Another way to view her intrusion into rhetoric is through Linda Brodkey’s article, "On the Subjects of Class and Gender in the ‘Literacy Letters.’" Brodkey writes about the power dynamics inherent in an exchange of "literacy letters" between adult basic writers and graduate students who were also teachers. Participants wrote to one another as part of a project designed to improve the literacy of the adult learners and sensitize the awareness of the teachers. Brodkey found that the hegemonic values of mainstream, middle-class society were reinforced through seemingly innocent written exchange between these groups. When uncomfortable topics regarding social class or gender were raised by the working-class adult learners, the middle-class-minded graduate students/teachers frequently changed the subject, effectively attempting to change the subjectivity of writers of what they deemed inappropriate discourse. Brodkey calls attention to the way in which classroom discourse (even when sidelined to an "unofficial" student-"teacher" exchange) attempts to erase class differences by projecting a supposedly neutral, classless space.

Sor Juana is caught in a similar exchange with church hierarchy. Her "literacy letters" come in several installments. First, in January of 1690 she writes a critique of a sermon that had been delivered 40 years earlier. This critique is known as the Carta Atenagórica or Letter Worthy of Athena (carta means letter in Spanish). In November of the same year, the critique is published without Sor Juana’s knowledge, and prefaced by a letter from a "Sor Filotea," a pseudonym used by the bishop of Puebla, Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz y Sahagún. Sor Filotea praises Sor Juana’s letter but "asks" her to discontinue her secular studies and her writing, and to behave more appropriately as a nun. A few months later, in March 1691, Sor Juana writes her response to the bishop, now known as La Respuesta, her best known and most explicitly feminist and polemical text.⁴Two additional letters attributed to Sor Juana and concerning her relations with the Church have recently come to light: the Carta al Padre Nuñez (1682), a caustic rejection of her confessor that was discovered in the mid 1980s; and the Carta de Serafina de Cristo (1691), which may have been a private version of La Respuesta since it is a more explicit and satirical response to critics of the Carta Atenagórica and to Nuñez in particular, first published in 1997.

Examining this cycle of letters as Brodkeyan "literacy letters," we come to see literacy not as technical correctness, but rather as the correctness or appropriateness of an author’s behavior and stance—the way in which a writer relates to her writing and audience—within the context of a specific society. Like Brodkey’s adult basic writers, Sor Juana is caught in a web of prohibited topics, a web in which others attempt to "change the subject" of her discourse (Brodkey 126). With complex maneuvers from within this web, Sor Juana puts herself forward as a rhetorician, someone intimately aware of the web’s entanglements and profoundly concerned with the acquisition, use, and effects of language in real-life contexts.

The bishop (a.k.a. Sor Filotea) and Sor Juana write carefully considered and publicly-minded missives to one another, articulating their respective versions of what can be read and spoken—what are the acceptable subjects? As in Brodkey’s literacy letters, their own status as "subjects" is part of this question. Who can Sor Juana be? They are divided as to whether she can be a nun who is a publishing scholar and a writer. What voice must the bishop assume in reprimanding Sor Juana? He chooses to write in a female voice, the fictional guise of a fellow nun. In this way, he can effect equality, in much the same way as "neutral" classroom discourse obviates difference according to Brodkey. In reality, of course, both situations reflect the actual wielding of authority by those in power. What voice can Sor Juana assume in response? In the opening of her letter, she assumes the standard trope of humility by declaring her inadequacy as a respondent to such an illustrious figure, and attesting to the pall this initially throws upon her.⁵

The letters are fraught with tensions of power dynamics, of hyperalertness to who is in charge (who is subject to whom), and with strategies regarding how to acknowledge this without saying so, how to get around such authority, and how to wield it. Whereas class is the primary dividing line in Brodkey’s letters, for Sor Juana and Fernández de Santa Cruz, gender is the overt problem. In their attempts to sort out questions of subjectivity, Sor Juana and the bishop enact stances of literacy. They each use (and at times distort) gender to position themselves in relation to their society’s body of knowledge. At the same time, they debate issues of literacy—what can women read and speak? In other words, multiple dimensions of subject are in play. They examine various angles of the question: what are the acceptable subjects of discourse for women?

