4 - With “Quills of Ink” and “Wings of Fragile Paper”: Sor Juana Responds to Her Public Image

Summary

Abstract: This chapter examines Sor Juana’s textual responses to her public image, in which carefully construed formulations of self reveal her conflicting feelings about her fame and inform her posthumous depiction. The chapter opens with an examination of Sor Juana’s romance #37 to the Duchess de Aveyro, in order to explore her ideas on representation and the possibility of a reciprocal exchange among women. Next, I consider her daring comparison with the martyrdom of Christ in her Respuesta, followed by readings of décima #102 and sonnets #152 and #145, in which she works to destroy her public image. The chapter closes with the suggestion of another means of exchange—in the form of the Engimas ofrecidos a la Casa del Placer—that held the potential of fueling a woman writer’s renown outside the literary marketplace.

Keywords: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz; self-fashioning; Fama y obras póstumas; Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz; Engimas ofrecidos a la Casa del Placer; romance 37

¿Que las plumas con que escribo son las que al viento se baten, no menos para vivirme que para resucitarme?

— Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, romance #49 (OC 1.146:153–56) [That the very quills with which I write / are those that beat the wind, / as much to sustain me in this life / as to revive me again? (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1994a, 177)]

A laudatory romance written shortly before 1700 by the Spanish Count de Clavijo includes the following uncharacteristically trenchant and unaffected lines:

No muere quien así vive,

pues en respetos mentales

se ve en sus escritos toda

la realidad de su imagen.

[Those who live in this way do not die, since in intellectual respects, the entire reality of their image can be seen in their writing]. ([102])

Like many of his counterparts of the Fama, the Count de Clavijo trusts that Sor Juana’s published works will grant her eternal renown. While the general sentiment expressed in the Count’s romance resonates throughout the posthumous volume, the passage cited reveals an original and suggestive interpretation of the role of Sor Juana’s writings in the cultivation of her posthumous fame.