The Dramatization of Lyric Poetry in the Works of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

Introduction: Sor Juana's experimental mixture of genres

Mexican baroque writer Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, who is currently undergoing a form of re-canonization, is a particular case. In contrast to her male contemporaries, she excelled in all literary genres and was the source of innumerable original aesthetic innovations that have still to receive adequate appreciation. With these innovations she managed to transform her fourfold disadvantage (as a female criolla stemming from a lower social stratus and writing in colonized Mexico) into the basis for a poetic independence that often put her well ahead of her historical and cultural context. This also holds true for her lyric poetry and her dialogue with Petrarchism. Whereas her theatre production and her prose writings have already been intensely examined, there has been little systematic research into her lyric poetry. To date, most studies have concentrated on the question how Sor Juana completes or transforms the Petrarchist system by inserting indigenous elements or by merging it with contemporary discourses of knowledge.¹

This focus has already yielded important results. Nevertheless, one aspect of her lyric writing still requires further examination: the nexus of lyric poetry and drama. In an astute study, Susana Hernández Araico focuses on Sor Juana's villancicos in order to bring more light to this relationship. She concludes: "El nexo de teatralidad entre estos textos surge no a manera de literatura dramática ni de diálogo representado, sino de escenificación coreográfica de versos cantados" (603). A closer look at some of Sor Juana's sonnets shows again the wide array of her literary techniques, because in those texts the effect of dramatization results precisely from the lyric representation and concatenation of dialogues. By this means, Sor Juana merges the lyric and the dramatic discourse, creating both aesthetic and conceptual innovations. She uses the experimental mixture of genres in order to re-conceptualize central aspects of the traditional discourses of love. By doing so, she transcends contemporary Petrarchism, anti-Petrarchism and female Petrarchism simultaneously and paves the way for modern lyric poetry.

The quasi-dramatic codification of intimacy

Right from the outset, lyric poetry was closely linked to theatrical performance. In Antiquity and the Middle Ages, poems were written in order to be performed to a broader public; they were typically sung and accompanied by string instruments (a lyre, cithara, or barbitos). For this reason, many traditional lyric poems were written as Rollenlyrik (i.e. as quasi-dramatic monologues or dialogues). Common histories of lyric poetry assume a gradual movement away from this initial type of quasi-dramatic performance and thus a long process of de-pragmatization of the lyric. Petrarch is often cited as an important step in this overarching historical process. His famous Canzoniere can be considered as the first composed cycle of poems in which the serialization of single texts creates a narrative dimension which transforms the lyric macro-text into a sort of a stream of consciousness novel. Because of this macro-narrativity, the single texts have to be read silently in order to grasp the complicated overarching semantic order. This fact can be interpreted as a strategic detachment from the concrete performance with which Petrarch prepares the ground for modern lyric poetry.

However, recent studies show that the history of the lyric is more complicated; after all, dialogue poems survive to the present.² The same holds true for Petrarch: a closer look reveals that his Canzoniere contains innumerable dialogue poems which maintain a certain performative aspect. In what follows, I will show that Sor Juana is inspired by this Petrarchan strategy, but that she develops it in a highly original way, creating something completely new. She uses the serialization of lyrical dialogues for an experimental form of dramatization which allows her to introduce completely new aesthetical and semantic effects. We have to change our view on the history of lyric poetry once again.

Until now, researchers had assumed that Sor Juana didn't write any structured collection of poems (Sabat de Rivers, 403...