Sor Juana, Zayas, and Early Modern Feminism
This is a term paper I did my senior year in college for a class titled, “Women in Latin America.” I offer it here in memoriam of Sor Juana’s 325th anniversary of her death. –Tlakatekatl
Modern feminism has long been assumed to have originated with white-Anglo-Saxon-protestant (WASP) women, but a closer inspection reveals that not to be entirely true. Some of the earliest voices of feminism originated not in Anglo-Protestant society, but in Spanish-Catholic ones. The following essay highlights two prominent women of the seventeenth-century Spanish speaking world that championed women’s rights centuries before the WASP feminist movement that materialized in the nineteenth-century. In effect, the literary work of Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz and Maria de Zayas y Sotomayor illustrates how the Baroque literary and artistic movement became the perfect vehicle for these women to espouse early feminist views.
Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz — commonly referred to as Sor Juana and considered Mexico’s first modern literary writer — played an important role in the development of modern feminist thought. She’s an example of an early modern woman who rebelled against the status quo from within the confines of a convent. Much of the prevailing research on early women writers of the hispano world has revealed long lost literature not just of Sor Juana, but of other like-mined women writers as well. It has also demonstrated that the story of modern women’s writing and feminist theory is one that has its roots in the humanist school that emerged in fourteenth-century Europe. This intellectual movement, rife with antifeminist ideology, inadvertently allowed for the materialization of feminist criticism through the Spanish Baroque tradition and in turn influenced Sor Juana who is considered one of the greatest writers of that style.
Born on November 12, 1648 in the small town of San Miguel Nepantla in what was then New Spain, Sor Juana rose through the literary ranks and was eventually heralded as the “Tenth Muse.”[1] Interestingly, she was not the first female writer given that name. In recent years, scholars have become interested in Spain’s Golden Era of literature, and as a result, obscure and forgotten writers have resurfaced. One of these rediscovered authors is Maria de Zayas y Sotomayor who was born in 1590 in Madrid, Spain, and incidentally shared the same birthday with Sor Juana. The little that is known of Zayas’s life points to noble origins, of having actively written between 1621 and 1647, and of being favored among poets like “Lope de Vega [who] lauded her poetry, describing her as the ‘Tenth Muse.’”[2]
Zayas lived during extremely turbulent and violent times, and her writings reflect that. She “lived and wrote during the reign of Felipe III (1598–1621) and Felipe IV (1621–65), [and her] settings…reflect the European extension of that empire, including…sites of conflict…where Hapsburg Spain contested Islamic power.”[3] She would have also been fully aware of the many wars Spain carried out throughout Europe, including the Eighty Years War against Dutch rebels and the Thirty Years War waged to maintain the Spanish-Austrian Hapsburg alliance. Being an educated lady of the court and well informed of current events, she translated these tumultuous events into her body of work. Greer makes a point of this stating that, “we can observe a certain interplay between the sociopolitical circumstances of Hapsburg Spain and the author’s construction of her tales of love and death.”[4]
Edwin B. Place wrote one of the first monographs on Zayas, and he informs us that she was renowned for her Baroque novellas — which received much praise during her lifetime, enjoyed best seller status for over two decades, and was the source for many great authors that came thereafter, including men.[5] What is important to understand is that the suppression of her work coincided with the rise of “subjective criticism” during the nineteenth century.[6] Zayas’s popularity waned over time, and in later years, she received harsh criticism for her feminist exhortations. Renowned Spanish literary historian George Ticknor wrote in 1929: “the work is of the filthiest and immodest I have ever read;” and the Hispanist Ludwig Pfandl commented in 1929, “can there be anything more gross and obscene…than a woman who writes lascivious, dirty, sadistic, and morally corrupt stories?”[7] In their antiquated and anti-feminist frame of thought, a woman should not endeavor to engage in this sort of improper authorship.
