2 - Soaring above the Rest: Sor Juana as “Sacred Phoenix” and the Fama as Moral Exhortation

Summary

Abstract: This chapter reads the Fama y obras pósthumas within the seventeenth century’s attempts to create holy subjects for the purpose of edification, primarily through Father Calleja’s approbation, as well as posthumous elegies that rescript Sor Juana’s renewal of her vows, charity, devotional writings, teachings, and God-given grace as means for both warranting her renown as a saintly exemplar as well as championing her literary and intellectual fame. By considering Sor Juana’s life story and her writing over and against that of Mexican female penitents of the Counter-Reformation, comparisons with male saints and even imitatio Christi, or the paradox of the inimitable female exemplar, I examine how the volume’s collaborators chose to align Mexico’s rara avis to staunchly entrenched formulae to make her legible for her contemporaries, thereby increasing the promise of posthumous fame.

Keywords: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz; Diego Calleja; funeral sermons; seventeenth-century female penitents; vitae; exemplars

-¿Qué quieres que infiera, Sancho, de todo lo que has dicho?—dijo don Quijote. – Quiero decir—dijo Sancho—que nos demos a ser santos, y alcanzaremos más brevemente la buena fama que pretendemos.

[Don Quijote asked: what do you mean to imply by all that you have said, Sancho? – I mean—said Sancho—that we should devote ourselves to being saints in order to sooner achieve the fame that we desire].

— Don Quijote, II:8, 595.

“En el poema [funeral] se revela el mundo, creencias, costumbres, ideas de la época, condición social del poeta y del muerto, la concepción del mundo, de la vida y de la muerte; todos estos factores determinaran el signo que posee el morir de los otros” [revealed in a funerary poem are the world, beliefs, customs and ideas of the time, the social status of the poet and the deceased, their conception of the world, of life, and death; all of these factors determine the sign imbedded in the death of others]

— Eduardo Camacho (1969, 22).

The richly Baroque portrait, the editor’s contradictory prologue, and his meticulous structuring of the volume all underscore the complexity of the Fama’s task of both commemorating and materializing Sor Juana’s fame.