The Mystic of Tunja: The Writings of Madre Castillo 1671-1742 (review)

Kathryn Joy McKnight. The Mystic of Tunja: The Writings of Madre Castillo 1671-1742. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1997. 284 pp.

The last fifteen years have witnessed, as an aspect of feminist scholarship, the discovery of convent life as an integral part of the making of colonial Spanish America culture. Josefina Muriel's Conventos de monjas en la Nueva España (1946) appears as a lone precursor of the scholarship that both historians and literary critics would develop under the full swing of Women Studies. Muriel followed with La indias caciques de Corpus Christi (1963) and Cultura femenina novohispana (1982). Interest in the lives of nuns and the social and economic structure of convent life did not really take off in the North American academy until the work of Asunción Lavrin began appearing in various journals and collections during the decade of the 1970's. Feminist efforts centered on the recovery of a women's tradition in writing and the arts. It did not take long to rediscover both the Spanish mystic Saint Teresa de Avila as well as the Mexican polymath Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Both published writers had long ago received the sanction and literary canonization of the patriarchy. Their names figures prominently in the rosters of the great writers of the Spanish language.

But the attention now focused on Saint Teresa and Sor Juana has been driven by a feminist inquiry interested in questions of subject formation and the possibility of a voice of their own within the prevailing discursive conditions in both the Spain of the Counter Reformation and the Colonial Baroque in Mexico. Georgina Sabat de Rivers (1995), and Stephanie Merrim (1987, 199l), in different ways, opened the world of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz to multiple considerations. Unknown aspects of her life came under close scrutiny. Sor Juana appeared acting in a multiplicity of social roles, inside and outside the convent. This new feminist scholarship recovered Sor Juana as the author of texts in a panoply of genres and also as a public intellectual, a role specifically repressed by the ideology of the Counter Reformation.

The apparently contradictory situations of conventual life, in which silence is priced above all other attitudes and behaviors, and the emergence of strong female voices--voices capable of engaging and even challenging the patriarchal order--, demanded an explanation which present discursive theory seemed unable to offer. There was a need for meticulous historical studies which could explain the dynamics of monastic orders and the life of female subjectivity. Electa Arenal's (1983) path breaking study examined how the convent worked as a catalyst for feminine autonomy. In Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in Their Works (1989) Arenal and Stacey Schlau, established the boundaries of the field well beyond Sor Juana. The nun, poet, musician, theologian, the genius of her period, now appeared as the crowing glory but not any longer as the singular and exceptional case of women's learning, writing and struggling in the arena of colonial public life. This shift in focus also marked a departure from the critic's practice of showing how the writings of the Spanish American nuns followed or drew from the peninsular models of vidas and mystical texts which they were encouraged to emulate. Instead there appeared a determinate need to write their difference in order to explore new spaces for knowledge. Nevertheless and despite all the differences between the work of feminist scholars and Octavio Paz's Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz o las trampas de la fé (1982) one cannot help but ask, to what extent the life and works of nuns like Sor Juana, Mother Castillo and the other nuns who have left us their vidas do not constitute, as Paz claims to be the case with Sor Juana, exceptional monuments to solitude: the solitude of the phantom lovers, the solitude of life in religious communities, the solitude of the...