Poems, Protest, and a Dream: Sor Juana - Essay Example

Sor Juana Many convey their messages through sarcasm and irony have used polemical style and subordinating styleto convey controversial issues. In this paper, the works of seventeenth-century author and nun, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, critically evaluated concerning the effective use of polemical style. Sor Juana work enjoys canonical condition in Latin American and Spanish circles, however, remain mostly unknown in English literatures. Sor Juanas writing provides readers a fetishistic glance at the interior functions of the female consciousness. It also provides the audience with a polemical base that builds a psychoanalytical conversation of female yearning. In her poem 48, "Respondiendo a Un caballero del Perú" she starts the verse by claiming that words fail her. Or rather, disappoint the muses who are the customary source of motivation for (male) poets. This approach is a very clever tactic to start writing. By mentioning the muses, Sor Juana is ironically indicating that the work of poetry conventionally constituted with certain postulation concerning gender. The assumption is that the poet is a man and that his foundation of motivation is gendered female. Gender issues have been a critical subject in poetry and other writings, this paper assesses if Sor Juana’s work effectively applied polemic. In most of her works, she voices her objections against the prejudice of womens position in her hypocritical community and her representative place of privilege at an unfeasible price. She shields herself and other women directly. Her first-person comments in her writing style make her polemic approach effective and convincing. The effect is due to the irony in her poems and actor of Doña Leonor in the play “Los empeños de Una casa” [The Trials of a Household]. Leonor is very beautiful and educated. However, since she has no self-confidence even in the selection of a partner, these features have been her bad luck, attracting numerous suitors from amongst her father will decide (Bergmann 153). Once she has spoken her obligatory grievances, Leonor leaves from the female custom for Spanish play of the occasion by affirming her outstanding learning. She relates the man she cherishes in a tone and perspective ordinarily reticent for men concerning women. Leonors self-representation as a brilliant intellectual is applicable to Sor Juana personality. Most significant is an alertness of the cost of her achievement and fame, with no false reserve or regret (Bergmann 153). It was and still is for women to fit into some societies, however, through her writings perspective she was able to write poems with polemic style. The style helps her work considered amongst male dominant field. Sor Juana herself acknowledged that there were no fortuitous reconciliations in the lives of scholarly women. In her autobiographical description in protection of her academic pursuits, the Respuesta a Sor Filotea, she elucidates that she refused marriage and opted the convent to could continue to schoolwork. Since the reason for the Respuesta was in extent an apologia, her self-representation is both candid and premeditated to demonstrate her courage and resourcefulness in confronting a paucity of selections in her adolescence (Bergmann 154). Sor Juanas self-representation and rationalization in the Respuesta is daring and hazardous, and each depiction of her selections has a reason. For instance, she says that she was ready to outfit as a lad to attend school and study Latin. Latin was not just the lingo of education but also the lingo of authority. Her learning won her admission into the courtyard of the viceroy and his spouse, who later was her patrons (Bergmann 154). From this statement, it is clear learning a male a fair and women were not allowed. She uses polemic style so as not to arouse unnecessary controversies. While she was studying Latin at home, she state, she cut an inch of her adored hair each moment she did not advance satisfactorily. Her perception of the association between a female distinctiveness and access to authority is apparent. She was highly praised and acknowledged in the secular world. However, chose to enter the convent since, as she states, provided the complete antipathy she had for marriage, nun life appeared the least inept and the most admirable system of life she could opt. As the heading of Electa Arenals critical analysis of Sor Juana and other monks of the era indicates, the convent was a means for autonomy. The convent provided an environment in which she could involve in intellectual work (Bergmann 154). Her experiences were unfortunate that the best way to produce her work best was to employ polemic and sarcastic style of writing. It works that is why we study her works today. Sor Juana also represents herself as insolent and not capable of repressing her intellectual inquisitiveness. Having preferred religious existence as a setting for intellectual vocation, she discovered that the church objected to her learning in natural discipline. The point she got is that the secular region of speculative viewpoint not controlled by theological principle and would ultimately confront it openly. When compelled to relinquish her learning for a few months, she says, she was not capable of resisting the quest of information and made unintentional scientific remarks in the cuisine of an egg. This connotation