Malcolm Read - Further Thoughts On Sor Juana

Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies
ISSN: 1470-1847 (Print) 1469-9524 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjil20
Further thoughts on the history of the

unconscious: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
Malcolm K. Read
To cite this article: Malcolm K. Read (2013) Further thoughts on the history of the unconscious:
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, 19:2, 159-184, DOI:
10.1080/14701847.2013.867394
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14701847.2013.867394
Published online: 09 Jan 2014.
Submit your article to this journal
Article views: 66
View related articles
Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cjil20
Download by: [Temple University Libraries] Date: 25 November 2015, At: 11:28
Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, 2013
Vol. 19, No. 2, 159–184, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14701847.2013.867394
Further thoughts on the history of the unconscious: Sor

Juana Inés de la Cruz
Malcolm K. Read*
Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature, State University of New York at Stony
Brook, NY, USA
Downloaded by [Temple University Libraries] at 11:28 25 November 2015
While feminist Hispanists of recent decades have justifiably broken with some of
the broad patriarchal assumptions that have long characterized their discipline, in
order to instate Sor Juana de la Cruz within a reconfigured literary canon, they
have accepted unquestioningly the key bourgeois concept of the “free subject,”
together with its associated ideological problematic, through which to press the
relevance of this same writer to “modernity.” The present article, by way of
contrast, locates Sor Juana’s writings historically within a play of sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century ideologies that transcend the level of individuality. These
ideologies serve, in the case of Sor Juana, as a basis from which to develop the
Althusserian concept of an ideological unconscious. Taken in combination with
its libidinal counterpart, this ideological unconscious serves in turn to theorize
how, in the transition from feudalism to capitalism, modes of production enlist
gender to prosecute their exploitative practices.
Keywords: feminism; free subject; ideological/libidinal unconscious;
feudalism; capitalism
The present article offers itself as a sequel to one on Marı́a de Zayas (Read 2010a),
its aim being to deepen the insights gained earlier through their extension to another
canonic figure, namely Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. There is a logic to the selection of
Sor Juana: while sufficiently similar to Zayas to justify a broadening of focus –
feminists themselves have pointed to the “striking similarities” between the two
writers (Merrim 1991b, 26; see also Merrim 1999, 92 –137 and passim) – her work
is sufficiently different to test the range and flexibility of the concepts deployed in
the Zayas article, and to suggest ways in which they might be refined. In the first
article, let us recall, it was argued that recent feminist criticism began with a fatally
wrong move: it assumed the existence of a “free subject,” a female subject, to be
sure, but still a subject, possessed of its own inalienable identity, struggling to
liberate itself from the entanglements of a patriarchal culture. The problem with
*Email: malcolm.read@stonybrook.edu
q 2013 Taylor & Francis

160 M.K. Read
such an approach, the argument ran, was that its “subject for all seasons” is radically
ahistorical. True, it may appear to have a history, indeed, a history that is only too
familiar: overlaid in the “Middle Ages,” the free subject struggles to emerge in
the “Renaissance,” reaches its apogee during the “Enlightenment” or, more broadly,
“Modernity,” only to fragment under “Postmodernism.” But what this same
criticism never called into question, even while it conceded the need to historicize,
was the very existence of a transhistorical subject (sometimes masquerading as a
period concept). Perforce, matters were only made worse when, under the
influence of discourse theory, it proceeded to foreground the relation between the
subject and language as such, a move that further detached textual analyses from
history.
My own approach was very different. The human subject, I argued from an
Althusserian perspective, was best envisaged not as a point of departure, existing
outside history, but as something at which one arrives, after a long detour through a
historically specific set of social relations. It might then transpire, in fact would
transpire, in the case of an organicist substantialism, the dominant ideology of
feudalism, that one arrives not at a “subject” but at a “serf/servant” or, alternatively,
a “lord.” The subject only appears, I elaborated, continuing to take my cue from the
Spanish Althusserian, Juan Carlos Rodrı́guez ([1975] 1990), with the onset of
animism, the first form of bourgeois ideology, and even then only in a proto-form,
under the guise of the “beautiful soul.” While constituting something in the nature of
a “break” from its feudal antecedents – Rodrı́guez theorized the existence of a
distinctively “feudal animism” – the new secular animism, far from displacing
substantialism, co-existed alongside the dominant ideology and intermingled with
it, progressively so with the resurgence of feudalism from the mid-sixteenth
century. Further to which, I concluded, the nascent bourgeois ideology would
eventually be eclipsed by a non-organicist Aristotelianism, deeply indebted to its
organicist predecessor and always threatening to revert to it. An analysis of these
ideological complexities made possible an in-depth understanding of Zayas’ work.
Indispensable to articulating the above argument was the Althusserian notion,
of which Rodrı́guez’s work was the classic formulation, of the ideological
unconscious, understood as the matrix effect of a social formation, as manifested
at the ideological level internal to such a formation. Ambitiously, I undertook in
the same Zayas article to theorize the relation between this ideological
unconscious and its libidinal or Freudian counterpart, facilitated through the
deployment of certain heuristic concepts drawn from Lacanian analysis, notably
the “imaginary” and the “symbolic,” to elucidate the transition from
substantialism to animism, the former characterized by relations of identification,
the latter equating with the field of symbols organized around the phallus.
A further key to the understanding of that transition proved to be the notion of
“anality,” drawn from a more classically Freudian variant of psychoanalysis.
These concepts were put to self-reflective use to understand something of the
history of the unconscious, existing, it was discovered, in symbiotic relation to
Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 161
(self)consciousness. Self-consciousness under feudalism proved too embryonic to

