Sor Juana's Villancicos: Context, gender, and genre

Western Folklore, Fall 2001 by Underberg, Natalie

INTRODUCTION

Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, the famous seventeenth-century Mexican nun and writer, successfully constructed and performed her identity as a creole woman in Colonial-era New Spain through her use of the villancico (a type of Spanish lyric, similar to other kinds of European folksongs). This was possible because the generic conventions, social attitudes, and performance context of this form provided Sor Juana with the optimal "cover" for her somewhat subversive female-centered worldview.

In my analysis, I combine considerations of the content of Sor Juana's writings with the cultural and performance context in which they were enacted, a perspective that is relatively lacking in the copious scholarship devoted to the famous nun. Living and writing in a cultural context that viewed as suspect the intellectual contributions of women, Sor Juana sought to present her identity through representations of Mexico and its varied ethnic groups and through the hagiography of the Catholic Church, which provided, perhaps unwittingly, potentially powerful figures with which women could identify.

Most collections and analyses of Sor Juana's work focus on her poetry or her essay writings. The most famous of the latter, of course, is her La Respuesta (The Answer 1691, 1994), written in response to a public attack by a Bishop against Sor Juana and her lack of humility in daring to challenge a theological point made by a Jesuit priest, Antonio de Vieyra (or Vieira), concerning the "greatest act" of Christ. Feminists laud this work as the first "manifesto" in the Western Hemisphere on the right of women to speak and learn (see, for example, the prologue by the Grupo Feminista de Cultura in Juana Ines de la Cruz 1979). But scholars and writers have largely ignored Sor Juana's many villancicos, and when they have been included in discussions of her life and artistry, they have mostly been discussed from a literary perspective-as written literature. Electa Arenal and Amanda Powell (in Juana Ines de la Cruz 1994) have noted that the consideration of the villancico as "arte menor" ("minor art") gave Sor Juana a certain opening to pontificate on theological matters, but I think this contention can be usefully expanded upon by demonstrating the intimate interrelation among three factors: the villancico texts, the situational context, and the cultural context. I will do this through careful examination of Sor Juana's villancico texts, and especially through a thorough reconstruction from available literature of both the situational (performance) context and of the cultural context (particularly in terms of how the form was regarded in her day). Such an analysis can address the following questions: How did Sor Juana manage to "pull off" a performance of these "pro-woman" songs in the context of a seventeenth-century Catholic liturgy? And what can an investigation of this question contribute to our understanding of the interaction between gender and genre?

Parts of the following analysis draw on Joan Radner and Susan Lanser's article, "Strategies of Coding in Women's Cultures" (Radner and Lanser 1993). They identify six types of coding through which oppressed groups like women can covertly convey subversive or "dangerous" messages: appropriation, juxtaposition, distraction, indirection, trivialization, and (feigned) incompetence. Several of these strategies figure in Sor Juana's use of the villancico form.

Additionally, a number of theoretical insights from the field of sociolinguistics (overlapping with anthropology and folklore) can be usefully applied to the case of Sor Juana's use of the villancico form.1 The situational and cultural context of Sor Juana's villancicos, reconstructed from available documents, allows us to develop important insights into her world and the way in which she attempted to navigate it.

Decades ago, Bronislaw Malinowski adumbrated (see, for example, Malinowski 1922 and 1935) a dual-contextual view of language and culture, advocating a focus on both the context of culture and the context of situation. I have applied this basic idea to the study of Sor Juana by trying to reconstruct from the rather scattered literature (a bit of information in this or that volume on villancico composition, etc.) on the villancico both the attitudes towards the form by Sor Juana's contemporaries (its cultural reception) and the way in which this form was performed (the situational context, including such elements as time, location, and audience).

Erving Goffman's rather exhaustive attention to the production format and participation framework of social interaction (1981) is also relevant as a framing device, albeit indirectly, for my analysis. For example, his "dissection" of the notion of speaker into several dimensions (animator-who does the talking; author-who chooses the words used; principal-whose beliefs are being expressed; and figure-who is the protagonist or character in the text) offers us a vantage point for considering how the conventions of the villancico form (such as including comic or carnavalesque characters) and the prevailing cultural context (such as the Roman Catholic attitude toward the "cult of the saints") effectively complicated notions of authorship and identity for performers, audiences, and critics. Sor Juana (as author) could, then, "speak through" (or see animated), the cover (or figure) of "the other," whether these were regional stereotypes of "local yokels" or the unimpeachable figures of Catholic saints. She could do this, in Goffman's terms, by blurring the line between Sor Juana "speaking" as principal (espousing her pro-woman beliefs) and the character (or figure) "speaking" (drawing on saints' legends or culturally-ascribed traits of different ethnic groups).