1 - The Fama: A Posthumous Imaging and Imagining of Sor Juana

Summary

Abstract: This chapter describes the Fama’s contents, structure and organization. It also traces the designs of the volume’s editor; specifically, his actions in transforming manuscript into print in order to influence potentially powerful readers in his endeavor to recast Sor Juana’s lifetime celebrity into posthumous renown. In conjunction, the intricate frontispiece and lengthy prologue set up editor Juan Ignacio María de Castorena’s framing of the Fama for his contemporaries, highlighting its Baroque intricacies that both underscore and undermine preserving Sor Juana for posterity. The chapter also explores a private dialogue between Sor Juana and the editor of her Fama that, once published, renders public their ties to one another and her role as author, a recognizable albeit unlikely figure for a seventeenth-century woman.

Keywords: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz; Juan Ignacio María de Castorena; Fama y obras póstumas; fame; Hispanic Baroque; frontispiece

In romance #51, “En reconocimiento a las inimitables Plumas de Europa” [To the matchless pens of Europe], her poem left unfinished yet published in the Fama, Sor Juana asks “¿Tanto pudo la distancia / añadir a mi retrato?” (OC 1.158:78) [Has distance really the power / to magnify my likeness? (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1988, 103)]. Although the query regarding her ill-wrought renown was most likely intended for the panegyrists of the Segundo volumen (SV), the writer’s newly exaggerated “distance” in death nuances the meaning of the verses published within the Fama. As a posthumous volume, the Fama imbues the literary (and visual) retrato or likeness that Sor Juana alludes to in romance #51 with a significance it could not have had while she was alive. By presenting its reader with a portrait of Sor Juana as they open its pages, the 1700 edition of the Fama offers its first indications of how and why the posthumous volume hopes to preserve the memory of the Mexican nun (see fig. 1). Befitting its role as a frontispiece, the emblematic engraving introduces the volume’s themes and concerns and constitutes the reader’s first encounter with its considerable task of figuratively recreating and recasting Sor Juana posthumously.