sustain an unconscious other than on a cosmic level, where it correlated broadly
with “God,” the domain of mystery and the unknown. In truth, even the “beautiful
soul” or proto-subject proved too frail a concept to give rise to anything other than
an “inside,” as opposed to an “outside.” A further, internal, split will only occur,
we suggested, with the rise of the subject in its classic bourgeois forms, beginning
with Cartesian Reason.
I propose, in what follows, to spell out more fully the consequences of the
theoretical positions adumbrated above, through an approach to the work of Sor
Juana. I will begin by revisiting some of the theoretical traps that lie in wait for the
unwary feminist, with reference to Sor Juana’s use of the sonnet form. The text will
then take a detour through late feudal substantialism – the work of Don Juan Manuel
will prove particularly illuminating in this respect – and secular and Christian
animism – the former exemplified by Garcilaso – by way of assessing the extent to
which class and patriarchy, notwithstanding their relative autonomy, functioned as an
integral part of a single social formation. Armed with the insights furnished by this
sortie into Sor Juana’s determinate historical matrix, we will conclude by addressing
aspects of her two classic texts, the “Respuesta” and “El sueño.”1
Lost in translation
The above introduction may strike many feminists working within the English-
speaking, and therefore tendentially empiricist, academy as already intolerably
abstract and rationalistic, even to the extent of evincing at the outset the kind of
masculinist discourse that they see as their business to contest. Symptomatically, a
feminist such as Stephanie Merrim will embrace an allegedly “broad-based and
fluid” feminist criticism, that “gravitates toward those critical postures that are
more practical than theoretical in nature” (1991b, 34), a criticism that we interpret
as prioritizing an applied criticism reluctant to spell out its theoretical
commitments. “The kinds of questions I ask and the directions I propose,”
Merrim elaborates, “will give the reader a better sense of what is meant here by
feminist criticism” (34). More recently, Veronica Grossi similarly underlines the
importance of dialogue between different fields of investigation and promotes the
“multiplicidad de ángulos interpretativos” (2007, 23) offered by post-structuralist
cultural studies. Doubtless a number of arguments can, and would be, enlisted by
way of support for such positions. Is there not much to be said for an approach that
begins with some very specific questions and refines its techniques accordingly?
Why the need for so much conceptual baggage as that envisaged by some
theoreticians? Is not diversity to be celebrated in all its forms?
Of course, Althusserians will be quick to respond that the kind of questions one
asks depends very much upon the kind of problematic within which one is
operating. When Merrim, to continue with the above examples, asks at the outset:
“What inner forces and drive motivated Sor Juan de la Cruz [ . . . ]?” (1991b, 11),
162 M.K. Read
and Grossi opposes the “texto literario” to its “ contexto sociocultural” (2007, 25)
and “literaturizes” the referent (32), the die is already cast, in causal terms, in
favour of a “subject” possessed of an “interior,” as opposed to an implied
“exterior.” And when to these concepts are added the notions of certain
unspecified, psychoanalytic “drives” and the “polisemic body,” together with
period concepts that are assumed unquestioningly as part of the common sense of
scholarship, a complex theoretical framework is firmly in place.
However, such a response is unlikely to make many converts among critical
pragmatists themselves, who, notwithstanding their allegedly open-ended
theoretical pluralism, still cherish the illusion that they can in some way side-
step theory, not to mention ideology, so as to begin with the facts “in themselves.”
An all-pervasive empiricist unconscious will not allow them to think otherwise.
Our tactical response, therefore, will be to meet pragmatism on its own preferred
ground, namely that of practice, in this case the practice of translation, on which to
argue the theoretical consequences of pragmatic choices of a seemingly simple,
inconsequential kind. Let us begin by considering the following passage from Sor
Juana’s “Respuesta”: “¿De dónde emanarı́a aquella variedad de genios e ingenios,
siendo todos de una especie? ¿Cuáles serı́an los temperamentos y ocultas
cualidades que lo ocasionaban?” (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1992b, 838). A popular
translation of the passage reads as follows: “Whence the variety of genius and wit,
being all of a single species? Which the temperaments and hidden qualities that
occasioned such variety?” (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1997, 41). What is not commonly
realized, except famously by Borges in his “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote,” is
that such a reproduction unavoidably re-inscribes the original within a totally
different ideological universe. “Species,” to take the most obvious example,
cannot possibly mean what “especie” meant to the seventeenth-century writer
and, taken together with “variety,” sends the reader off in a (post-)Darwinian
direction completely alien to Sor Juana’s text, just as “temperament,” as it is now
commonly understood, was long ago stripped of its erstwhile “humoreal”
connotations. As for “ocultas cualidades,” it would require a whole article to
unpack its precise content for Sor Juana. But to make our discussion to some
degree negotiable, we will concentrate upon “ingenio” and “genio.”
While “ingenio” presents problems of its own, the choice of “wit” is normal
practice, justified historically and semantically on the grounds that, its recent
accretions notwithstanding, the English term still preserves something of its earlier
resonances.2 It is important to realize, however, that those resonances are complex
in the extreme, as when Herrera equates the “ingenio” with “yo” in Garcilaso’s
First Elegy. “[Yo] el ingenio umano,” the commentarist writes, “que es la fuerc a
de nuestra alma; como se conosca immortal, dessea tambien que su mesmo
cuerpo, compañero i aposento suyo, en cuanto fuere possible, goze de aquella
mesma felicidad” (Herrera [1580] 1973, 336– 7). Such a strictly feudalizing,
substantialist interpretation, as Rodrı́guez notes, contrasts starkly with animist
resonances of the original: “[ . . . ] mientras que lo que Garcilaso enuncia
precisamente con ese ‘yo’ (y a partir de él) no es otra cosa que la realización,
plenamente animista, de un ‘alma bella’ con otra ‘alma bella’” (1990, 341). The
shift of register is to be explained as follows: while Herrera is perfectly familiar
with the animist use of the term “ingenio,” which he further deploys in his own
verse, the theoretician in him feels compelled to appeal to a substantialist norm
whenever he wishes to appear “learned,” or so at least the Althusserian argues.
Such a norm, let us note in passing, would appear to be the one most relevant to
Sor Juana’s own use of the term in her “Respuesta,” where she is also attempting to
appear at her most authoritative.
The problem posed by “genio” is much more serious in that “genius,” which, in
the above translation, momentarily threatens to cross with “genus,” carries all the
semantic freight that the word accrued during its passage through Romanticism,
which completely masks an earlier meaning again exemplified by Herrera, in this
case with respect to its use in Garcilaso’s Second Eclogue. The commentarist
interprets:
genio es una virtud especifica, o propriedad particular de cada uno que vive.
No erraria mucho quien pensasse que el entendimiento agente de Aristoteles es el
mesmo que el genio Platonico. Es el que se ofrece a los ingenios divinos, i se mete
dentro para que descubra con su luz las intelectiones de las cosas secretas, que
escriven. I sucede muchas vezes, que resfriandose despues aquel calor celeste en los
escritores; ellos mesmos o admiren, o no conozcan sus mesmas cosas; i algunas
vezes no las entiendan en aquella razon a la cual fueron enderec adas i dilatadas del.
(Herrera 1973, 581 – 2)
In this passage, Herrera accommodates the Aristotelian with the Platonic,
therefore animist, understanding of genio, which concedes the prophetic
dimension of the term, and accordingly, it could be argued, resonates, however
distantly, with the modern notion of the “genius.” That said, it is also clear that
Herrera finally surrenders to a traditional, feudalizing reading that emphasizes the
organic basis of the “genio,” which further suggests that, when it comes to prose
writing (which, to reiterate, is the context germane to Sor Juana’s usage), “genio”
cannot break its ties with substantialist ideology.
Now it may well seem that all of this is much-ado-about-nothing and scarcely
justifies our objections to the marginally anachronistic use of “genius” for “genio.”
Except that the matter does not end here. “Genius” in this context is the thin end of
a wedge that sees feminist critics parading Sor Juana herself as an “exceptional
genius” (Lavrin 1991, 80), a “sober and ironic herald” of the Age of Reason and
“prefigurement” of twentieth-century feminism (Arenal 1991, 124, 125), a genius
“permeated by her feminine consciousness” and an existentialist before her time
(Sabat-Rivers 1991, 144, 157). The use of “genius,” to translate “genio,” we are
saying, is part of a wholesale project to modernise Sor Juana, with an eye to
facilitating the consumption of “baroque” texts by a student body that deems
relevant to it only that with which it can “identify.”
164 M.K. Read
Voices of love
How to “literaturize” a pre-modern writer like Sor Juana for modern (feminist)
consumption? The urgency of the problem is not to be underrated. “[T]here is a
great need,” Gimbernat de González assures us, “for readings more relevant to our
times,” in the theoretical defence of which we are assured that “[e]very period
privileges its own ways of controlling the production of intertextual meanings”
(Gimbernat 1991, 164). And given the texts’ vulnerability to such control, there is
little to prevent feminist critics from establishing “a determining relationship
between more modern concepts and those of Sor Juana, privileging the contexts
that oriented her works and rendering them relevant to contemporary concerns”
(164). Little, that is, except the objectivity of the pre-modern texts, whose
“stylized,” “merely imagined,” “simply rhetorical” form stands frustratingly
athwart repeated attempts to press them into the post-romantic mould of a subject
who lives in nature, at the level of its sensations, and who accordingly exhibits the
necessary qualities of “sincerity” and “authenticity.” To consider how these
tensions play themselves out in detail, let us continue with our analysis of
Gimbernat through her discussion of the following sonnet.
Probable opinión es que, conservarse
la forma celestial en su fijeza,
no es porque en la material hay más firmeza
sino por la manera de informarse.
Porque aquel apetito de mudarse,
lo sacia de la forma la nobleza;
con que, cesando el apetito, cesa
la ocasión que tuvieran de apartarse.
Ası́ tu amor, con vı́nculo terrible,
el alma que te adora, Celia, informa;
con que su corrupción es imposible,
ni educir otra con quien no conforma,
no por ser la material incorruptible,
mas por lo inamisible de la forma. (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1992a, 153)
Other concerns notwithstanding – notably the presence of the masculine voice –
the selection of the sonnet form would seem, at first blush, ideal terrain on which to
undertake the defence of the subject. That said, one does not have to look beyond
the warning contained within its title (“Usa cuidadosamente términos de
escuelas”) before one begins to question the ideological purity of a sonnet that, by
its own and Gimbernat’s reckoning, is locked within a scholastic universe
conceived as a “stratified order of ascending categories” (1991, 172), in which
Celia’s love “becomes actualized within the immutability of the divine order.”
“[It] cannot give way,” the critic explains, “thanks to the fact that the presence and
imparting of a substantial form has granted it permanence within change” (172).
From the Althusserian standpoint, it would be important to note that the feudal
notion of substantial forms, based on the inextricable union of spirit and body, acts
as a serious material drag upon the animist pretence to ethereal freedoms of the
spirit, also actively promoted within the same sonnet. The effect of the bodily
freight is to block the emergence of the (proto-)subject or beautiful soul and, by the
same token, to raise seemingly insurmountable problems for a bourgeois criticism
that is constrained, ideologically, to prioritise the notion of the free subject:
“Where, in this universe of vertical categories, do we find the orchestrating
presence of Sor Juana?” (172).
Again, from our own critical standpoint, the answer is immediate: a transcendental
presence in Sor Juana is nowhere to be found, for the simple reason that substantialism
knows no such presence. The key opposition within the feudal ideology, we would
elaborate, is not that between subject and object, but that between this world and the
next. But such a possibility is something bourgeois ideology cannot think. Driven into
a corner, it must take refuge in denial: “From her privileged position, knowing and the
knowledge she controls raise [Sor Juana] to a meta-discursive level from which she
exercises a new power; interpretation as emancipation” (172). The feminist critic,
then, is prepared to posit the existence of a subject by fiat, if necessary, even where
none is to be found. As Gimbernat elaborates:
Yet Sor Juana’s oeuvre contains poems [ . . . ] in which we catch sight of the search
for an emancipating language, or at least a language with flashes of emancipation.
Though submerged in a cultural context that forms and conditions them [ . . . ], the
poems contain a layer of self-awareness critical of those modes of thought and
reflection, which enriches and enables other readings. (173)
The tactic is to see in the voice of the implied author a presence that subverts that
of the male voice, and thereby levels the playing field between male and female.
The result in critical terms is, to say the least, unpersuasive, but one understands
the critic’s desperation: the capitalist economy cannot function without the
freedom to exploit (and to be exploited) and the dominant ideology is there to
persuade its subjects of freedom’s permanence – it is, allegedly, part of their
distinctively “human nature.” In the case of Sor Juana, the freedom in question
must be established on the basis of a relatively meagre residue, left behind by a
defeated animism and serving minimally, even when this ideology was at its most
flourishing, to enable a degree of co-existence with a dominant feudalism. But
established it must be: “through her meta-discourse the poet has mounted a
scenario that opens a space for emancipation, erasing the lines that demarcate
hierarchical and confining orders” (174), for without it, claims regarding the
relevance of Sor Juana to the “modern world” cannot hold.
Doubtless the attribution of ideological motives to the feminist critic will be
contested by the empirically minded. Where, precisely, is the evidence? The
answer: in the footnotes that accompany Gimbernat’s article. In this repressed
form – what are footnotes but the formal equivalent of an unconscious? – the
166 M.K. Read
feminist protests the importance of defending an originary subject in the face of