In La Respuesta, Sor Juana’s stance of literacy is complicatedly feminist. Calling upon history, Sor Juana (like Christine de Pisan) invokes a community of historical women as her source of inspiration, and as proof that women have been accepted intellectual leaders. Thus the Hebrew Bible yields Deborah, the Queen of Sheba, Abigail, Esther, Rahab, Hannah; the Greeks had Minerva, Zenobia, Arete, and Aspasia Miletia; and Christian thinkers have included Catherine, Gertrude, and Paula, this last woman one of the founders of Sor Juana’s own Hieronymite order of nuns (77-79). She also takes on theology. Confronting Paul’s well-known admonition to "Let women keep silence in the churches" (I Cor 14:34), she asks if it is permissible for women to study and interpret scripture. Sor Juana clearly answers yes, in private at least (La Respuesta 81-91).

But Sor Juana also shows that in practice, for a woman to learn is no easy task. She points continually to the dangers, hazards, and interruptions that have recurred in her attempts to study. Frequently, she speaks of the ways in which learning imperils the female body. She spiritedly warns against the risks incurred when a young girl confronts a male teacher (87). But her own female body also imperils learning. It presents disruptions that must be ignored or overcome. Thus, when she is a child she decides not to eat cheese because she hears it makes one stupid (49). When she fails to learn her lessons in a specified time, she punishes herself by cutting her hair (51). Despite these negative conclusions, as a mature adult she learns to incorporate the body’s lessons and acknowledge its needs, as the reference to cooking and Aristotle demonstrates. The kitchen becomes a pedagogical site.

One senses that when Sor Juana is alone and in control of her own learning, nothing can stop her. Such independence is impossible to sustain, however. And it is other female bodies, her fellow nuns, that most intrude upon Sor Juana. She explains in La Respuesta that she joined the convent because it was a way to avoid marriage and pursue salvation (51). But the community of nuns interferes with her educational progress. Her fellow nuns like to talk, and to interrupt her. She finds such interruptions "repugnant" "rumblings" or "noise" (46, 51).⁶ She says,
 

In other words, while she complains that her "only teacher was a mute book," and asserts "what a hardship it is to learn from those lifeless letters, deprived of the sound of a teacher’s voice and explanations" (59, 53), Sor Juana rejects the companionship of the convent. "The noise of the community would interrupt the tranquil silence of my books," she says (51). In Nina Scott’s translation of the letter to the confessor Padre Antonio Miranda de Núñez, Sor Juana is even more caustic: "Why should it be judged evil that the time which I might spend in foolish chatter at the grille, or in a cell sniping at everything that goes on in and out of this house, or fighting with someone or shouting at a poor servant or wandering idly through the world with my thoughts, be invested in studying?" (431). Sor Juana was in conversation with several women outside the convent, including three viceregents’ wives, whom she acknowledges in other works. Georgina Sabat de Rivers has uncovered details about these upper-class women, who were instrumental in encouraging Sor Juana and disseminating her work. Interestingly, all the women Sabat de Rivers identifies are from Spain, not New Spain. As Sor Juana traces the repercussions of belonging to a community, she rejects the most immediate community of women available to her, and outlines a rhetoric of disruption and dissociation. She is especially attuned to the importance of which community it is that one affiliates with. For Sor Juana, the desirable affiliation is the scholarly world of letters. She insists this world is not exclusively male, and so she creates the historical cadre of women companions. Joining this group necessitates dismissing available feminine associations as trivial, domestic-minded "interruptions."

While Sor Juana’s solidarity with women seems to preclude the nuns in her own convent, eventually, having had ample time to reflect upon the role of interruptions in her own life, she recognized them as potentially productive. Following fellow nuns’ lead, she interrupts the bishop. Her very act of responding to him is interruptive, since what she "should" be doing is heeding his advice and shunning letters. Instead, she breaks in upon, and thereby joins, his discourse. She knows that when she is interrupted she must listen to others; she counts upon her own interruption ensuring her an audience. By refuting the bishop’s admonishments, she sounds what Brodkey calls a nondominant, disruptive, and potentially resistant voice. Brodkey writes: "While the power of a discourse is not absolute, neither is it vulnerable to change by individuals who ignore its power, only by those who interrupt or resist or challenge the seemingly immutable reality of unified subjectivity" ("On the Subjects" 129). Sor Juana reconstructs the nuns’ interruptive behavior into a "feminine" rhetorical model of resistance and challenge.

