Hearing Voices: Aurality and New Spanish Sound Culture in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz by Sarah Finley (review)

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648/51–95) has become a central figure in our understanding of the Baroque on both sides of the Atlantic. Her work has been unpacked from a myriad of perspectives, ranging from philological and stylistic inquiries to feminist, postcolonial, and environmental studies. The Mexican nun is now an indispensable presence in our critical imaginary. Octavio Paz, in his highly influential Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, o las trampas de la fe (Barcelona: Editorial Seix Barral, 1982), presented Sor Juana’s life as a deeply conflicted quest to carve out a personal space within a society that expected women to comply and follow the rules. Although many details of Paz’s vision have been debated and amended by recent archival discoveries, the overall outline of his profile remains valid. In her persuasive Hearing Voices: Aurality and New Spanish Sound Culture in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sarah Finley uncovers with great precision some of the subtle ways in which Sor Juana mobilized her poetic talent in order to propose a feminine cultural discourse. Finley’s book articulates a detailed analysis of how references to harmony, sound, music, and silence enabled Sor Juana to provoke, within the coruscating practices of the New World Baroque, an agential space for women. Building on recent developments in the field of acoustic studies and otology, or “the affective and physiological study of the ear” (7), Finley presents a series of close readings of several of Sor Juana’s works, from well-known examples (like the philosophical poem Primero sueño, the famous Respuesta to her critics, and the religious play El divino Narciso) to other writings that certainly deserve more attention (like the exquisite villancicos, redondillas, loas, and romances).

After a brief introduction—a section that offers, perhaps too schematically, a guiding map of the book and its theoretical goals—the text is divided into five chapters, and a short coda or epilogue. Chapter One, “Harmony: Order and Authority in Occasional Poems,” establishes a direct link between the multiple references to sound deployed by Sor Juana in texts dedicated to public authorities and events, and the musical iconography utilized by emblematic and allegorical images at that time. In Sor Juana’s hands, music was an effective metaphor for civic order. Chapter Two, “Resonance: Intersections of Music and Other Arts,” explores the impact of the affective and acoustic ideas of Athanasius Kircher on Sor Juana’s reliance on analogical connections between rhetorical, musical, and visual elements. Kircher’s conceptualizations of musica poetica (related to the power of writing) and musica pathetica (related to the representation of emotions) frames Finley’s discussion of Sor Juana’s efforts to describe visual effects through metaphors of hearing. Chapter Three, “Sound: Female Auralities in the Villancicos,” unpacks how Sor Juana designed a literary soundscape in which the musical abilities of the Virgin Mary were showcased as a model for cosmic harmony, a topic expanded on in Chapter Four, “Echo: Repercussions of Feminist Intellect,” where Finley spotlights Sor Juana’s capacity to turn song and other acoustic allusions into a gendered practice, a maneuver that enables her to oppose a feminine sound (the ear) to dominant forms of masculine control (the eye). The last chapter, “Silence: Transgressions and Feminine Revoicings,” emphasizes how for Sor Juana a lack of language was not necessarily equivalent to a lack of resonance; her recourse to silence in her magnificent and complex poem Primero sueño underlines how the absence of words actually amplifies the sounds of the body and the surrounding world, a situation that once again privileges the acoustic over the ocular. The final chapter, “Coda: Re-Sounding Voices,” revisits some of the themes discussed in the previous chapter, and could have been part of it; as a conclusion to the book, it feels...