any attempt to transfer the causal axis to the structures that encompass it:
I use the term meta-discourse and not subtext, because I believe that the interpreting
voice of the text, which makes for the dialogue within the text itself, rises above the
enunciating presence of the male with his baggage of literary tradition and achieves
a superior and all-embracing position which favours the desired equilibrium. If I
understood the interpretive force as a subtext, I would be proposing a reading of
respect and subordination to the order imposed by tradition. (176, note 22)
For the superior, all-embracing position, read the transcendental Kantian subject;
for the subtext, read the ideological unconscious, whose always already
determining presence the bourgeois critic must unconsciously disqualify, other

than in the form of a context. And the distinctive feature of the context, it is
important to add, is that it only exerts its influence on the subject afterwards and
from outside. Of course, here as elsewhere the term “unconscious” needs, as they
say in Spanish, to be picked up “with pincers”: Gimbernat’s defence of the “free
subject” is, at one level, absolutely conscious and certainly “intentional.” That
said, the tenacity with which she clings to the existence of a subject, to the point of
marginalizing the ideological forces aligned against it, also betrays the ineluctable
presence of her own determining subtext.
Idealism to the second power

The passage of time, within the context of a resurgent neo-liberalism, has only borne
witness to a strengthening of the ideological hold on Hispanist feminism of the
ideology of the “free subject.” In a more recent work, for example, in which she
struggles to locate Sor Juana with respect to the baroque “ars combinatoire,”
Merrim is symptomatically certain of two things: firstly, that Sor Juana “locat[es]
herself squarely within the bounds of neo- Thomism” (1999, 70) as opposed to being
dispersed subjectively through various traditions; and secondly, that Sor Juana
enjoys a transcendental status with respect to the discursive turmoil, “juggling
shards of male tradition” in the manner of a bricoleuse (71), to express what she
wants to say. This free subject will serve the feminist critic to bridge the historical
gulf that separates the seventeenth from the twentieth century, but at the cost of
retrospectively projecting its globalized form onto its embryonic counterpart, the
proto-subject of mercantilism, and thereby blurring the distinctive effectivities of
each. Predictably, the spectre of ahistoricism raises its ugly head, although it
“should be clear” (as Merrim’s book unfolds) that certain modern concepts, notably
those relating to subjectivity, “not only obtain without undue anachronism to the
seventeenth century but also pertain with special relevance to that time” (xliii).
Unfortunately for this line of argument, however, Sor Juana’s transhistorical
relevance is not quite so obvious as the critical bluster would have us believe. There
is, to begin with, the problem of the sheer, unforgiving objectivity of Sor Juana’s
text, which determines, on the evidence of the critic’s own work, that the proto-
subject of an emergent bourgeoisie quite simply fails to live up to the ideological
requirements of the post-modern, distinctively petty bourgeoisie. Hence, while the
nun’s love poetry can display “genuine emotion” (Merrim 1999, 53), the fact of the
matter is that it can also all too frequently “degenerate into a showcase for
Scholastic argumentation or conceptista word play” (54). What is particularly
frustrating, the complaint runs, is that the seventeenth-century lyric otherwise offers
a most appropriate space for the “examination of the self’,” which makes it
inexplicable that “Sor Juana places closure just where we would expect disclosure”
(54). Frustrating, that is, if “we” are the kind of critics who cherish interiority and
look enviously upon a Protestant culture whose women writers, like Anne
Bradstreet, exhibit a “complex” and “thick interiority” (138) – the contrast with Sor
Juana could “hardly be more stunning” – or, like Margaret Lucas Cavendish,
positively “flaunt” their subjectivity (211) in diaries and autobiographies. Of
course, Spain boasts lives of saints, hagiographies and spiritual autobiographies a
plenty, but the, on Althusserian terms, eminently substantialist, feudal self-
abasement and self-loathing they exhibit is manifestly that of a sinner, as distinct
from a subject, and, from the standpoint of (post-)modern bourgeois culture, suffers
ineluctably from a lack (of individualistic self-analysis, etc.), which has to be “made
up for” by the force of what is vaguely referred to as the writer’s “sentiments” (160).
At first glance, recent criticism might seem to exhibit nuances that mark a
significant departure from the feminist tradition as characterized above. Grossi, for
example, while still insistent upon Sor Juana’s “originality,” is emphatic that the
latter is to be sought not in “el grado de sinceridad de su expresión” but rather in
the poet’s recreative capacity (2007, 30). On this evidence, it might be supposed,
the richly interiorized subject of the classic bourgeoisie no longer meets the
requirements of the globalizing capitalism of the twenty-first century, whose
relations of production are best served by a much more fluid, fragmented
subjectivity. The loss of the referent, it might further be argued by way of support,
has manifestly brought about the fading, even eclipse, of the subject, evinced by
the “death of the author.” Why, otherwise, should Grossi seek from the outset to
neutralize the force of an “authorial intention” that is viewed as altogether too
phalogocentric (25)? But appearances are deceptive. If necessary, the focus upon
the texts can be readily cashed in, albeit at the cost of a battle between authors
(38 –9) and, moreover, braced from within by the promotion of the texts’ own
subversive potential, otherwise their “carácter transgresor, contestatorio” (23), on
which rest the claims for their artistic originality. Such a brazen rewriting of
seventeenth-century rhetoric in terms of a post-Romantic quest for originality
would have troubled a critic more alert to the claims of ontology but, having
detached the discursive object from its real counterpart, Grossi can afford to be
casually dismissive of the whole question of anachronism (153).
By the same token, this same critic may appear to be more attentive than her
predecessors to the need to situate literature in its historical “context” or
168 M.K. Read
“framework” (Grossi 2007, 24). She certainly foregrounds in Sor Juana the
importance of that favoured medieval genre, the allegory, as a vehicle of the
exemplum (147– 8). But again appearances prove deceptive. In reality, the
aestheticizing or, to use Grossi’s terms, “literaturizing” of history turns the latter
into one more literary genre, as a means of further asserting the autonomy of
culture. The feminist critic is quite specific in this respect: her brand of semiotics –
legitimized through reference to post-structuralist philosophers who “ponen en
primer plano el papel central del lenguaje” (21, note 11) – opposes the literary text
not to a material outside, in accordance with classic empiricism, but to a context
made of “textos culturales.” The effect is to textualize the real by drawing it into
the sphere of language (25). In this way the Royal Road lies open, at the theoretical
level, to an epistemic relativism, which leads in turn to an ontological irrealism:
“una pluralidad ontológica de verdades parciales” (152).
Only the articulation of psychoanalysis or Marxism could have hoped to
transfer the debate onto a different theoretical plane, to see the subject as
subjected, constructed by the symbol, but while such resources have been
available outside Hispanism for some time (see Coward and Ellis 1977), the
impact of both was limited within the dominant institutions of anglophone
Hispanism (see Read 2003, chapter 6). Ludwig Pflandl’s unmediated depiction of
Sor Juana’s psychology afforded Merrim, not without reason, little more than
“dark comic relief” (Merrim 1999, xxv), and while El Saffar’s reading of the
collective Spanish psyche and its Oedipal crisis allegedly yielded some enduring
insights (43), it understood history as little more than a “background.” As for
Lacanian psychoanalysis, it duly arrived to make a contribution of its own (see
Stroud 1993), but ultimately only at the cost of returning psychoanalysis to a
“historical and political vacuum ultimately no less debilitating than the most
crudely naturalistic interpretation of Freud” (Dews 1987, 108).
Marxism was largely absent as an available discourse from anglophone
Hispanism, and feminists were obliged to look to the nearest available equivalent
by way of eking out their texts, which, in the case of North America, meant George
Mariscal’s Contradictory Subjects (1991). As a reworking of Rodrı́guez’s Teorı́a e
historia ([1975] 1990) for liberal consumption, however, this work perforce
suffers from one fundamental, but only too predictable, defect: it equips
Rodrı́guez’s substantialism, no longer an ideology but a discourse, with the
“subject” it lacked in Rodrı́guez’s original formulation (see Read 2010b, chapter
2). Grossi, similarly, looks to John Beverley’s reading of Góngora’s Soledades
(Beverley 1980) to support her political take on Sor Juana (Grossi 2007, 41, note
5), but this particular Hispanist seems to have been unfamiliar with Rodrı́guez’s
work altogether and, notwithstanding his early Left-wing bias, was more anxious
to castigate Marxism for its lack of a Lacanian libidinal subject than to pursue its
key explorations into ideology (see Read 2010b, chapter 1). The message, then, is
clear: to develop a gendered Marxism, we must look for assistance outside the
theoretically circumscribed world of anglophone Hispanism.
“The Law of the Father?”