It is the strategic, carefully conceived character of Sor Juana’s acts of interruption that elevates them to a rhetoric. This is most clear in the relationship she maps between interruption, silence, and speech. Interruption can provoke silence or speech; it is an effective conduit for rhetorically-effected change. Aposiopesis is a Greek term that incorporates this rhetorical interplay of interruption and silence. It means "stopping suddenly in midcourse, leaving a statement unfinished; sometimes from genuine passion, sometimes for effect" (Lanham 20). Sor Juana invokes a variant of aposiopesis (without using the term) at the beginning of La Respuesta. She tells Sor Filotea that the challenge of responding to her almost left her resolved to "leave the matter in silence; yet although silence explains much by the emphasis of leaving all unexplained, because it is a negative thing, one must name the silence, so that what it signifies may be understood. Failing that, silence will say nothing, for that is its proper function: to say nothing" (41-43). In other words, she interrupts her own potential silence to call attention to it as meaningful. In effect, she says, "If I do not make a full response, or if I stop suddenly in midcourse, it is from passion and for effect. Be sure to hear my silences."

This is critical to an understanding of Sor Juana because at the end of La Respuesta she tells Sor Filotea that she will write nothing more without approval, and, in fact, she writes little afterwards. Two years later, in 1693, she becomes subject to an ecclesiastical tribunal that examines her work for the presence of heresy (Trabulse, Los Años Finales). The tribunal was conducted in private, and little is known about the details of the proceedings. What resulted was a public confession by Sor Juana in 1694, which included official documents signed in blood, repentance for her former sins, renewal of her vows, and a self-declaration that María Luisa Bemberg has used as a title to her 1990 film about Sor Juana: "I, the worst of all." These acts remain the central mystery of Sor Juana’s life. They have been variously interpreted as a sincere renewal of faith (this is the conservative approach that helped to paint her as a saintly figure, originated by her 1700 biographer, Diego Calleja), or as a necessary bow to authority with furtively defiant gestures (this is the more recent, feminist interpretation). There are those who construe her as victim (Ward) and others who believe she miscalculated her political strength (Trabulse, Los Anos Finales; Paz). The final tragic note to this story is that a year after the public confession, at the age of 46, Sor Juana died, after contracting an illness (some say intentionally) when caring for victims of a plague in Mexico City.

Hence, as Sor Juana’s La Respuesta "names" the significance of her own silence, it also articulates a theory of silence in general. My literal translation of the above passage reads: "one must put a brief inscription on silence so that others can understand what it is trying to say" (40-42).⁷ Sor Juana’s rhetorica utens, her use of rhetoric, is the "brief inscription" that we may choose to read as a key to her actions; her rhetorica docens, or study of rhetoric, is found in her prescription of why and when such brief inscriptions are needed (see Burke, ROM 36). Susan Sontag explains that "Since the artist can’t embrace silence literally and remain an artist, what the rhetoric of silence indicates is a determination to pursue his activities more deviously than before" (12). Certainly we can read Sor Juana’s statement "deviously," using it to shed light on her own mysterious silence in the years following this letter (a reading strategy that Arenal and Powell encourage in their annotations of La Respuesta). "And so I, my lady, shall answer only that I know not how to answer; I shall thank you only by saying that I know not how to give thanks; and I shall say, by way of the brief label placed on what I leave to silence, that only with the confidence of one so favored and with the advantages granted one so honored, do I dare speak to your magnificence" (43). She interrupts the bishop in order to explain her past reticence and to announce her impending silence so that she herself will be listened to—by those who know how to hear. The rhetoric of interruption merges with a rhetoric of silence.⁸ And we come to understand that the rhetoric of interruption is not just a whiny complaint about fellow nuns but a demonstration of the rhetorical act she is engaged in through her most critical and life-determining actions.

Of course there is an intended joke in the way in which Sor Juana capitalizes on the tradition that taught girls and women that silence was fitting for them (which Kathleen Myers points out came from St. Paul), and then endorses its use in new and subversive ways (Myers 483). She ironically refuses the "’feminine’ convention of silence" even as she invokes it (Franco 23). In her probing discussion of Sor Juana’s silence, Josefina Ludmer says Sor Juana makes silence into a praxis, a "space of resistance vis-a-vis others’ power" (89). By associating her own learning with silence (mute books, lifeless teachers), she separates knowing from saying and creates an epistemology that aligns knowing with not saying ("no-ing"), or silence. In this way, she can legitimate her own possession of knowledge without infringing on the male territory of speaking. Ludmer’s article is wonderfully insightful, but neglects Sor Juana’s self-declared "inscription" of silence. That is, Sor Juana does speak, effecting what Cheryl Glenn calls a "delivery of silence" (2). Glenn asserts:
 

