Early Modern Women's Writing and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz

Modern Language Review, The, Jan, 2004 by Rebeca Sanmartin Bastida

Early Modern Women's Writing and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. By STEPHANIE MERRIM. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. 1999. xliv 323 pp. 17.95 [pounds sterling]. ISBN 0-85323-784-0.

This is a very important contribution to Women's Writing studies in early modern Spain and Latin America, a research field that has become increasingly popular in recent years. Stephanie Merrim, who has already published on Sot Juana Ines de la Cruz, proposes a comparative study between the Mexican nun and other Spanish, French, and English women writers of her time, including Catalina de Erauso, Maria de Zayas, Mme de Lafayette, Anne Bradstreet, and Margaret Lucas Cavendish. To contextualize this project, it should be said that its interpretation upholds the view of her-story against his-tory (p. xxxviii), with all the positive and problematic implications of this approach. Covering a broad geographical frame, this book could be of use to academics in both the Hispanic and the European fields. This accounts for the translation of Spanish prose quotations from Sot Juana, Erauso, and Zayas into English, and although this makes it available for European readers, from the perspective of a Spanish-speaker it seems a shame not to offer the Spanish authorial version alongside.

Notwithstanding this small criticism, the comparative approach adopted by Merrim should be applauded. Hispanic literature does not need to be studied separately from the main European field (as it used to be in the past), and the author of this book shows convincingly enough that the feminine Hispanic Baroque has more in common with the rest of Europe than not. In the concrete case of Sot Juana, Merrim proves this assertion to be true: the scholar manages effectively to view the nun 'without walls', as she herself proposes in a useful metaphor in the introduction to her book, to situate the Mexican writer's works 'within a larger context' that will allow us to see 'the enhanced dialogue of commonalities that emerges from the interplay' (p. xv).

Merrim's study tries to demonstrate how Sot Juana and other women of her time adapt the Baroque's main devices and strategies (created by men) to their own so-called feminist purposes. It is the same procedure that she had identified in a previous study (Feminist Perspectives on Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991)) and other scholars like M. L. Bretz (Voices, Silences and Echoes: A Theory of the Essay and the Critical Reception of Naturalism in Spain (London: Tamesis, 1992)) recognize in works written two centuries later, i.e. the manipulation of a prevailing ideology to defend a position, the strategy of assuming a man-created code in order to undermine it. Women situate themselves within the ideology of power with the purpose of twisting its male forms. In this way, for example, Sor Juana quotes Saint Paul, interpreting his unfeminist assertions in her favour (p. 203). It is the same subtle sabotage of dominant male discourse that Kathryn Joy McKnight perceived in The Mystic of Tunja: The Writings of Madre Castillo 1671-1742 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), dealing with Madre Castillo's work.

Merrim shows how convents are 'written' in order to provide women not only with a place to escape from man, but also to fulfil themselves and project an inner and safe space. Canonical values are thus used to proclaim anti-canonical arguments. Once more, the official excuse of defending woman's education (in her role as guardian of her children) is evoked in order to achieve the more important goal of access to books and knowledge. This appealing thesis is accompanied by the attractive titles of the book's chapters, two of which, 'Women on Love', refer to D. H. Lawrence's novel.

How far can we believe that this was being done consciously by early modern women writers? As always, it is a question of the reader's faith in feminist issues, in feminist academic readings, which, after Derrida, tend to offer an effective counter-argument to chauvinist society. Certainly, Merrim defends her assertions very well, although some of her examples are open to debate, e.g. her understanding of the purposes of Cervantes's novella El celoso extremeno (pp. 106-07). Also potentially controversial is her interpretation of Zayas's enclosing her heroines in convents at the end of her stories, an ending that for Merrim signifies emancipation. Of course, in adopting this reading Merrim has support from a long tradition of studies searching for the same kind of internal contradictions in texts of all times, although, as she herself recognizes, we as readers cannot have access to the writers' intentions (p. 89).

In general, Merrim provides penetrating insights into Sor Juana's works. The author convinces the reader that a writer following conventions is able to achieve a high level of fidelity to her own truth or personality. It is also positive, in my view, that this book, while dealing with the nun's poetry, does not dwell too much on the possible lesbian nature of her verses, which, although an interesting question, would have detracted from Merrim's aim in this analysis rather than developing it. Particularly interesting is the chapter dedicated to the writers' self-representation that describes (following S. Greenblatt) how spiritual autobiography was the most appropiate cultural form of the time to carry out a self-definition, to achieve subjectivity, through a 'nihilating' vigilance of the self and the thorough use of melancholy (p. 144). Merrim's exploration of these issues is sophisticated and it would have been interesting to see her response to P. J. Smith's reading of the language of Saint Theresa (in Chapter I of The Body Hispanic: Gender and Sexuality in Spanish and Spanish American Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989)), where the scholar explains the strategies assumed when talking as a woman. Merrim develops an insightful view of a 'civil war of self-representations' (p. 167), based on the internal division between positive and negative presentations of the self.