Mary Murray’s The Law of the Father? acknowledges the existence of postmodern
feminism, of the kind reviewed above, but only to take her distance from it (1995,
2 – 3), viewing it (following David Harvey and Alex Callinicos) as a product of the
leisured, over-consumptionist life-style of the 1980s. She is unsparing in her
criticism of such leading feminists as Juliet Mitchell, whose commitments to a
dialectical understanding of history are, allegedly, purely “rhetorical” (25), and in
whom the claim that the form of women’s oppression has varied historically
“remains little more than an assertion” (34). At the same time, neither Marx nor
contemporary Marxists ever consider such questions as how the principal social
relationship between labour and capital was constructed through patriarchy (41) or
how the overthrow of serfdom affected gender (53) and, in consequence, have little
cause for complacency. Having thus cleared away the theoretical clutter and marked
significant omissions in the preceding work, Murray proceeds to elaborate her own
take on the transition from feudalism to capitalism. It merits careful consideration.
Murray’s first move is to prioritize the Lord/serf relation, as determinative of
property relations under feudalism (37). At the apex of the social ladder was the
king, the nominal “owner” of the land, who, in exchange for military service,
ceded control over his possessions to his vassal-lords, the latter being granted
jurisdiction over “their” serfs and tenants (54). The system was in essence an
exploitative one, whereby the vassal-lords extracted the social surplus through the
threat of violence from a subordinate peasantry. Murray goes to great lengths to
emphasize that feudal rights (of control) referred to revenue rights, not to
exclusive ownership. It is at this point that the feminist argument begins to bite.
The rights of revenue were, predictably enough, reproduced within the relationship
between men and women. Husbands did not own their wives, who were “merely”
tenants to their new lord (67), although they expected to be obeyed by them (107). Nor
did they own their wives’ estates; rather they were simply guardians of them, in which
capacity they were entitled to the rents and profits to be derived from them. The claim
is not that women were not disadvantaged by such arrangements: clearly, they were
and there exists a whole body of misogynist literature to prove it. But the further point
needs to be emphasized: biology – the presumed incapacity of women to bear arms –
did not cause women’s oppression, rather the “biological differences between men
and women became significant [ . . . ] with the entrenchment of class relations” (61,
italics added), within a historically determinate set of social relations. From which it
follows, according to Murray, that this same Law of the Father opened up a space for
the operation of “sisterly relations” (100), which, within the limitations of a patrilineal
feudalism, allowed women room for manoeuvre. Specifically, women were by no
means debarred from the exercise of political power (81); were able to inherit and
could hold fiefs and vast lands (81), and, in their capacity as sisters, daughters and
subordinate wives, were assured the ongoing protection of their clan or family, even
after marriage (99–103).
170 M.K. Read
Murray is a historian, not a literary critic, but she does promote an internal relations
view of causality, as opposed to its linear equivalent, that would presumably lead her
to look with favour upon an extension of her “metaphoric symbolism” to other levels
of the social formation. If women never sever their metaphoric ties with their material
roots in the kinship group, then neither do feudal signatures sever their connections to
their “unfree” referents, the latter marked with the signature of the Lord. These
signature, then, form a link between property relations and the workings of language,
as these operate under feudal substantialism, as exhibited by a text such as Don
Manuel’s El Conde Lucanor (1335).
First impressions are important: at the syntactic level, Don Juan Manuel’s
embedded clauses function as paratactic blocks: “E [ . . . ] le preguntó [ . . . ] E le

dixo [ . . . ] E le mandó [ . . . ]” etc. The speaking subject, one might say, is the one
element not to find a locus in the syntactic structure, whose flow perforce remains
relatively disarticulated. At the formal level, then, our conclusion is emphatic: the
presence of the subject in Don Juan’s text remains embryonic, as does the
distinction between a subjective inner realm and an outside world. The crucial
relationship is that between this world and the next, on a cosmic scale; two worlds
whose specular identity was disturbed at the Fall, and can only be restored through
hermeneutic commentary. Within the terrestrial realm, body and soul are
inextricably intertwined, such that it could be said, psychoanalytically, that the
substantialist body has still failed to break its material/maternal ties or, in more
strictly Lacanian terms, that it remains relatively locked into the imaginary.
All of which would, among other things, further explain the predominance of
the signature over the sign, in evidence in a Catholic sacrament that continues to
envisage the wine as the blood of Christ, and the bread as the body of Christ.
“E devedes saber,” elaborates Don Juan Manuel, “que la razón porque dizen que
tomó el pan e bendı́xolo e partiólo es ésta: cada que Ihesu Christo bendizı́a el pan,
luego él era partido tan egual commo si lo partiesse con el más agudo cochiello
que pudiesse ser” (Manuel 1982, 338). Pursuing the logic of psychoanalytic
discourse, this organicist inability to break with the material bond suggests a
residual failure to resolve the Oedipal drama, an inability symptomatized in a
preoccupation with cleanliness and, within the framework of Christian ritual, with
the ritual of baptism. Don Juan, for his part, knows exactly how to “read” the
latter: in washing away the pleasure (“deleite”) of those implicated in the act of
engendering, we remove the stain of original sin (339).
At this point, the anal obsession relating to cleanliness crosses with the
thematics of castration, thinly disguised as circumcision; and circumcision,
whether we take the route through psychoanalytic discourse or substantialist
ideology, raises the spectre of castration, the threat of which is indispensable to the
maintenance of the Law and therefore to the functioning of human society:
[ . . . ] e para lo alimpiar, ordenó nuestro señor Dios, en la primera ley, la
circunc isión; e commo quier que en quanto duró aquella ley cumplı́an aquel
sacramento, porque entendades que todo lo que en aquella ley fue ordenado, que
todo fue por figura desta sancta ley que agora abemos, devédeslo entender
señaladamente en este sacramento del baptismo. (339)
The child, then, turns away from the maternal, but less completely under
feudalism; also with added complications in the case of the girl-child, firstly
because she is already castrated and therefore cannot be intimidated into
sacrificing her desire, and secondly because, through her gender, she bears
organically the weight of the maternal:
[ . . . ] pues el circunc idar non se puede fazer sinon a los varones; pues si non se puede
ninguno salvar del pecado original sinon por la c ircunc isión, cierto es que las
mugeres que no pueden este sacramento aver, non pueden seer alimpiadas del
pecado original. (339)
By way of anticipating our later argument, we draw attention to the energy Sor
Juana invests in salvaging the Virgin from any material contagion of the body. But
before we address the seventeenth-century writer, we need to consider some of the
ideological changes introduced by the onset of animism. These, as we will also
see, radically determine Sor Juana’s work.
The capitalist fraternity

Escrito ‘stá en mi alma vuestro gesto
y cuanto yo escribir de vos deseo:
vos sola lo escribistes; yo lo leo
tan solo, que aun de vos me guardo en esto. (Garcilaso de la Vega 1989, 52)
The reference in this Garcilasan sonnet to reading and writing is certainly resonant
of an enduring substantialism during a period of transition (see Rodrı́guez 1990,
226– 7), even as the “new men” were seeking to introduce the spirit of
Petrarchism. Having said which, it is immediately clear that much has changed
since Don Juan Manuel was writing. The relevant ideological matrix is no longer
feudal. A break has occurred that has displaced the focus of attention towards the
proto-subject, now distinguished less by what it reads than what it sees.
En esto estoy y estaré siempre puesto,
aunque no cabe en mi cuanto en vos veo,
de tanto bien lo que no entiendo creo,
tomando ya la fe por presupuesto. (Garcilaso de la Vega 1989, 52)
Note the eye/I that sees the thing from its own unique perspective, within the
distinctively private space of “love,” the latter newly operative under its own
norm, distinct from that of the “war” with which it was formerly associated. In this
self-enclosed ambit, love’s body has been transformed into the nude, otherwise a
detachable soul. And all of this within the framework of a newly expanded
universe suffused in its totality by the power of love or the “Soul of the World.”
172 M.K. Read
What sustains such a break? Quite simply a radical transformation of the feudal
Lord/serf opposition into its bourgeois Subject/subject counterpart, achieved
through a process of primitive accumulation that saw the serfs, who by definition
retained partial control over their means of production, progressively “freed” of
the same means and thereby brought under the control of capital. In Murray’s
terms, we pass from the “Law of the Father” to the “capitalist fraternity” and, by
the same token, “from the natural paternal body,” which is put to death, to an
“artificial” body that is a construct of the mind (1995, 92). Ideologically,
transposing Murray’s view of property relations, “service” mutates into
“friendship” as the new social bond:
Y la causa de tal unión y vı́nculo es la recı́proca virtud y la sabidurı́a de los dos