PART II: EDUCATION AND NATIVE BODIES

The Divine Narcissus is a religious play which Sor Juana wrote to be performed on the feast of Corpus Christi.¹⁰ The context is didactic—it teaches what communion is. In other words, the play serves a rhetorical function. But it also comments on how communion has been and should be taught to natives. So, it investigates issues of pedagogy, especially the persuasive ethics of pedagogy. We can therefore read this text as a rhetoric of belonging because it both reflects and reflects on what is involved in attempting to create a society that integrates the myriad blend of races in New Spain. While La Respuesta chronicles the competing forces of affiliation and separation, The Divine Narcissus looks at the problems and opportunities of persuading people to be more like one another. From the start the play acknowledges this is no easy task. Speaking in the guise of author, the character Religion insists in the introduction that she will take the play back to Madrid to be performed before the king to make the crown aware of the exigencies that arise when (as the character Zeal says), "two worlds are joined" (Loa 436ff., 474).

While my reading of this work will highlight potentially subversive meanings, I want to say at the outset that it was perceived to be in line with church orthodoxy in Sor Juana’s time; this was not one of the works the bishop objected to. As Sor Juana says to the bishop, "I recognize full well that your most prudent warning touches not on the letter [the Carta Atenagórica], but on the many writings of mine on humane matters that you have seen" (La Respuesta 45). Written around 1688 and first published in 1690, The Divine Narcissus contains an introductory loa, in which native Aztecs are seen encountering the conquerors, resisting Christianity, and then preparing to accept its magnificence. The formal function of the loa, a genre originating in sixteenth-century Spain, is to prepare the audience (who would in theory include natives, some of whom might still lean toward pagan customs) for the auto sacramental that follows, by announcing that this play will use a mythical allegory (Narcissus is God and Echo is Satan) to explain the Eucharist visually.¹¹

Colonial New Spain was in constant racial flux, as a result of miscegenation resulting from the Spanish Conquest. Although racial and class mobility were both negotiable, and racial distinctions were in actuality unstable, elite members of Sor Juana’s own criollo class perceived the blood of mixed races as a source of contamination. The caste system of New Spain had at least sixteen different categories of race and corresponding class, which developed from the ideology of limpieza de sangre, or purity of blood, which Spaniards used to separate themselves from Moors and Jews during the Reconquista. In the play’s loa, this obsession with blood as a frightening point of contact with Others emerges. At first, the threat of blood manifests as the blood of sacrificial and cannibalistic ritual, in which the Aztecs were known to have participated before the Conquest. Sor Juana’s play then transforms the tainted cannibalistic blood rites into the purified blood of Christian communion. The play compares the native ritual of eating the Aztec god Huitzilopochtli’s body and drinking his blood (provided via the sacrificial victims) to the Eucharist, which is put forth as an "unbloody" consumption of holiness that converts God’s body and blood into bread (Loa 358). This bread, the play points out, comes from wheat seeds, the same seeds praised by the Aztecs when they worship Huitzilopochtli as God of the Seeds. Thus, the practice of communion is shown to be prefigured (though less holy and less complete) in Aztec tradition.

Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s first-hand account of the Conquest was published in Madrid in 1632 with four subsequent editions within the next four years; its popularity makes it feasible to surmise that Sor Juana would have read it or at least known its contents.¹² Díaz del Castillo’s description of the Spaniards’ first encounter with the technology of sacrifice in the Aztec temple indicates one material referent for the cultural fascination with blood, and demonstrates how a comparison of Old and New World blood was ideologically ingrained: "All the walls of the oratory were so splashed and encrusted with blood that they were black, the floor was the same and the whole place stank vilely….The walls were so clotted with blood and the soil so bathed with it that in the slaughter houses of Spain there is not such another stench" ( 219-220). As they are in Bernal Díaz’s historical account, Sor Juana’s Aztecs are intelligent and dignified. Yet both texts reveal repulsion toward the natives’ sacrifices. Sor Juana’s Aztec chief, Occident, betrays the author’s repulsion in his speech praising Huitzilopochtli:

