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Review Essay: The Many Faces of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. The Divine Narcissus / El Divino Narciso. Trans. Patricia A. Peters and Renée Domeier. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1998. 202 pp. ISBN 0-8263-1888-6
Ignacio, Ricardo. Un soliloquio y cinco vertederos a Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. San Jose, CR: Editorial Universitaria Centroamericana - EDUCA-, 1992. 49 pp. ISBN 9977-30-186-7
Sabat de Rivers, Georgina, ed. Ésta, de nuestra América pupila: estudios de Poesía Colonial. Houston: Society For Renaissance and Baroque Hispanic Poetry, 1999. 341 pp. ISBN 0-9669395-0-6
Bijuesca, K. Josu, et al., eds. Sor Juana & Vieira: trescientos años después. Santa Barbara: Center for Portuguese Studies, Department of Spanish and Portuguese [Anejo de la revista Tinta], 1998. 193 pp. ISSN: 0739-7003
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (Mexico, 1648-95) has been defined in many different ways: poet, feminist, essayist, scholar, scientist, nun, criolla. Her works demonstrate multiple subjectivities, and these are further expanded by the wide range of scholarship on the writings of Sor Juana.
The four works examined here are unified only by their quest to explore a distinct facet of the life and texts of Sor Juana. One sees her as a woman living in a communal setting; another views her as a religious woman; yet another examines her poetry; and one studies her as a scholar engaged in one of the most significant intellectual debates of her time.
The Divine Narcissus / El Divino Narciso is a bilingual edition of Sor Juana's play of evangelization, in which the allegorical characters of America and Religion write an auto about Christ, casting Narciso as Christ, portraying Eco as Satan, and featuring Naturaleza Humana as the third party in a pastoral romantic triangle.
The play has been widely studied, as well as the loa which provides the frame story as for the auto itself. Women in this play are the active, dominant forces. When Religion and Celo (Spaniards) come to conquer and convert America and Occidente (Aztecs), the female Religion restrains the male Celo from killing Occidente and America. Likewise, it is the female America who is receptive to Religión's words. In the auto sacramental which they co-write, the male Narciso is fought over by...