Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. La resistencia del deseo by Francisco Ramírez Santacruz (review)

Few scholars have attempted to write a biography of the illustrious Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz since Octavio Paz published his version in 1982. Thirty-seven years later, Francisco Ramírez Santacruz has taken the challenge of writing a dispassionate but comprehensive narrative of her life, taking into consideration new data on her life, new analyses of her literary work, and the greater number of studies about conventual life published in the last three decades.

A literary scholar by training, Ramírez Santacruz has a great sensitivity for historical research and the ability of intertwining the nun's writings with verified facts about her life and the social context of her times. Unlike Paz he does not interpret any aspect of her life by using psychoanalytical theories; neither does he advance hypotheses about her character or her activities based on thin cloth spun by fictional imaginations. In other words, this is an honest attempt to have a straightforward and fluid biographical narrative constructed with the literary tools of persuasion, but respecting the codes of verifiability established by history. Whenever the occasion demands it, Ramírez ponders on the several possibilities behind the nun's behavior, choosing to explain probabilities rather than making a statement when there is no clear evidence about some situations or facts. He makes it clear what his position is in regard to alternative ones upheld by other academicians.

Ramírez has the rare ability of putting together different pieces of information skimmed from writings, current affairs, legislation, etc., and incorporating them in the biography of the nun, making sense of her life in her own historical context. He has treated the major events in the nun's life with discretion, aiming at elucidating them as part of her own experience as a person, and judiciously posing questions that reflect the nuances of seventeenth-century Mexico. This line of enquiry and response guides us to the complexities of her life and her relations with people who were also complex in their relations with the nun-poet. Particularly appealing are the passages discussing the reception of her Carta Atenagórica among friends and enemies and her own Response, her best known quasi-personal and intellectual autobiography.

Since Sor Juana's life abounds in silences as much as in eloquent expressions of her inner self through her own writings, the analysis and assessment of all evidence is necessary to make sense of what appears puzzling on its surface. This work navigates such challenges well. For example, her complicated relationship with the Bishop of Puebla and her decision to sell some of her books and retreat into a more private life toward the end of her life receive thoughtful attention and offer new angles of interpretation that are reasonably logical for her times and circumstances. The author leads us to consider the angst that must have accompanied Sor Juana throughout her life and revealed itself after the success of her printed work.

Out of these pages emerges a very human Sor Juana: neither the victim of ecclesiastical persecution, nor the self-assured feminist and yet, someone who embodied "intellectual freedom and a unique way of being a woman." Ramírez has successfully injected into his work an evenness in judgment that is very helpful and definitely necessary to understand Sor Juana's life as that of a brilliant but constantly challenged woman. In this fine-tuned narrative there is fairness in the judgment of her character, her achievements and her doubts, as well as her emotional quandaries and intellectual depths. This new biography of the renowned poet nun is highly commendable and obligatory reading for her numerous readers and admirers.