An Out-of-Control Mexican Nun

Latin Americans are justly proud of their literary traditions.  Legend has it that about a third of the first edition of Don Quixote came to the New World, this despite the Church’s attempt to ban all novels from the region.  On the other end of the time scale, everyone knows the name of Nobel Prize winner (one who actually deserved it) Gabriel García Márquez.  But how many can name the best writer of the colonial period?  You can’t?  Why not?

That mega-hypocritical tradition of machismo couldn’t be involved, could it?

It happens to be a woman, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, who lived through the second half of the seventeenth century and died helping plague victims in the street.  She was extremely precocious, dressing in boys’ clothes and sneaking into school with her brother, fooling no one in the process.  Since a woman’s only choices in those days were to become a housewife, a prostitute or a nun, and the first two held no appeal at all for her, she took religious orders.  She began writing, and she was exceptionally good, turning out brilliant love poetry in the Baroque style of the day.

Now, imagine yourself as the prioress of that convent, having to figure out how a girl who had entered the place at age fifteen could write so knowingly about love relationships.  Well, ask Stephen Crane how someone who had never seen a battle could write so convincingly about warfare.  When he did observe a battle, he commented, “The Red Badge is all right.”  It was the same with Sor Juana; her books had taught her how those things work.  But women, especially nuns, were not supposed to be involved in intellectual activities, and she was sent to the kitchen.  There, she said, she couldn’t help working out scientifically how water became steam.

Eventually she was forced to give up her library.  She received a letter from her bishop, who hypocritically pretended to be a superior in the order and detailed how unseemly it was for her to engage in such activities.  Sor Juana’s “Reply to Sor Filotea de la Cruz” is a classic of early feminism.  But she really hit her stride with “You Foolish Men,” fragments of which follow.  (Be advised that all poetry is difficult to translate, so the one I picked off the Net is a little stilted.)

You foolish men who lay
the guilt on women,
not seeing you’re the cause
of the very thing you blame;

If you invite their disdain
with measureless desire,
why wish they well behave
if you incite to ill?
. . . . . . . . .

What kind of mind is odder
than his who mists
a mirror and then complains
that it’s not clear?
. . . . . . . . .

You always are so foolish,
your censure is unfair;
one you blame for cruelty,
the other for being easy.
. . . . . . . . .

Your lover’s moans give wings
to women’s liberty;
and having made them bad,
you want to find them good.

Bear in mind that this was written in the late seventeenth century.  But have men taken her challenge?  In a Latin American country I know well, but which shall remain nameless, virtually no man is faithful to his wife, for the simple reason that if a man’s friends learn that “one woman is enough for him,” he is disgraced as not being much of a man.

In 1968 I was in a US Information Agency facility and talked a woman who had memorized an enormous number of poems from the Colombian folk tradition into putting them on tape for me.  I found a quiet, empty room and suggested that we use it for the recording.  She recoiled in horror, and when I expressed surprise at her attitude, she explained that if a man and a woman are alone together there is trouble for one of them.  If something sexual does develop, the woman is disgraced.  If it doesn’t, the man is disgraced.

Want another example of the ongoing hypocrisy in the mix?  In Mexico City there are rooms full of materials on Sor Juana’s life and works, but to this date I do not know of even one serious scholarly book based on those materials.

My own excuse is that the Mexico City smog kills at a distance of 50 miles.  Ahem!