The Answer/La Respuesta

Preface to the Second Edition: What Does Sor Juana Mean?

Today scholars and critics in the fields of literature, history, rhetoric , religious studies, women’s and gender studies, queer studies , Latin American studies, colonial/postcolonial discourse, and cultural criticism are researching, presenting, and publishing new studies of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz at a remarkable rate. The year 1995, the tercentenary of her death, marked an exciting increase in the attention paid to this seventeenth-century writer and intellectual . Since then, the range and depth of interest in her work has continued to grow, appropriately mirroring the wide readership she enjoyed in her own lifetime (with nearly twenty editions of her books by the 1690s) and launching the interdisciplinary area of inquiry now referred to as Sor Juana studies—akin to Shakespeare or Cervantes studies. Our second edition of The Answer/ La Respuesta responds to this enhanced interest in a writer whose work illuminates the thought of her world and may throw light on unsettled questions in our own. New perspectives bear on Sor Juana’s “Answer to Sister Filotea,” the essay in which this important author defended her own and, by extension, other women’s learning.As in our first edition, the essay itself appears bilingually, with annotation to clarify its dense web of baroque allusion. We have added in the Appendix a translation of the letter from “Sister Filotea”—who was in reality a powerful bishop—to clarify for readers the opinions and chastisement that prompted Sor Juana’s eloquent statement. Additions to our bibliography give updated printed and online readings on relevant topics. Sor Juana’s legacy rests ultimately in the beauty, weight, and complexity of her literary art. We have expanded the selection preface to the second edition What Does Sor Juana Mean? vii from Sor Juana’s poetry to demonstrate more amply both her lyric prowess and her poetic engagement with the themes of women’s intellectual ability and right to study. Our selection proves Sor Juana ’s mastery as a poet and the ever-present inquiry, and frequent spirit of play, that she brought to both creative and studious activity . The introduction to the poems identifies the genres, themes, and strategies of language that make these, from Sor Juana’s hundreds of marvelous poems, particularly fitting to accompany the Answer. In addition, we now include the witty “Prólogo al lector / Prologue to the Reader of These Poems” (from the second collection of her poems published during her lifetime, in 1690), which with offhanded confidence invites us to take or leave what we find. Similarly playful while at the same time critical of misogynist convention is the romance, or ballad, critiquing the admirer who praised Sor Juana by calling her “Phoenix.” In this edition we include this parodic send-up in its entirety. Also newly added are liturgical performance pieces, villancicos dedicated to the Feast of the Assumption that show the Virgin Mary as learned, powerful, and deeply beloved. Finally, love poems in expanded selection here (two more sonnets, and the lavish “Romance decasílabo” or “Ballad in Variant Meter”) explore the nature of love not only as an emotion but also as a field of inquiry. Sor Juana’s milieu—the seventeenth-century, trans-Atlantic context of so-called Old and New Worlds—was shaped by conflicting redefinitions of political rule, religious mandates, public and private spheres, along with varying views of the natural world and the human soul. This early modern period showed a fascination with hierarchies both celestial and terrestrial and with how these were either to be understood, justified, revered, and upheld or critiqued, challenged, and overthrown. In tune with her era as a learned poet, dramatist, essayist, and theologian, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz at times composed texts to celebrate and affirm institutions , views, or individuals that she deemed worthy of respect. At other times, or simultaneously, she exposed and contradicted those she saw as unjustly or ignorantly holding sway. Gender difference and inequities figured high among the issues that preoccupied both her and her period, and the critical focus that she applied to her culture’s conceptions of female and male abilities and spheres of action can be traced through prose and verse in a range of genres over the two decades of her writing career. Our twenty-first century is still far from settling questions that Sor Juana posed and explored, whether about gender, sexuality, and identity, or about the relation of religious and spiritual belief viii Preface to the Second Edition [3...