Confessing to the Father: Marks of Gender and Class in Ursula Suarez's Relacion

The autobiographical text of Ursula Suárez, a nun who lived from 1666 to 1749 in Santiago, Chile, was originally written with only one reader in mind, her confessor. A mid-nineteenth-century copy of this manuscript, made for Father José Ignacio Víctor Eyzaguirre, helped to make the autobiography known to scholars and historians. ¹ Yet, it was only in 1984 that Ursula Suárez’s Relación, as the nun called her text, circulated among a wider audience when it was published under the auspices of the Chilean Academy of History in commemoration of its fiftieth anniversary. ² The editors, the philologist Mario Ferreccio Podestá and the historian Armando de Ramón, wrote extensive and well-documented studies to introduce Suárez’s Relación autobiográfica, suggesting that this text illuminates the study of various aspects of Chilean society in colonial times, especially daily life inside and outside the convents, religious practices, and language usage (de Ramón 33, 43–4).

In Spanish American letters, there are very few published autobiographies written by women. In a recent study of Spanish American autobiographical writing, At Face Value: Autobiographical Writing in Spanish America, Sylvia Molloy studies three texts by women. The first, Mis doce primeros años (1831), was written by a Cuban author, María Mercedes Santa Cruz y Montalvo, Countess of Merlin; the second is Cuadernos de infancia (1937) by Norah Lange; and the third, the six-volume autobiography of Victoria Ocampo, the prominent editor and intellectual who founded the review Sur in 1931 at José Ortega y Gasset’s suggestion. Ocampo’s autobiography was published posthumously between 1979 and 1984 in Buenos Aires. In recent years, a wealth of autobiographical writings by nuns has been uncovered, both in Spanish America and Spain, as well as other autobiographical texts by women, such as letters and memoirs, and as it was to be expected, these manuscripts reveal previously undocumented aspects of women’s lives. ³

Although the notion that nuns have often been among the most educated women of their times is not new, only two autobiographical texts by nuns have entered the Spanish canon, St. Teresa of Avila’s Vida and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s Respuesta. ⁴ The seventeenth-century Mexican nun, Sor Juana, in her well-known 1691 letter, Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz, which includes an autobiographical account, replies to the criticism of the Bishop of Puebla and defends her right to study, learn, and write. Sor Juana employs her life story in self-defense in order to show ecclesiastical authorities that it was God himself who instilled in her a compulsive passion for studying and writing. She claims that she is merely following God’s will in devoting herself to intellectual pursuits. Both St. Teresa and Sor Juana were learned and widely read women whose texts show evidence of a refined and conscious use of intellectual discourses. In her study of St. Teresa’s rhetorical strategies, which she calls a “rhetoric of femininity,” Alison Weber emphasizes how the Spanish nun used discourse to her advantage. Sor Juana, on the other hand, using strategies of concealment and subordination, which Josefina Ludmer has called “tretas del débil,” convincingly argues in favor of allowing women to devote themselves to the life of the mind. Although Ursula Suárez’s text differs in many ways from St. Teresa’s and Sor Juana’s, her use of discourse also reveals how gender played a role in Suárez’s discursive strategies of self-representation.

The Relación, written between 1708 and 1730, in a style and language that retain a marked oral character, recounts events in Ursula Suárez’s life from the year of her birth, 1666, to 1730. ⁵ Although she also mentions events that occurred before her birth, and others that extend to around 1730 or 1732, ⁶ most of the narrative focuses, first, on her childhood years when the relationship with her mother and paternal grandmother is specially relevant to her...