amigos, la cual, por su espiritualidad y por la enagenación de la materia y
abstracción de las condiciones corpóreas, remueve la diversidad de las personas a la
individuación corporal y engendra en los amigos una propia esencia mental [ . . . ].
(Hebreo 1947, 36)
So argues León Hebreo in his Diálogos de amor (1502), confirming thereby our
critical conviction that, by the beginning of the sixteenth century, the “book” has
effectively been replaced by the “dialogue,” otherwise the thinly disguised
homologue of market exchange.3 And it is only within the context of the capitalist
market, as Murray explains, that property appears as a simple relation of
possession between individual and object (1995, 55). By extension, property
becomes a right to material things, that is, objects or commodities, by which we
arrive at the right to exclude others (71).
The flow-on effects, as far as women are concerned, were complex. To begin
with, in Spain, in contrast to Murray’s England, the feudal aristocracy clung
successfully to its privileges within the context of Absolutism. True, even here,
when animism was at its most flourishing in the early sixteenth century, there was
potential for subversive possibilities. After all, women also stood to gain with men
from the development of absolute ownership rights vested in individuals as
absolute owners. But there is no gainsaying the general course of development:
with the death of the father, brothers rise to dominance at the cost of sisters, now
transformed into “daughters and subordinate wives only” (103). The consequences
are apparent in the classic animist dialogue, El scholástico, in which the
dialoguists Francisco de la Vega and Alberto de Benavides target women as the
threatening embodiment of sin. They are opposed by Alonso Osorio and Hernán
Pérez de Oliva only to the extent that the latter are able to discover in antiquity
evidence of individual women who knew how to behave “varonilmente” (see Read
1999, 19).4
Once again, we must look to language as the barometer of change. Animism re-
structures syntax on the basis of a subject that is opposed to an object, with which
it is joined by means of a copula: “yo amo a Dios” – the example is Villalón’s (see
Read 1999, 16– 7). In this way, under the rule of the symbolic, metonymic
structures are hammered into place within the flow of characteristically hypotactic
discourse, whose complex clauses are held together by the binding presence of a
clearly recognizable expressive subject: “[oraciones] espresan y manifiestan
cumplidamente el conc ibimiento del hombre en el proposito que tiene tomado
para hablar” (quoted by Read 1999, 16). A homologue suggests itself between the
transformation of use values into exchange values, and that of feudal signatures
into signs. In both cases, the disruption of identities is broadly the same, as are the
respective processes of compensation (“weighing”): economically, the pains of
labour are eclipsed by the price; linguistically, the wound of the metaphoric trace
is spirited away by meaning (see Goux 1990, 58– 9, 105).
The separability of spirit from flesh is carried over into the distinctively
Christian form of animism – religion, needless to say, does not escape the impact
of the new social relations. The Soul of the World continues to drench every aspect
of the Creation, even in its lowliest forms – hence Santa Teresa’s notion of “Dios
entre pucheros.” Necessarily, the individual is also implicated: now ensconced
within the solitude of his/her private domain, s/he must choose between two
horizons – those of the spirit and the flesh. The duality is familiar enough, less so
the choice, to be exercised by the individual, within the context of this world. And
following inexorably upon the notion of choice is that of a calling, widespread in
reformist circles and, as suggested above, difficult to reconcile with a substantialist
thematics.
In sum, while there is no gainsaying the features it shared with its secular
counterpart, Christian animism was unable to relinquish one key aspect of its
substantialist legacy, namely the distinction between this world and the next, a
distinction that in turn brings in train two other notions equally indispensable to
Christian animism, namely those of the “dark night” of the soul and the promise of
the soul’s union with the godhead. By way of contrast, the animist notion of the
Soul of the World effectively dismantles all cosmic dichotomies. Moreover, a
profane attachment to individual identity, we saw, precluded the secular subject’s
merger with the Other. But in order to explore the dynamics of these (non-)
encounters in greater detail, let us pick up the thread of Sor Juana’s work.
“Respuesta”
Animism, as Rodrı́guez defines it, disappears as an autonomous matrix at the end
of the sixteenth century (1990, 354), in the face of a resurgent feudalism, which,
through the offices of the Inquisition, moves quickly to impose its rule. That said,
history rarely proves reversible, least of all in the context of the new disorder of the
seventeenth century, and a dominant nobility will have to learn to live with, by
assuming, the irreversible legacy of animism.5 And crucial to that legacy is the
split between the public/private sectors, in evidence in Sor Juana’s claim: “[ . . . ]
que el leer públicamente en las cátedras y predicar en los púlpitos no es lı́cito a las
mujeres; pero que el estudiar, escribir y enseñar privadamente no sólo les es lı́cito
174 M.K. Read
pero muy provechoso” (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1992b, 840, italics added).
Significantly, the first thing to strike the reader of the “Respuesta,” its pervasive
religiosity notwithstanding, is the prominence accorded throughout to a subject
solicitous of its own privacy and freedom (“la libertad de mi estudio” [831]), “el
sosegado silencio de mis libros” [831], etc.). Moreover, we are talking here not
simply of a seemingly free subject but, perforce, of an interiorized subject, intent
on expressing itself: “Pero quiero que con haberos franqueado de par en par las
puertas de mi corazón, haciéndoos patentes sus más sellados secretos” (830), in
terms of what is, emphatically, a life history, designed to account for Sor Juana’s
own individual eccentricities, paramount among which is her thirst for knowledge.
For feminist critics, already obsessed with issues of identity, the temptation
proved irresistible. Faced by the repeated foregrounding of the “yo,” they
immediately categorized the “Respuesta” as a distinctively autobiographical text,
in the classic bourgeois tradition. True, they were far from accepting uncritically
the autobiographical bias lent to Sor Juana studies by Octavio Paz’s Sor Juana
Inés de la Cruz o las trampas de la fe (1982). Merrim, for example, emphasizes the
autobiographical indirection of Sor Juana’s self-representations, through which to
account, among other things, for the writer’s rather “mercurial” presence within
the “Respuesta,”“[o]scillating dramatically” between self-exaltation and denigra-
tion (Merrim 1991b, 29). But such qualifications notwithstanding, “autobio-
graphical aspects” are, allegedly, “built into” Sor Juana’s work (Merrim 1991c,
118), which strikes the feminist reader as “a typical popular autobiography”
(Ludmer 1991, 88 – 9). Other critics agree. Arenal believes that, long before
moderns, Sor Juana discovers that the personal is political (1991, 130). And
needless to say, from viewing Sor Juana’s work as, in essence, autobiographical,
it is but a short step to presenting it as nothing less than a “manifesto promoting
freedom of expression” (Stavans 1997, xli), within the context of a
pre-Enlightenment in which the divine cedes progressively to the scientific
(Merrim 1991b, 27).
Against this modernizing critical thrust, we must insist upon the need to make
the necessary distinctions. Sor Juana, objectively speaking, does not write an
autobiography, but is actually engaged in a “dialogue” or, to be more exact, in a
“dispute” of a strictly feudalizing kind, with her “confessor,” before whom our
poet grovels appropriately, as a servant before her lord. But that is only the least of
it: while it certainly requires its freedoms, her thirst for knowledge remains that of
a soul driven towards its “natural place,” configured strictly in terms of service to a
lord/Lord: “[ . . . ] yo procuraba elevarlo cuanto podı́a y dirigirlo a su servicio,
porque el fin a que espiraba era a estudiar Teologı́a” (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1992b,
831); and while “science” is undeniably the point at issue, it is a science of a
singularly feudal kind, in which signatures predominate over signs, thereby
inviting the scientist to discern the presence of God’s voice in objects that are
anything but free: “¿Cómo sin Fı́sica, [entenderı́a] tantas cuestions naturales de las
naturalezas de los animales de los sacrificios, donde se simbolizan tantas cosas ya
declaradas y otras muchas que hay?” (831). Underlying such statements is the
substantialist view of the world as a book:
Y en fin, ¿cómo el Libro que comprende todos los libros, y la Ciencia en que se
incluyen todas las ciencias, para cuya inteligencia todas sirven; y después de
saberlas todas (que ya se ve que no es fácil, ni aun posible), pide otra circunstancia
más que todo lo dicho, que es una continua oración [ . . . ]. (832)
Note also the suspicion that, parenthetically, attaches to a quest for knowledge: her
unquenchable curiosity notwithstanding, the feudal scholar is haunted by the fate
of Icarus and will remain forever fearful of overstepping the bounds of decorum.
As was apparent from our analysis of the sonnet form, the texts of Sor Juana are
appropriately seen not as originating in a single source of expressivity, gratifyingly
unified in its intent to express a feminine consciousness, but as sites across which a
variety of ideological force fields play, force fields so intermingled as to defy any
attempt to disentangle them, at the individual level. There are, for example, whole
passages of the “Respuesta” in which the substantialist servant who reads the
Great Chain of Being for its divine illuminations merges inextricably with the
animist who sees the thing and legitimates her truth claims accordingly, through
reference to her personal experience. Conversely, it sometimes proves impossible
to separate the individual whose “merit” is such as to arouse the envy of friends
and colleagues, within a typically bourgeois scenario, from the Christ-like figure
who can expect nothing in recognition of her excellence but a crown of thorns.
Elsewhere, one’s impression is of an ebb and flow of over-determined ideologies,
such that, at one moment, the substantialist influence predominates, only to be
displaced, at the next, by an animist thematics, as when Sor Juana, after ceding to
the Abbess’ command to cease her secular studies, immediately proceeds to
legitimate her scientific interests by reconfiguring God’s signatures as free objects,
transfused with the Spirit of the World:
[ . . . ] aunque no estudiaba en los libros, estudiaba en todas las cosas que Dios crió,
sirviéndome ellas de letras, y de libro toda esta máquina universal. Nada veı́a sin
reflejo; nada oı́a sin consideración, aun en las cosas más menudas y materiales;
porque como no hay criatura, por baja que sea, en que no se conozca el me fecit
Deus, no hay alguna que no pasme el entendimiento. (837 – 8)
Again conversely, Sor Juana can teeter on the brink of a classically bourgeois
empiricism, objectively viewing the free “thing” within explicitly perspectival
norms:
Si veı́a una figura estaba combinando la proporción de sus lı́neas y mediéndola con
el entendimiento y reduciéndola a otras diferentes. Paseábame algunas veces en el
testero de un dormitorio nuestro (que es una pieza muy capaz) y estaba observando
que siendo las lı́neas de sus dos lados paralelas y su techo a nivel, la vista fingı́a que
sus lı́neas se inclinaban una a otra y que su techo estaba más bajo en lo distante que
176 M.K. Read
en lo próximo, de donde inferı́a que las lı́neas visuales corren rectas, pero no
paralelas, sino que van a formar una figura piramidal. (838)
Only immediately to affirm the “deceits” of this world and insist on the essential
untrustworthiness of the visual sense, in a manner over-determined by the
typically feudal (and baroque) conviction as to the essential untrustworthiness of
the visual sense: “Y discurrı́a si serı́a ésta la razón que obligó a los antiguos a
dudar si el mundo era esférico o no. Porque aunque lo parece, podı́a ser engaño de
la vista, demostrando concavidades donde pudiera no haberlas” (838).
Of course, there are moments when one discerns evidence of an unmistakable
“influence,” of the kind that operates between individuals, as when Sor Juana
directs her confessor’s attention to the laboratory possibilities offered by the

