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LITR 4231 Early American
Literature Research Posts 2014 (research post assignment) Research Post 1 |
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Maryam Chamber Delos Santo
26 March 2014
Independent Thinker: Sor Juana Ines De La Cruz
On February 4th 2014 I was scheduled to present the poem reading for
my early American literature class titled “You Men”. After the poem recitation
and as the, class discussion proceeded. I amazed myself that I knew a little
about her but only enough to conduct the presentation. Once Dr. C. White
educated the class on Sor Juana, I knew I was going to research her life .I beg
to argue that Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz stands out not only as a
great thinker but also as a fascinating and complex woman in a militantly
patriarchal period.
She was a feminist born too soon. A woman of faith, an intellectual, freedom
thinker, freedom fighter, and her weapon was her mind, herself with a pen on
hand. In seclusion and in privacy. It was in seventeenth-century Mexico when
there was tension between study, faith, and intellectual freedom. She was
determined to seek knowledge and refused to remain as women of her time,
uncivilized and untutored so she proceeded to write the first feminist
manifesto.
Her
mother agreed to send her to Mexico City to
study under a priest .Sor Juana
became known as a child genius or prodigy.
It is at this time that the Viceroy of New
Spain, the Marquis de Mancera was so impressed by her knowledge that he
even had her tested by a group of men, learned men that included Theologians ,
philosophers ,mathematicians , historians , poets , a challenge that only a
woman of her caliber , grace and beauty not only physical but intellectual could
handle with great confidence. Her self-taught knowledge was acquired from
exposure to her grandfather’s library at the age of 3 years old. By the age of
20 years old. Sor Juana took her vows in the convent of the order of St. Jerome.
In this convent silence, praying and study was required and was a form of
worship.
It was at St. Jerome’s where Sor Juana was privileged to have her own private
study,her own library. I as lover of books and exposure to the arts at a very
young age by my mother and grandmothers can only imagine the freedom and joy she
felt to be surrounded in pure seclusion by books that exposed plus introduced
her to so many places and cultures far outside her own, opening a world of the
beauty of the written word that further helped her to become an author, poet,
scholar and a fighter for the rights of women.
Work Cited
3.
www.mexonline.com/history-SorJuana.html
4.
orgeonstate.edu\instruct\phi1302\Cruz\html
5.
Kirk-Rappaport, Pamela, Sor Juana Ine’s de la Cruz: Religion, Art, Feminism New
York. The Continuum publishing company 1998
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