of the contemplation of perspective happened in a convent hostel. She jokingly hypothesizes on how much more Aristotle could have documented had he been into the kitchen. Her scholarly activity, varying from the daily to the most mysterious areas of astronomy, mathematics, theology, and speculative viewpoint, brought her into positions the church chain of command considered unsafe and potentially unorthodox (Bergmann 155). Therefore, there could be no sufficient refutation of the implied accusations in the epistle by "Sor Filotea." It states that the nuns submission to the church meant repudiation of the very scholar work that had encouraged her decision to relinquish the "world" and enter the seminary (Bergmann 156). She openly pokes fun at Aristotle in her passage, wittily supposing that his resume might have been comprehensive had he underwent the female destiny of having to learn at home with only accessible instruments. However, her soliloquy on cuisine can also be a study as a reaction to Plato, who’s Gorgias reprimands rhetoric as equivalent to mere catering. In this conversation, Socrates asserts that both cooking and rhetoric are not arts at entirely, but habitudes (Bokser 8). From the passage and statement, the use of polemic style is essential since her predicaments were high, and the best way to convey the message was to employ irony and sarcasm. At times, Sor Juana’s position concerning gender is worryingly dismissive. Since her commitment in writings is something she did not decide, she alleges it is reasonable. She narrate her memoirs as a sequence of intellectual push for that began as untimely at a tender age of three and “caught fire with the desire to learn” (49). This denotes that her occupation to track letters and values, beginning at such a tender age, is geologically induced (La respect 49). A three-year-old did not opt to learn. She studied because she had to (77). Elsewhere she affirms that she knows she was born a poet (22–24). Until occurrence taught her contrary, she thought each person speculated concerning the diversity of human nature. That they observed geometrical scope and dimensions in the revolving of a child’s top and empirically experiential the laws of standpoint (La respuesta73, 75). Her assertion to be a sensation in effect discards sexual category. Writing and learning are a vocation for which she cannot be accountable. This deflection of accountability acts to deny her action in defying gender principles. She is not a woman breaking standards but a poet who just occurs to be a woman (Bokser 11). The passage confirms that the writing style of Sor Juana complemented her mental status as a witty woman, and there could have never been a better way to express her. Sor Juana reveals the contradictions more delicately in the final line of her idealistic reflection on information, “the Sueño.” The poem final line, "y yo despite" [and I, awake], initiates for the initial time in the characteristics of the speaker as woman. The gendered "despite" showing in the end provokes a revising of the encyclopedic and maybe globalizing study of microcosm and macrocosm. The dream of comprehensive acquaintance from which the writer awakens is a daydream of academic freedom in which she can symbolize her prejudice as awareness. The depiction of mental examination is her vividness, most global, and thus most motivated self-representation. She constitutes herself as topic challenges the sexual category system. She demoralizes the self-convincing intellectual hypothesis of the gender structure in her resistance to her right to learn theology in her Respuesta a Sor Filotea. She reveals the social input of seeing women as prostitutes and as substances of desire in her poetry on her representation and in verbal indications of other female. The Sueño, with its implied and open universalization and valorization of her mental practices and, not by the way, of her insensible physical functions, rejects both the hypothesis and the action of objectifying females(Juana 121) She transforms numerous of the customs in which she involves, thus surpassing her role models. This consideration is not just stylistic magnificent or esthetic genius, but rather a vigorous engagement with the contents and the philosophy they exemplify. An alertness of this involvement in a remarkably brilliant and marginalized topic can result in a useful strategy to the Sueño. Her stylistically intricacy is clearly inspired by the urge of communicating the message plainly as possible (Bergmann 159). In conclusion, considering the predicament Sor Juana went through, her polemic style is effective. Through the style of writing, she reveals her affirmation of the soundness of her existence and contemplation. Through the action and writing, she inspired generations of Hispanic women to seek innovative representations of woman as subject. In order to depict the disagreement between her visualization of herself and the attractive portraits painted to silence the look of that vision. Works Cited Bergmann, Emilie L. “Nine: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Dreaming in a Double Voice,” UC Press E-Books Collection, 1982-2004. Ned Web. 28 Feb. 2015. Bokser, Julie A. Sor Juana’s Rhetoric of Silence. Rhetoric Review, 25.1, (2006): 5–21. Print. Juana, Inés C, Margaret S. Peden, and Ilan Stavans. Poems, Protest, and a Dream: Selected Writings. New York: Penguin Books, 1997. Print. Read More