kitchen: “Pues, ¿qué os pudiera contar, Señora, de los secretos naturales que he
descubierto estando guisando?” (838). Consciously or unconsciously, one feels,
the Mexican nun must have had in mind Santa Teresa’s famous claim to have
discovered God among the pots and pans. The ideological communality is
unmistakable: both writers see evidence of the Soul of the World at work even
among the lowliest forms of the Creation. And yet Sor Juana, as her critics have
often pointed out, never indulges in the kind of mystical flights characteristic of
the Christian animist. So it comes as no surprise when the literalism characteristic
of the latter blends imperceptibly into a recognizable form of Aristotelian
rationalism: “Y yo suelo decir viendo estas cosillas: Si Aristóteles hubiera
guisado, mucho más hubiera escrito. Y prosiguiendo en mi modo de cogitaciones,
digo que esto es tan continuo en mı́ que no necesito libros” (839). Emphatically,
Sor Juana believes the Philosopher needs some basic lessons in how to see, but she
poses her argument in terms that enable us to gauge their ideological inflection
precisely: the I/eye in question is that of a non-organicist Aristotelianism that, with
the eclipse of secular animism, functions ideologically to grease the mercantile
relations that survived the economic collapse of Spain and its empire:
Y en una ocasión que, por un grave accidente de estómago, me prohibieron los
médicos el estudio, pasé algunos dı́as, y luego les propuse que era menos dañoso el
concedérmelos [los libros], porque eran tan fuertes y vehementes mis cogitacions,
que consumı́an más espı́ritus en un cuarto de hora que el estudio de los libros en
cuatro dı́as; y ası́ se redujeron a concederme que leyese. (839)
In accordance with the logic of our own argument, we anticipate that such an
enhanced sense of self-consciousness, however substantialized, will give rise to an
equally enhanced sense of un-consciousness. In this respect Sor Juana’s texts do
not disappoint:
[ . . . ] y más, Señora mı́a: que ni aun el sueño se libró de este mi continuo
movimiento de mi imaginativa; antes suele obrar en él más libre y desembarazada,
confiriendo con mayor claridad y sosiego las especies que ha conservado del dı́a,
haciendo versos, de que os pudiera hacer un catálogo muy grande, y de algunas

razones y delgadezas que he alcanzado dormida mejor que despierta. (42)
The “day’s residues” are here being worked upon by unmistakably “primary
processes,” but there the anticipation of modern developments ends: this
unconscious will be filled with a thematics drawn not from animism or any
subsequent form of bourgeois ideology but from a non-organicist Aristotelianism
that, under pressure, begins to “assume” substantialist locutions and even, in
extremis, to regress to a distinctively feudal organicism. To explore such matters
further, let us turn to “El sueño.”
“El sueño”
Faithful to their commitment to discover in Sor Juana a poet who lives at the level
of sensations, as opposed to that of stylized rhetoric, critics have resolutely insisted
upon reading the “Primero sueño” as an exercise in self-expressivity, beginning
with its very title, symptomatically interpreted as “First I dream” (Peden 1997, vi–
vii). Sabat-Rivers, in her well-known commentaries, emphasizes the “veiled
presence of the writer as she intervenes in the poem’s discourse” (1991, 146) and,
among other things, does not hesitate to read into Sor Juana’s interest in
Nictimene’s punishment for incest with her father a hidden preoccupation with her
own illegitimacy (147). The slippage from personal subjectivity to issues of
feminine identity is then easily negotiated. Sabat-Rivers finds it natural, given Sor
Juana’s “concern about being a woman,” that the poet should view positively those
feminine figures who “suffer at the hands of the masculine figures who intervene
in their lives” (152); whereas Arenal reminds us that Ceres, Proserpina, Arethusa
and Nictimene are “all in some way ill treated, betrayed or tricked by male
relatives or lovers or husbands,” driven to rebel and cruelly punished (1991, 129).
To be sure, the familiar issues resurface regarding Sor Juana’s curious
relegation of the “I” to the margins in what is allegedly her most personal, most
intimate, most autobiographical poem. But even as she concedes this much,
Merrim presses to an extreme the familiar reading of the poem’s conclusion that
seeks an equation between the “benign, merciful Christian God” and a Sun that “is
shown cruelly attacking, even raping, the Shadow” (1999, 210); a reading that,
furthermore, “leaves the female Prometheus violated and disenfranchised (if only
temporarily) by an unsavoury force identified not only with the Christian Divinity
but also quite emphatically with the masculine – the patriarchy” (211). Far from
questioning what seems, in the light of the textual evidence, a somewhat forced
reading – are we really to believe that the Christian God is being cast as a rapist?!
– more recent critics have bolstered further the centrality of the subject: “En el
Sueño el centro rector no es la corona ni el sol, sino el cerebro humano, donde la
fantası́a transforma las imágenes sensoriales en nuevas creaciones luminosas”
(Grossi 2007, 34). From this Lockean subject of classic liberalism, it is but a short
distance to its transgressive, aggressive, postmodern avatar who, notwithstanding
178 M.K. Read
her reluctance to make ontological commitments, remains firmly lodged within an

