Penelope and the Minyades: Mythologemes and a Rhizome for Women's Text(ile)s as Women's Work in the Lyric Voice of Juana Inés de la Cruz

HABLAR, v fablar, del verbo Latino fabular, fabularis, á fando, que vale tanto como razonar, contar novelas. Habló el buey y dixo mu: cada vno deue mirar como habla . . . Hablar en público, cosa peligrosísima, siendo uno el que habla, y muchos los que le escuchan . . . Habla la boca, con que paga la coca: muchos incouenientes se siguen del hablar, y muchos prouechos de callar . . .

HABLA . . . se dixo de fabula, que significa cuento pero hablilla vale mentira, cosa que no tiene fundamento de verdad, ni autor cierto.

Sebastián de Covarrubias y Orozco, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o Española

(1611)

The trope of the weaver has been amply explored as a figure in and of women's writing. Ever since Caryln Heilbrun famously argued that Penelope is the paragon of the plotless woman, who writes herself only to unweave herself, bound as she is to the marriage plot, the search for another figure for women's writing was set in motion. Both Clayton and Miller, in their return to the classical sources of these mythologemes for writing women, have elevated Arachne and Athena as alternative figures for women's creativity. In studies of Juana Ines de la Cruz's construction of her lyric voice, pioneering work by Bergmann and others have affirmed the paradoxical agency of Juana Ines's affirmation through effacement strategy a la Penelope, while Merrim has responded to Heilbrun's famous call to women to turn from the marriage to the heroic plot by tracing the "heroic" possibilities of Hispanic women's writings in the early modern period, including the turn to convent life, that were "narratable in a patriarchal world"(108). Similarly, Franco's reading of Primero sueno (c. 1688) and La respuesta de la poetisa a Sor Filotea de la Cruz (1691) explored the transgressive figures employed as metaphors in the poem–Nyctimine, the Minyades, Phaeton, Icarus, among others–for the striving of the (female) subject for knowledge, despite the various limits placed on the epistemic quest. By no means an exhaustive review of the literature of weaving and transgressive figures in the poetry of Juana Ines de la Cruz, these brief references will, I hope, point my reader to authorities of greater note on the work of Juana Ines and how she may have related to a larger body of mythologemes for transgression.

As my own contribution to this volume on Juana Ines de la Cruz's minor forms of writing, I would like to think through weaving figures with her and about her, as alternatives to the mythologeme of Penelope, or the exceptional Arachne or Athena. The Minyades, the sisters who disobey Dionysius in the fourth book of Ovid's Metamorphoses so that they may do the work of Athena and tell one another stories, fit the bill. For their transgressive labor–they continue to work on the god's feast day–their house and their weaving are transformed into a vineyard, and creeping vines, for "coepere virescere telaeinque hederae faciem pendens frondescere vestis; / pars abit in vites, et quae modo fila fuerunt, palmite mutantur; de stamine pampinus exit; / purpura fulgorem pictis adcommodat uvis" (the weaving all turned green, the hanging cloth / Grew leaves of ivy, part became a vine, / What had been threads formed tendrils, from the warp / Broad leaves unfurled, bunches of grapes were seen, / Matching the purple with their colored sheen) (Metamorphoses IV. 396-99). In this scene of divine retribution, their work and their home bear fruit otherwise, as the primary source of intoxication for the Dionysian feast. The sisters themselves are transformed into bats who "haunt houses not woods," so that they are separated from their original home, now terroir for the god they had scorned, in a form of self-imposed exile (IV. 414).

In the opening night sequence of the Primero sueno, the poetic voice refers to the Minyades in an extended narrative metaphor for bats inhabiting the higher reaches in the space whence the poetic voice speaks...