Afterword (Or Why Think of the Fama as a Success If It Fails on Almost All Fronts?)

Summary

It seems only fitting to conclude by citing the final lines of the poem that closes the Fama y obras pósthumas. Written in Latin by the Mexican intellectual Felipe Santiago de Barrales, the highly affected and pedantic funeral elegy subscribes to the well-tried topic of the ubi sunt? by appearing not on Sor Juana’s tombstone but on her cenotaph. Accordingly, the poet describes how the nun retains her voice in the afterworld:

Yo soy aquella, dijo, que excitada por el amor de Sofía,

Concebí doctos libros en el virgíneo pecho.

Por tanto, a fin de no despojarme, sepultada, de tan gran amor, me

transformo aun en volumen más útil para los vivos

[She said: I am she who, roused by the love of Sophia, imagined scholarly books in my virginal breast. As such and so as to not be stripped of such great love in the grave, I transform into a volume more useful still to the living].

Ejemplar signifies exemplary when used as an adjective, while as a noun it stands for “copy,” as in a copy of a publication. Can Sor Juana thus be the true exemplar, or ejemplar—at once a model of imitation and a book or volume? By concluding the Fama with Santiago de Barrales’s poem, editor Castorena brings his volume full circle. His cherubs of the engraved frontispiece—the Mexican and Spanish contributors to the volume—have imitated the allegorical Book of Fame by trumpeting and crowning Sor Juana’s fame and, at the same time, the nun-writer has literally become his Fama. Or so he would have us believe.

The nun’s posthumous panegyrists attempt upon her death to redirect and refashion the singularity that fueled her celebrity during her lifetime into either the heroic stature of an iconic poet and muse or the moralizing publicity granted to the saintly. Both the pious portrayal of Sor Juana, inspired by her “conversion” and propagated originally, albeit problematically, by Diego Calleja, and her identity as an American treasure and cultural icon ideally would have rendered her an exemplar or model and facilitated her elegists’ goal of persevering her for posterity.