interior space that is free, autonomous and, more importantly, the seat of power, a
power shown by “penetrating” analyses (38) to be more than equal to its phallic
equivalent (146).
The theoretical basis of such a position is never clearly spelt out (see above),
except obliquely, as in the case of Arenal, who suggests by way of concluding her
discussion that Sor Juana “discovers the equivalent of Julia Kristeva’s
prediscursive semiotic center” (1991, 137). Presumably Arenal has in mind
Kristeva’s sense that, to quote MacCannell, the “[t]he symbolic destiny of the
speaking animal is superimposed [ . . . ] over the biological destiny, which remains
fundamental, a ground” (MacCannell 1986, 30), together with her attempt “to
image forth the woman at the threshold of the imaginary and symbolic, but never
actually crossing it” (135). The relevance of such an approach to “El sueño” is
certainly undeniable: one presumes Arenal references Kristeva with the distinction
in mind that Sor Juana’s poem poses between a feminine underworld (“pechos
maternales” etc.), with its barely disguised female genitalia (“cavernas
pavorosas”), perceived through the veil of anality (“lechos lamosos”), and the
castrating, phallic figure of “El Padre de la Luz ardiente.” That said, as should be
apparent from the above, our own approach is rather different, indeed reverses and
further nuances Kristeva’s emphasis. It is our symbolic destiny, the Althusserian
argument runs, that enlists our biological destiny, within a determinate historical
matrix, thereby returning us, in a timely manner, to the dense textuality of Sor
Juana’s verse.
Con tardo vuelo y canto, del oı́do
mal, y aun peor del ánimo admitido,
la avergonzada Nictimene acecha
de las sagradas puertas los resquicios,
o de las claraboyas eminentes
los huecos más propicios
que capaz a su intento le abren brecha,
y sacrı́lega llega a los lucientes
faroles sacros de perenne llama
que extingue, si no infama,
en licor claro la material crasa
consumiendo, que el árbol de Minerva
de su fruto, de prensas agravado,
congojoso sudó y rindió forzado. (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1992c, 183 –4)
Let us pick up the thread of Murray’s metaphoric symbolism, whereby wealth or
assets represent an aspect of intrinsic identity, such as agnatic status or name. The
Cid’s “Yo soy Rui Diaz el de Vivar” is, by this estimation, not the statement of a
free subject but a lord proclaiming the nobility of his lineage. In an important
respect his being is substantially embodied in his name. In the same way, the Cid’s
two daughters, given in marriage, cannot be detached from his being, which
explains why, before the law, he is fully justified in demanding retribution on their
behalf. Even under metonymic symbolization, as it operates under the feudal
mode, gifts remain as products of the person’s labour, creativity or energy and,
unlike commodities, are not “alienable,” which again explains why the Cid can
legitimately demand the restitution of the wealth bequeathed to the Infantes. Such
property relations, we suggest, were the motor behind the workings of the
substantialist text.6
That the “El sueño” functions lexically and syntactically along comparable lines
cannot be denied. Nor is there any gainsaying the psychoanalytic mechanisms
involved: the block upon the metonymic flow of discourse, exercised by the
hyperbaton, releases the libidinal energy that would otherwise remain repressed.
But we will get nowhere in our analysis of Sor Juana’s work unless we read the
libidinal dimensions of her text through a historical lens, focused upon a resurgent
feudalism within the new disorder, for which we must return to Rodrı́guez. The
relevant section of the latter’s work does not deal directly with Sor Juana but with
the Spanish poet, Fernando de Herrera, although what the Althusserian has to say
is most germane to the nun’s work.
Secular animism, we recall from our discussion of Garcilaso, balks at the
prospect of the soul’s union with the beloved or, cosmically speaking, of its fusion
with the Soul of the World, insofar as both spell the negation of the individual soul
proper. Except that, according to Rodrı́guez, this animism had entered into decline
by the second half of the sixteenth century, which would explain why Fernando de
Herrera cannot think in terms other than the soul’s fusion with the Absolute, along
the lines of a Christian animist. Herrera differs from the latter, however, in one
important respect: for him fusion can signify not only joy but also death
(Rodrı́guez 1990, 297). What precisely has happened in the intervening period?
Rodrı́guez does not spell out the details but the implications of his discussion
are clear: a recrudescence of feudal relations, together with their associated
property rights, has strengthened the ideological ties with the maternal, the effect
of which is to raise the spectre of castration: “Herrera parte siempre de la base que
la pretendida realidad autónoma de la propia alma es, sin embargo, una realidad
‘mutilada’, ‘a medias’, hasta que no logra alcanzar su fusión con lo Absoluto”
(298). The obsessive horror the poet shows towards love as flesh, as body,
connects subterraneously, Rodrı́guez further elaborates, with the image of the
Lady as in some measure demoniacal, even vampiric, as a result of which Herrera,
for one, always teeters on the brink of regression to older, organicist
representations of the vagina (300). Within this context, which is that of Sor
Juana, the soul, even as it soars heavenwards, can never free itself entirely from the
body’s “languid limbs” and “inert bones”:
i juzgándose casi dividida
de aquella que impedida
siempre la tiene, corporal cadena,
180 M.K. Read
que grosera embaraza y torpe impide

el vuelo intelectual con que ya mide
la cuantidad inmensa de la Esfera
ya el curso considera
regular, con que giran desiguales
los cuerpos celestiales. (Juana Inés de la Cruz 1992c, 189)
But if a resurgent substantialism effectively undermined animism, we need also to
take into account “El sueño”’s ending, upon whose significance feminists have
been quite right to insist: “[ . . . ] quedando a luz más cierta / el Mundo iluminado y
yo despierta” (201). For Merrim, by way of example, it “explodes” (1991b, 21),
subsequently “destabilizes the poem” (1999, 136), except, we hasten to qualify,

not in terms of some ill-defined liberal “sense of self’,” “feminine consciousness,”
etc. projected retrospectively, but of a residual “beautiful soul” of animist
extraction, a reminder that the poem recounts the journey of the soul through a
whole cosmos that is yet the inner world of a proto-subject. To catch the
ideological nuances involved, consider the feudal reminiscences, originating in
alchemic techniques, that survive within the new, animist horizon of limitless
power and that explain the residual demoniacal elements still attached to the soul’s
“power” to manipulate the spirit of things: “culpa sı́ grave, merecida pena /
(torcedor del sosiego, riguroso) / de estudio vanamente judicioso” (Juana Inés de
la Cruz 1992c, 189); or better still, the animist conviction of the capacity of the
“eye/I” to “see the thing,” epitomized in the floral display:
la vista perspicaz, libre de anteojos,
de sus intelectuales bellos ojos
(sin que distancia tema
ni de obstáculo opaco se recele,
de que interpuesto algún objeto cele),
libre tendió por todo lo criado. (191)
But that recoils before the sin of pride that such a conviction implies:
Tanto no, del osado presupuesto,
revocó la intención, arrepentida,
la vista que intentó descomedida
en vano hacer alarde
contra objeto que excede en excelencia
las lı́neas visüales
contra el Sol, digo, cuerpo luminoso. (192)
Such are the limits of a beautiful soul that has learned to live with substantialism or
that, more exactly, is corroded from within by a substantialism that attacks it
where it is most vulnerable, in the priority that it accords to vision, as embodied in
the figure of Icarus, who “por mirarlo todo, nada vı́a, / ni discernir podia” (192).
Conclusion
It was the misfortune of anglophone Hispanism, as a discipline, to have arrived
late upon the scene of “theory,” at a point when the feminism of the 1970s and 80s,
in which the class/patriarchy debate had figured prominently, was giving way,
under pressure from a resurgent New Right, to its postmodern counterpart of the
1990s, the latter characterized by an emphatic rejection of economic
determination as an explanatory principle. Equally, to have inherited a legacy
so deeply marked by a conservative Catholicism as to be prevented from
developing an indigenous Marxist culture, against which to measure critically its
ingrained, unconscious idealisms (although it should also be said that Marxism
contributed materially to its own marginalization by its failure to integrate a

