From Ire to Irony

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Callaloo.Steel is a form of discourse Useful from either end. Its point offers death in discord Its pommel will guard against.-Sor Juana Ines de la CruzWhen we talk of anger, the passage with which Homer began the Iliad immediately comes to mind: "Sing, 0 Muse, the murderous ire of Peleus' son Achilles, the fatal ire, which in fulfillment of the will of Zeus brought to the Achaeans such woes, hurling to the House of Death so many worthy and courageous souls." In female literature anger is often of a different type; it has been purified in the crucible of irony.Throughout the centuries anger has been an active generator of female discourse. Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, the seventeenth century Mexican nun and the first American woman of letters, brandished the swift stiletto of her pen to fend off the attack of Manuel Fernandez de Santa Cruz, Bishop of Puebla. In 1690 the Bishop of Puebla had published a letter (using the pseudonym of Sor Filotea) in which he praised Sor Juana for her wisdom in matters of theology and at the same time reproached her for occupying herself with subjects which were not of her competence-women were not supposed to study literature or write about serious matters, amongst them theology or faith. Sor Juana answered Fernandez de Santa Cruz in her now famous Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz, a scathing letter which covertly ridiculed the Bishop and gave Sor Juana a decisive although Pyrrhic victory over her detractor. A number of years later she was forced to renounce her writing, as well as to donate her library to the Church, and died victim of the plague that ravaged Mexico City in what has been considered by many an apparent suicide. Sor Juana's Respuesta a Sor Filotea, however, remained as a testimony of her struggle against the repression of feminine speech and is considered today the first American feminist manifesto.Sor Juana's letter was an irate document, but it was also a filigree of irony, exquisitely moulded in captious terms to escape the Inquisition, as well as the Bishop's repression. Virginia Woolf wrote her famous essay A Room of One's Own in the same spirit as Sor Juana. A Room of One's Own is built on ire, although exquisitely masked by Victorian feminine "savoir faire." Women who write with anger, Woolf

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz on self‐control

“…(Carriere, 'Die Frauen', 322a)" (I am grateful to Trevor Pearce and Lisa Shapiro for pointing out to me Ebbersmeyer's article). 4 For discussions of the role of irony in Sor Juana's writings, see Ferré (1994), Cortés-Vélez (2006), and O'Donnell (2015). 5 In particular, see Beuchot (1999).…”

“…4 4 For discussions of the role of irony in Sor Juana's writings, see Ferré (1994), Cortés‐Vélez (2006), and O'Donnell (2015). …”