana had out-smarted him once again. I recount this anecdote not because it is exceptional, but rather because it typifies how Sor Juana was, and continues to be, viewed as an anomaly-an incongruous sign whose deviation from a predominantly masculine cultural and ideological order incites both admiration and anxiety . In my professor's impassioned reaction to the elusiveness of the poem and his somewhat desperate insistence that we look at the portrait, this conflict becomes apparent. His admiration for her art is undercut by his desire to continue seeing her as a woman, one who can be possessed for as long as the viewer of the portrait can hold the gaze on her image. In a sense, my professor's near-sightedness is symptomatic of a larger, cultural myopia. This unwillingness or inability to appreciate Sor Juana as an accomplished writer of prodigious intellect, who is also a woman, exemplifies much of the Sor Juana criticism written by my professor's contemporaries...