Pfandl was responding to the American writer, Lena E. V. Sylvania, who first raised the issue of Zayas’s feminism when she “wrote the first monograph dedicated to Zayas, published in 1922, just after women in the United States secured the right to vote.”[8] Worthy of notice is that Place’s monogram about Zayas was published in June of 1923, a year after Sylvania. His interpretation of Zayas underscores his antipathy toward feminism, contemptuously calling her novellas “women’s rights propaganda.”[9]
Zayas work revolved around the subject of love, marriage, and infidelity as it related to the submissive and passive role that was expected of women in Europe at the time, particularly the violence that they experienced at the hands of their husbands and lovers. In Boyer’s introduction to her translation of Zayas’s Desenganos amorosos, she states:
The Disenchantments stresses the need for women’s side of the story even as it represents a conscious and systematic attack on men’s violence against women in literature and in life, a systematic violence not only condoned but actively promoted by the patriarchal mind-set of Counter-Reformation Spain.[10]
Zayas’s cleverly woven and intricate stories of lies and deceit were juxtaposed against a backdrop of romance and courtly love with the outcome usually resulting in the violent death of a female character. The male characters were “badly flawed…yet the frame commentaries inscribe masculinist readings that applaud the men’s actions to safeguard their ‘honor.’”[11] The female protagonist was doomed from the start, caught in a damned if you do — damned if you don’t situation from which she could not escape her fate.
Boyer informs us that “Zayas’s work is the conscious feminization of a tremendous array of motifs taken from a highly refined, male-produced literature,”[12] and that, “In her feminism, Zayas wrote within the tradition of the medieval ‘woman question’ debates that flourished in Spain and elsewhere in Europe.”[13] In regards to the Disenchantments specifically, Zayas was overtly countering the patriarchal abuses of women and the “institution of marriage, recently codified by the Council of Trent,” which gave men absolute dominance and control over women.[14] All things considered, Zayas was an early modern feminist writer who protested the status quo and was critical of the ill treatment of women, especially the double standard that favored men’s honor over the welfare of women in general.
Undeniably, Sor Juana was most certainly familiar with Zayas’s body of work. Stephanie Merrim, a leading sorjuanista, writes: “Literary criticism to my knowledge has yet to equate Sor Juana, Zayas, and Lafayette. Indeed, the three authors — writing in three different genres from different countries and cultural contexts — may well appear to be rather unlikely partners.”[15] Merrim argues that the misogynistic attitude of the seventeenth century Counter-Reformation Hispanic world allowed ample room for “saturated…quasi-feminist discourse” to flourish.[16]
Like Zayas, Sor Juana’s life is equally interesting, and her early childhood is just as mysterious. Born out of wedlock, her absentee father was a Basque immigrant by the name of Pedro Manuel de Asbaje. Her mother was Isabel Ramirez, a criolla, who took over the family estate in Sor Juana’s fathers’ absence. She was a studious child from a very early age, learning to read and write at the age of three. At thirteen, she moved to Mexico City and quickly became a court favorite. “Father Calleja observed that the urban elite were immediately entranced by her. Her cleverness, intelligence, and beauty made her an instant sensation.”[17] Even though she suffered the major handicap of her age — being a woman, she soon learned to navigate through the sexist environment and made a name for herself.
Sor Juana’s pursuit for knowledge could at times be extreme. For example, in a poem entitled Response, she relates how she would cut her hair in increments of about six inches if she failed to learn Latin at her desired rate, “because it did not seem right that a head which was so bare of knowledge should be crowned with such an adornment.”[18] Given the sad reality of women’s second class status and denial of education, she chose to give up her secular freedom in order to further her intellectual pursuits under the guise of religion. It is certainly true that Sor Juana abandoned the Convent of the Discalced Carmelites after only several months because life there would have been too rigid and physically demanding. She chose instead the more comfortable and relaxed environment at the Order of St. Jerome where she could immerse herself in the humanities.
The intellectual movement known as humanism is the source of our modern public school system. By embracing the Classical approach to public rhetoric, “Humanists regarded the scholastic philosophy of medieval universities as out of touch with the realities of urban life, [and] established the pattern for elementary and secondary education for the next three hundred years.”[19] Although, men that came out of this “new school” were still misogynous, like Boccaccio for example, a Pandora’s Box was opened and women like Christine de Pizan (1365–1431) began to question the prevailing sexist assertions. In response to Matheolus’s Lamentations and in an amazing “proto-feminist” voice she wrote Book of the City of Ladies (1405) where she states, “Just the sight of the book…made me wonder how it happened that so many different men…are so inclined to express both in their treatises and their writings so many wicked insults about women and their behavior.”[20] Amusingly, it is Boccaccio and his ilk that provided the framework for the Spanish Baroque to flourish, giving both Zayas and Sor Juana the allegoric and metaphoric literary ammunition to challenge patriarchy.
