The Answer
Book Review

A canonical work is forever fresh and new, offering each succeeding generation insights germane to its concerns. Sor Juana's Answer to the Most Illustrious Sister Filotea de la Cruz was a powerful feminist statement when it was written three hundred years ago, and it speaks eloquently to today's readers as well. Although the Mexican nun's works have been translated into English many times over the centuries, Electa Arenal and Amanda Powell have given The Answer a distinctly feminist reading, focusing, as Sor Juana did in the original, on issues of gender. Through their introduction, notes, and carefully worded translation, they convey the complexity of Sor Juana's thought as well as her immense frustration. A prodigiously talented adolescent in an age in which intellectual women were considered fascinating aberrations, Sor Juana taught herself rhetoric, theology, literature, and science, and astounded the court with her knowledge.

In 1668 she entered a convent in order to devote herself to intellectual pursuits, according to Arenal and Powell, although other scholars have advanced different theories. The cloister afforded her with the opportunity to continue studying and writing on secular as well as religious subjects, and the recognition she achieved from the ruling elite including from the new viceroy and his wife - soon provoked the wrath of the ecclesiastical authorities. Father Antonio Nunez de Miranda was so contemptuous that Sor Juana relieved him of his duties as her confessor. Colonial convents were often thriving social and artistic centers. Living in a posh cell and attended by several servants and a slave, Sor Juana continued to cultivate her interests - poetry, music, science, and theology - and to entertain influential guests. Her celebrity grew in educated circles, not only in Mexico, but also in Spain. However, churchmen such as Nunez were unrelenting in their criticism, for Sor Juana not only wrote "unchaste" love poems, but also meddled in theology - an unseemly activity for a woman. In a conversation at the convent, Sor Juana became engaged in a complex theological discussion, which was witnessed by her longtime friend, Bishop Manuel Fernandez de Santa Cruz, who requested that she commit her thoughts to writing.

Sor Juana believed that the text would be seen only by him, but he treacherously delivered it to the press, appending a letter signed "Sor Filotea" as a preface. This purportedly friendly letter, with its pretense of pious concern, was a public attack on Sor Juana with a veiled threat of persecution. The viceroy and vicereine had already returned to Spain, and without their protection, Sor Juana was in a particularly vulnerable position. The Answer is Sor Juana's response to the bishop, written in her own defense. In this remarkable document, Sor Juana displays her incredible linguistic skill and mental agility. In the baroque tradition, she cultivates a multiplicity of voices and meanings. Her knowledge of rhetorical conventions and the elements of hagiography, her use of empirical observation and deduction, and her command of sermonic and epistolary forms make The Answer one of the richest works of prose of the Golden Age. But while Arenal and Powell do a superb job of rendering The Answer into English, Sor Juana's stylistic brilliance is not the point of their translation.

The Mexican nun offered, as no other writer of her time could have, a distinctly woman-centered vision. Finding no female intellectual peers in her own world, she defends her right to the scholarly life by producing numerous examples of learned women from the past, thereby showing that active intelligence in females is the rule, rather than the exception. She reexamines Saint Paul's admonition that women should remain silent in church, arguing that it was meant to apply not only to women, but to all those who are incompetent. Feigning humility, Sor Juana unmasks the semantics of repression. By playfully referring to the scientific knowledge she gleans from cooking, she creates a space - the kitchen, the nursery - where women can teach each other and exercise their talents. By so doing, she defends the notion that intellectual activity is the rightful domain of either gender. Furthermore, she demonstrates that prohibitions on women's talking and teaching are based on misinterpretations of doctrine.

Like today's feminists, Sor Juana called for a change in outlook. She disparaged her superiors' views on the proper role of women as myopic and erroneous, and she exposed the gender-repressive elements embedded in language and ideology. Renal and Powell judiciously caution against applying today's feminist agenda to Sor Juana, for her world was dramatically different from ours. At the same time, they show that her impassioned defense of women's right to the pursuit of wisdom set a precedent for modern feminism.

Three centuries after it was written, The Answer still stuns us with its beauty, its genius, and its relevance.

The Answer. Americas
Jan '96 by Barbara Mujica.