theoretical analysis of patriarchy into its own investigations). The price this
feminism paid was an inability to name the exploitation that lay at the heart of both
feudal and early capitalist modes and that gave definition to the nature of women’s
oppression. Thus, while eloquent regarding the difficulties Sor Juana faced in
asserting her professional “merit,” as a distinctively woman writer, within a
patriarchal social formation, feminist Hispanists have been less than forthcoming
regarding the benefits to be derived from her privileged location within the
ideological apparatus that most effectively negotiated the Transition. That said, in
no sense have we sought in our own analysis to blame Sor Juana in personal terms
for her class allegiance. On the contrary, we have argued that her work is most
profitably viewed not as a direct translation of personal anguish and frustration,
but as embodying the ideological contradictions of a particular historical
conjuncture. That conjuncture was characterised by the resurgence of a
distinctively neo-feudal ideology, at the expense of an emergent bourgeois
animism. The latter, even in its heyday, had secreted a form of self-consciousness
too fragile to support anything other than a rudimentary sense of interiorized
being. The resurgent neo-feudalism of the seventeenth century, while forced to
adapt to the novel phenomenon of Absolutism and therefore to accept the strict
division between the public and private spheres, secured its own political
dominance by filling the dominant ideological forms with substantialist concepts
of its own making and thereby corroding the residual animist notion of the soul
from within.
Notes
1. It might reasonably be objected that any text such as the present, which promotes itself as an
impersonal critique of an empiricist problematic, can refer to “my approach,” what “I argued” or
“I proposed,” etc. only at the price of committing a performative contradiction, which an appeal
to “we” or “one” does little to off-set. Suffice it, by way of response, to observe the following.
While they accept that scientists communicate knowledge effects only by returning to the
discourse of the subject-form, Althusserians argue that the insights of a science should not be
confused with the vision of an individual. In the words of Althusser himself: “[Vision] is literally
no longer the eye (the mind’s eye) of the subject which sees what exists in the field defined by a
182 M.K. Read
theoretical problematic; it is this field itself which sees itself in the objects or problems it
defines” (Althusser and Balibar 1970, 25. Original italics). The critical focus upon “Sor Juana,”
not to mention individual scholars, resonates with similar difficulties relating to questions of
agency and structural causality, as will be seen below.
2. For example, Richard Carew translated Juan Huarte’s famous Examen de los ingenios as The
Examination of Men’s Wits (1594). Strangely, Lavrin opts for “talent” (Lavrin 1991, 81).
3. At both levels, the ideological and economic, the guiding principle is the same: the Sun/gold is
disengaged and set apart as a universal equivalent, the measure of all value. Such intimated
homologies, it cannot be repeated too often, are not to be understood reductively, in terms of
transitive causality, but through the matrix effect of the whole social formation, as it impacts
upon particular instances or levels.
4. For a detailed feminist study of the Spanish Humanist tradition, along similar theoretical lines to
the present article, see Martı́nez Góngora (1999). I am grateful to Megan Hughes for bringing
this work to my attention.
5. For an in-depth analysis of the compromises involved, see Read (2004); for more historical
detail, see Yun Casalilla (1987).
6. For further detail on signatures and paratactic structures with respect to the Poema de Mio Cid,
see Read (1983, chapter 1).
References
Althusser, L., and É. Balibar. 1970. Reading Capital. Translated by B. Brewster. London: New Left
Books.
Arenal, E. 1991. “Where Woman is Creator of the Wor(l)d. Or, Sor Juana’s Discourses on Method.”
In Feminist Perspectives on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, 124– 41. Edited by S. Merrim. Detroit,
MI: Wayne State University Press.
Beverley, J. 1980. Aspects of Góngora’s “Soledades.” Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Coward, R., and J. Ellis. 1977. Language and Materialism: Developments in Semiology and the
Theory of the Subject. Boston, MA: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Dews, P. 1987. Logics of Disintegration: Post-Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Theory.
London: Verso.
Garcilaso de la Vega. 1989. Poesı́as completas. Edited by Á. L. Prieto de Paula. Madrid: Castalia.
Gimbernat de González, E. 1991. “Speaking Through the Voices of Love: Interpretation as
Emancipation.” In Feminist Perspectives on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, 162– 76. Edited by S.
Merrim. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press.
Grossi, V. 2007. Sigilosos v(u)elos epistemológicos en Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Vervuert:
Iberoamericana.
Goux, J. J. 1990. Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud. Translated by J. Curtiss Gage. Ithaca,
NY: University Press.
Hebreo, L. [1502] 1947. Diálogos de amor. Translated by Garcilaso de la Vega el Inca (1590).
Buenos Aires: Espasa-Calpe.
Herrera, F. de. [1580] 1973. Obras de Garcilaso de la Vega con anotaciones de Fernando de
Herrera. Edited by A. Gallego Morell. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones
Cientı́ficas.
Juana Inés de la Cruz (Sor). [1969] 1992a. Obras completas. Edited by F. Monterde. Mexico:
Editorial Porrúa.
Juana Inés de la Cruz (Sor). 1992b. “Respuesta de la poetisa a la muy illustre Sor Filotea de la Cruz.”
In Obras completas, by Juana Inés de la Cruz, 827– 48. Edited by F. Monterde. Mexico:
Editorial Porrúa.
Juana Inés de la Cruz (Sor). 1992c. “El Sueño.” In Obras completas, by Juana Inés de la Cruz,
183– 201. Edited by F. Monterde. Mexico: Editorial Porrúa.
Juana Inés de la Cruz (Sor). 1997. Poems, Protest, and a Dream: Selected Writings: Sor Juana Inés
de la Cruz. Translated by M. S. Peden. New York: Penguin.
Lavrin, A. 1991. “Unlike Sor Juana? The Model Nun in the Religious Literature of Colonial
Mexico.” In Feminist Perspectives on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, 61 – 85. Edited by S. Merrim.
Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press.
Ludmer, J. 1991. “Tricks of the Weak.” In Feminist Perspectives on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz,
86 – 93. Edited by S. Merrim. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press.
MacCannell, J. F. 1986. Figuring Lacan: Criticism and the Cultural Unconscious. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press.
Manuel, Don Juan. [1335] 1982. Libro de los enxiemplos del Conde Lucanor e de Patronio. Edited
by A. I. Sotelo. Madrid: Cátedra.

Mariscal, G. 1991. Contradictory Subject: Quevedo, Cervantes, and Seventeenth- Century Spanish
Culture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Martı́nez Góngora, M. 1999. Discursos sobre la mujer en el humanismo renacentista español: los
casos de Antonio de Guevara, Alfonso y Juan de Valdés y Luis de León. York, S. C: Spanish
Literature Publications.
Merrim, S., ed. 1991a. Feminist Perspectives on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Detroit, MI: Wayne State
University Press.
Merrim, S. 1991b. “Toward a Feminist Reading of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Past, Present and
Future Directions in Sor Juana Criticism.” In Feminist Perspectives on Sor Juana Inés de la
Cruz, 11 – 37. Edited by S. Merrim. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press.
Merrim, S. 1991c. “Mores Geometricae; the ‘Womanscript’ in the Theater of Sor Juana Inés de la
Cruz.” In Feminist Perspectives on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, 94 – 123. Edited by S. Merrim.
Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press.
Merrim, S. 1999. Early Modern Women’s Writing and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Liverpool:
Liverpool University Press.
Murray, M. 1995. The Law of the Father? Patriarchy in the Transition from Feudalism to
Capitalism. London: Routledge.
Paz, O. 1982. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz o las trampas de la fe. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura
Económica.
Peden, M. S. 1997. “Translator’s Note.” In Poems, Protest, and a Dream: Selected Writings: Sor
Juana Inés de la Cruz, v – vii. Tanslated by M.S. Peden, New York: Penguin.
Read, M. K. 1983. The Birth and Death of Language: Spanish Literature and Linguistics: 1300–
1700. Madrid: Porrúa.
Read, M. K. 1999. “Cristóbal de Villalón: Language, Education, and the Absolutist State.”
In Culture and the State in Spain, 1 – 33. Edited by T. Lewis, and F. J. Sánchez. New York:
Garland.
Read, M. K. 2003. Educating the Educators: Hispanism and Its Institutions. Newark: University of
Delaware Press.
Read, M. K. 2004. “Ideologies of the Spanish Transition Re-visited: Juan Huarte de San Juan, Juan
Carlos Rodrı́guez, and Noam Chomsky.” The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34
(2): 309– 43.
Read, M. K. 2010a. “Marı́a de Zayas and her Critics: Notes toward the History of the Unconscious.”
Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 16 (2/3): 191– 218.
Read, M. K. 2010b. The Matrix Effect. [Self-published, available from Amazon.com].
Rodrı́guez, J. C. [1975] 1990. Teorı́a e historia de la producción ideológica: las primeras literaturas
burguesas (Siglo XVI). Madrid: Akal.
184 M.K. Read
Sabat-Rivers, G. 1991. “A Feminist Rereading of Sor Juana’s Dream.” In Feminist Perspectives on

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, 142– 61. Edited by S. Merrim. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University
Press.
Stavans, I. 1997. “Introduction.” In Poems, Protest, and a Dream: Selected Writings: Sor Juana Inés
de la Cruz, xi– xliii. Translated by M.S. Peden, New York: Penguin.
Stroud, M. D. 1993. “The Desiring Subject and the Promise of Salvation: A Lacanian Study of Sor
Juana’s El divino Narciso.” Hispania 76 (2): 204– 11.
Yun Casalilla, B. 1987. Sobre la transición al capitalismo en Castilla. Salamanca: Junta de Castilla y
León.

Malcolm Read - Further Thoughts On Sor Juana

Caricato da

Informazioni sul documento

Titolo originale

Copyright

Formati disponibili

Condividi questo documento

Condividi o incorpora il documento

Opzioni di condivisione

Hai trovato utile questo documento?

Questo contenuto è inappropriato?

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

Malcolm Read - Further Thoughts On Sor Juana

Caricato da

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies

ISSN: 1470-1847 (Print) 1469-9524 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjil20

Further thoughts on the history of the

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14701847.2013.867394

Published online: 09 Jan 2014.

Submit your article to this journal

View related articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

Further thoughts on the history of the unconscious: Sor

q 2013 Taylor & Francis

(self)consciousness. Self-consciousness under feudalism proved too embryonic to

feminist protests the importance of defending an originary subject in the face of

determining presence the bourgeois critic must unconsciously disqualify, other

Idealism to the second power

“The Law of the Father?”

embedded clauses function as paratactic blocks: “E [ . . . ] le preguntó [ . . . ] E le

The capitalist fraternity

Y la causa de tal unión y vı́nculo es la recı́proca virtud y la sabidurı́a de los dos

directs her confessor’s attention to the laboratory possibilities offered by the

haciendo versos, de que os pudiera hacer un catálogo muy grande, y de algunas

her reluctance to make ontological commitments, remains firmly lodged within an

que grosera embaraza y torpe impide

subsequently “destabilizes the poem” (1999, 136), except, we hasten to qualify,

contributed materially to its own marginalization by its failure to integrate a

by A. I. Sotelo. Madrid: Cátedra.

Sabat-Rivers, G. 1991. “A Feminist Rereading of Sor Juana’s Dream.” In Feminist Perspectives on

Potrebbero piacerti anche