The verbal assault carried out by these brave women who dared to counter their prescribed roles was not been well received. In his book, Juana Ines de la Cruz, die zehten Muse von Mexiko (1946), Pfandl describes Zayas as “a ‘neurotic with an Oedipal complex,’ a frustrated woman, vengeful, jealous, and malign.”[21] Here Pfandl is speaking on behalf of men who perceive feminists as a threat to their manhood. In a letter by Sor Juana, uncovered by Father Aureliano Tapia Mendez in 1981 and published in a booklet entitled Sor Juana: A Spiritual Self-Defense, she states:
Women feel that men surpass them, and that I seem to place myself on a level with men; some wish that I did not know so much; others say that I ought to know more to merit such applause; elderly women do not wish that other women know more than they; young women, that others present a good appearance; and one and all wish me to conform to the rules of their judgment; so that from all sides comes such a singular martyrdom as I deem none other has ever experienced.[22]
With this statement, Sor Juana sums up her position as a controversial figure and exposes the frustrating love-hate reaction from her contemporaries. The futility of her endeavors calls to mind the adage “you can’t win for losing.”
Sor Juana’s relentless desire to pursue her literary passion and advocacy for women’s education would lead to her eventual censure. Merrim states, “Sor Juana, one might conclude, experienced the bounty of early modernity and the (unjust) deserts of its antifemale retrenchment.”[23] It has long been popularly held that Sor Juana’s Carta Athenagorica, which disagrees with the revered Father Vieyra over the meaning of Jesus’ act of washing his disciples’ feet, was the catalyst that led to her eventual renunciation of secular pursuits; however, according to Dorothy Schons, it appears that the controversy was more complex than that. The letter was well received in Spain and was deemed to not contain anything contrary to the Church. Schons also tells us that in Mexico, the Jesuits controlled the Inquisition and that Father Vieyra had been a Jesuit himself, and so it was felt by that order that a perceived attack on him was akin to an attack on them as well.[24]
This seeming assault also played into the patriarchal hands of those out bent on silencing her impudence and outspokenness, for it was held in general that women were expected to be passive objects of adoration, and in the abbeys as nuns, they were to be silent and reflective observers. Besides the common womanly occupations, learning to read and write beyond what was deemed enough for the indoctrination of the faith was mostly discouraged. Asuncion Lavrin affirms that, “An educated woman who passed beyond mere literacy to the reading of literary or historical texts, or who knew Latin and had some notion of mathematics, was an unusual individual in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.”[25] The status quo could not have been clearer; either she conformed to her prescribed role as a woman, or she would endure public reprisal and admonishment from the fathers of the Church.
In conclusion, outstanding women like Zayas and Sor Juana, forerunners of feminism and ahead of their time, paved the way for the future feminist activists and intellectuals who slowly chipped away at the patriarchy. Without a doubt, it can also be firmly stated that highly literate women of the Baroque period, such as Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz and Maria de Zayas y Sotomayor, paved the way for modern Latina Feminism.
ENDNOTES
[1] Octavio Paz, Sor Juana or, The Traps of Faith (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1988) 64–65).
[2] Maria de Zayas y Sotomayor, The Disenchantments of Love, A Translation of the Desenganos amorosos by H. Patsy Boyer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997) 2.
[3] Maria de Zayas y Sotomayor, Exemplary Tales of Love and Tales of Disillusion, Edited and Translated by Margaret R. Greer and Elizabeth Rhodes (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 2009) 13–14.
[4] Ibid, 14.
[5] Edwin B. Place, Maria de Zayas, An Outstanding Woman Short-Story Writer of Seventeenth Century Spain (Boulder: University of Colorado Studies, 1923).
[6] Maria de Zayas y Sotomayor, The Enchantments of Love, Translated from the Spanish by H. Patsy Boyer (Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press, 1990) xii.
[7] Ibid, xii.
[8] Margaret Rich Greer, Maria de Zayas Tells Baroque tales of Love and the Cruelty of Men (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000) 54.
[9] Ibid, 8.
[10] Zayas, Disenchantments, 1.
[11] Ibid, 9.
[12] Zayas, Enchantment, xx.
[13] Ibid, xxiii.
[14] Zayas, Disenchantments, 23.
[15] Stephanie Merrim, Early Modern women’s Writing and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1999) 95.
[16] Ibid, 90.
[17] Ibid, xxvii.
[18] Pamela Kirk, Sor Juan Ines de la Cruz; Religion, art, and Femenism (New York: The Continuum Publishing Company, 1998) 21.
[19] Zayas, Exemplary, xviii.
[20] Ibid, xviii-xix.
[21] de la Cruz, Poems, xvi.
[22] Ibid, xviii.
[23] Merrim, Early, xl.
[24] Stepahnie Merrim, editor, Feminist Perspectives on Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991) 51.
[25] Ibid, 64.
