Stephanie Merrim, Early Modern Women’s Writing and Sor Juana
Inés de la Cruz (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press/Nashville:
Vanderbilt
University
Press,
1999),
xliv+323pp.,
ISBN
0853237840/0826513387
This book is a brave and commendable attempt to build bridges:
‘Hispanic literatures…have too long been differed or differed themselves
into a parochial insularity.’ Sor Juana, the phoenix of Mexico, is for once
treated not as a singular phenomenon but compared and contrasted with a
number of other, more or less contemporary women, who include
Catalina de Erauso, María de Zayas, Mme de Lafayette, Anne Bradstreet,
and the Duchess of Newcastle, writers in Spanish, French, or English.
There is a valuable chapter comparing Sor Juana’s self-fashioning with
that of the woman soldier Catalina de Erauso, followed by two interesting
chapters on Baroque narratives of love written by women. The third
chapter contrasts Sor Juana and Anne Bradstreet, Catholic and Puritan, as
spiritual biographers; I would have welcomed, here, an analysis of
Catholic traditions of self-examination to match the good account of
Puritan spiritual autobiography. The fourth and last returns to the
consideration of ‘fame’ and the position of the educated woman of the
seventeenth century. This is a considerable contribution to knowledge,
since few treatments of early modern women have integrated Hispanic
material: this book does an excellent job of demonstrating the wealth of
interesting writing by women which is in Spanish and setting it in its
cultural context.
While there is much to admire in this book, there is also a clear
sense of a missed opportunity. The impression which is tacitly given is
that Sor Juana was unique in her time in being an internationally famous
woman poet who was deeply learned in Classical, Patristic and
Renaissance literature. While Merrim’s book ranges from one culture to
another, the women she has chosen as comparison to Sor Juana did not,
since each of them commanded only her own native tongue. But Sor
Juana herself was not so confined. The Duchess of Newcastle seems to
stand in this book for the woman who lays claim to male spheres of
knowledge, but while she laid the claim, she could not substantiate it; she
was an aristocratic amateur. Sor Juana, on the other hand, was genuinely
learned. While the only such seventeenth-century Englishwoman of
whom much is known is Bathsua Makin (incidentally, Merrim quotes the
Essay as her work, though Noel Malcolm was able to show in the TLS for
5 November 1999 that it is almost certainly by Mark Lewis), there were
contemporary women elsewhere in Europe who could have been brought
into the picture. Sor Juana was, as Merrim demonstrates, actively part of
a literary milieu, and invited to write for public occasions. She could,
therefore, have been advantageously compared with contemporary
women of whom this is also true. Anna Maria van Schurman (1607–
1678), whose The Learned Maid is discussed on pp. 199–200, was
famous both within and beyond the Netherlands, and her position within
Netherlandic culture could be compared with that of Sor Juana in useful
ways; it is curious that Merrim does not do so, since van Schurman, like
Sor Juana, enjoyed international celebrity; they performed as women
scholars, and their work was held up to admiration both within and
beyond their immediate context. Van Schurman is in a more serious sense
Sor Juana’s peer than the massively eccentric Duchess.
Jane Stevenson
University of Aberdeen