Bulletin of the Comediantes

IN THE WORDS of the contemporary Mexican poet Luis Felipe Fabre, “Todos los sorjuanistas discrepan en algo. Discrepan / entre ellos. Discrepan / en algo que suele ser casi todo” (“Sor Juana y otros monstruos,” Poemas de terror y de misterio, Almadía, 2013). These disagreements began during Sor Juana’s day as her many defenders took on her equally numerous critics. More recently, the polemic intensified after the 1982 publication of Octavio Paz’s Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz y las trampas de la fe and has continued unabated since then. The most contentious issues are less concerned with interpreting her works and more with understanding key moments in her life. Given the paucity of biographical documents relevant to Sor Juana’s life, scholars pore over her writings in search of clues. (Additional information has been unearthed in recent years, although some of it seems to inspire more questions than answers.) While many mysteries enshroud Sor Juana’s life, three main questions remain unsolved: Why did she take the habit? What was the nature of her relationship with María Luisa, vicereine of New Spain? And why did she seemingly renounce her literary and intellectual pursuits and embrace an ascetic life? Into these murky waters valiantly wades the Mexican literary scholar Francisco Ramírez Santa Cruz with a highly readable and fastidiously documented new biography of the nun poet, part of a series of biographies of famous writers from the Hispanic and wider Western world recently launched by the Spanish publisher Cátedra.

Ramírez de Santa Cruz carefully explains his approach to the book in his introductory note. He divides previous biographies on Sor Juana into two general groups, “por un lado, aquel que hace una lectura de su vida desde el liberalismo laico y, por el otro, aquel que defiende a ultranza una interpretación hipercatólica de sus motivaciones y obras literarias” (12). The only two previous biographies he references in his introduction are the first, written by a Spanish Jesuit, Diego Calleja (1638–1725), with whom Sor Juana exchanged letters but never met. Calleja’s Vida is a short, hagiographic text replete with fascinating anecdotes upon which critics relied for centuries. The other is Octavio Paz’s monumental and spellbinding intellectual biography of the nun. While he was critiqued for his collapsing [End Page 131] of the viceroyalty’s treatment of intellectuals with the persecution of similar figures by more contemporary regimes, the poetic undercurrents with which Paz inflects New Spanish society and the way he unravels the intellectual strands upon which she drew render it nonetheless the most compelling of books, its tricks and snares notwithstanding. Ramírez de Santa Cruz situates his text at a remove from both books, claiming that his biography “propone una exégesis lo más objetiva posible de todos los datos que se conocen de sor Juana hasta el día de hoy” (12).

It is a wise ambition and one in which he succeeds. Like Paz, Ramírez Santa Cruz writes eloquently and reads Sor Juana’s work skillfully, but he is a more levelheaded and straightforward biographer than Paz, avoiding the extravagant speculations that the Nobel laureate permitted himself. The reader, for example, might want to contrast the circumspect manner with which Ramírez Santa Cruz tackles the issue of Sor Juana’s absent father with Paz’s riotous psychoanalytical reading to understand the difference in methodology between these two biographers. At the same time, La resistencia del deseo is no dull read, and the author powerfully conjures the era and its culture for the reader. Of note in this regard is his portrayal in chapter 1 of Sor Juana’s early years and his riveting description of what life on a rural hacienda might have looked like for a young criolla. According to the author, in the Hacienda Panoaya in Amecameca Sor Juana first became acquainted with Nahuatl speaking communities and with the...