Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648–1696) was a Catholic nun.
1 Background
Some forty years before this essay, Juana had written an essay critical of a priest’s sermon. The bishop of Puebla then published this essay, forty years later (i.e., in our relative present), under a woman’s pseudonym, and he added his own comment, telling Juana she should focus on prayer rather than writing. Her Response to this is what we’re reading. (The “most illustrious lady” referred to at the beginning is the bishop’s pseudonymous “Sor Filotea.”)
Juana responds with sarcasm: Thanks. See p. 39.
2 Mind and the passions
Amo treats the mind as active, and in fact treats everything that is active as intentional and therefore as in some way a mind or like a mind. In short, activity, in the Cartesian outlook, is mental, and the mind is activity.
Juana’s explanation of her persistence in study flouts this Cartesian idea by making the mind—her mind—subject to a sort of compulsion. See p. 47. Later she refers to this as her “wicked inclination” (p. 61). She even goes so far as to say she has attempted to resist this urge, “to entomb my intellect together with my name.” Note the implicit argument: If her scholarly pursuits are compulsory, she is not choosing them, so she can/should not be held responsible for them (and indeed she has made every effort to avoid them).
3 Life, learning, selfhood
While she learns Latin, she adopts a strategy for managing her hair that suggests a rather striking idea about human (and especially a woman’s) appearance. See p. 51.
So she becomes a nun, in so many words, in order to study. See p. 51 green. (Interesting to consider the many alternative reasons why someone might become a nun, and the fact that Juana has none of those.)
Aside from the interesting conception of thought and study as compulsive, Juana circumscribes a correspondingly fascinating conception of selfhood. See p. 51 blue.
4 Secular and religious learning
In a more or less modern but Catholic way, Juana pitches secular study as primary to theological study. See p. 53. (A similar argument is made about the intelligibility of historically specific allusions in the Bible on pp. 87f.)
And yet, while being a nun helped her focus on her studies, it also—and, let’s say, religious practice and the life of being a nun in particular also—got in the way of that study. (She will say in a moment that she and the other nuns “delight in [each other’s] company” on p. 61.) Note here how, moreover, the community of the convent differs from the sort of community Juana lacks and she describes as essential to learning. See p. 59.
5 Gender and learning
Unsurprisingly, Juana seems to have confronted, and not only in the letter from ‘Filotea’ (i.e., a priest), resistance to her commitment to study. See p. 63.
Now, one thing to notice here is the fact that Juana has described what is, at least in part, an act of resistance as an act rather of obedience. She has been, in her presentation, compelled to study; she hasn’t sought it out; she has resisted it as much as she can. And yet, she says, it must God Himself put it there, so it would be impious of her to resist the urge to study.
Even when her superiors attempt to stop her, she cannot stop. See p. 73. Note the parallel here to Descartes’ second Meditation: Let the evil deceiver do his best to deceive me, etc. There is a similar sort of self-as-refuge thought here. If she can’t have books, she finds occasions for learning in observing children (girls) playing. See p. 74.
Learning while cooking provides another occasion for impromptu study and an occasion for reflecting on the limited opportunities for learning available to women and simultaneously the limitations of men (“Had Aristotle cooked, he would have written a great deal more”). See p. 75.
Juana demonstrates through example the fact that, of course, women are capable of learning, and that learning should be promoted or demoted for someone not because of their gender but on account of their demonstrated excellence in it, man or woman. She argues, too, that study can be destructive—and not to anyone because they are a man or a woman, but because they don’t have the chops. This passage at the bottom of p. 81 made me laugh very hard.