Thus, what Sor Juana writes in The Divine Narcissus is a rhetoric of conversion.¹³ How shall we win over the natives?, Sor Juana asks. The conversion of bleeding, still-pumping hearts into unbloody purity is metonymic shorthand for a parallel religious conversion the natives are persuaded to partake in. Replacing their "lewd rituals" with Christianity cleanses their blood of its bloodiness (Loa 97). At the same time, emphasizing the "unbloodiness" of the transformation persuasively underscores the attractiveness of this unbloody alternative to battle. In other words, Sor Juana has her native characters eloquently protest the conquerors’ outrageous intrusion; but then she appeals to the natives’ need for spiritual sustenance and for self-preservation. They had better convert—or else; this threat encompasses both this world and the next. Sor Juana’s endorsement of Euro-Christian hegemony necessarily complicates the temptation to see her work as wholly counter-cultural, which feminist writers of the past decade frequently have done. For example, Mary Christine Morkovsky claims that Sor Juana "maintained that women as well as the native peoples of the New World had the right to education" (Morkovsky 59). But Morkovsky neglects to ask exactly what sort of native education Sor Juana promotes.

Sor Juana asks this very question of her predecessors: how have we won over the natives? The first missionaries arrived in New Spain just a few years after the conquest. Sor Juana’s convent inherited the results of a 150-year-old successful yet tainted conversion project. Curiously, in writing this conversion treatise Sor Juana did not use Nahuatl, the Aztec language she knew and used in other works.¹⁴ She pointedly avoided Nahuatl even though its use for conversion was the prevalent method of persuasion through the Sixteenth and much of the Seventeenth Century (Heath ch.2).¹⁵ The natives of The Divine Narcissus speak only Spanish, and the play endorses Christianity. It is possible that the absence of Nahuatl is an intentional snipe against the ineffectual and insensitive actions of Spanish invaders whose persuasive attempts were thinly veiled aggression. For example, the Requerimiento of 1513 "had to be read to the Indians through interpreters before hostilities could be undertaken against them. It warned them of their obligation to become Christian subjects of the Spanish crown and of the consequences if they failed to do so. Rejection of the demand would be considered a sign of obduracy and hence, sufficient reason for subjugation by force" (New Catholic Encyclopedia, "Latin America, Church and the Indian in" 447).

Europeans commonly resorted to the doctrine of "just war," which saw military action as a legitimate means of conversion. Sor Juana might be aligning herself with the sixteenth-century priest, Bartolomé de Las Casas, who vehemently opposed the just war doctrine and devised an alternative rhetoric of conversion through peaceful means (see Abbott ch. 4). It is also possible that since, as the loa indicates, Sor Juana envisioned the auto sacramental being performed in Spain, she avoided writing in a language that would have no currency there. Regardless, it is also impossible to ignore the fact, that like Garcilaso de la Vega, the Peruvian mestizo who wrote about the Spanish treatment of Floridan and Incan natives less than a century before (see Abbott ch. 5), Sor Juana saw value in native culture and questioned conversion methods, but viewed Christianity as superior and preferable to paganism.

Hence, I do not join critics who have questioned Sor Juana’s religious sincerity. Her devotional poetry and prose is too beautiful and sincere to doubt her spiritual integrity. The auto sacramental of The Divine Narcissus is a sincere rendition of Christian doctine. The loa, however, does point to its own task of conversion as constructed and debatable. Religion, the character tasked with converting the natives, sees herself tempering the violence of her military companion, Zeal:

And I, in peace, will also go

(before your fury lays them low)

for justice must with mercy kiss;

I shall invite them to arise

from superstitious depths to faith. (Loa 91-95)¹⁶

Sor Juana puts forth her suggested persuasive tactics as an alternative to violent conversion. Yet she simultaneously raises the age-old question regarding the distinction between persuasion and violence. Exactly how much free will does a persuasive situation permit? How do we draw the line between persuasion and force? The Divine Narcissus enters rhetorical history as one of many voices in the debate regarding force and persuasion, perhaps begun by Gorgias in his Encomium of Helen. According to Gorgias, in certain circumstances, persuasion can be like rape, and the person who comes "under the influence of speech" might be construed as a victim, just as besieged as someone "ravished by the force of the mighty" (41). In Sor Juana’s play, Religion figures as a "Spanish Lady," an allusion to the classical and Old World tradition of Lady Rhetorica, who is often represented as armed with a mighty sword.¹⁷ Likewise, Religion vanquishes with influential speech. She knows this, yet she still distinguishes her role from that of the militaristic Zeal: "It was your part to conquer her/by force with military might;/mine is to gently make her yield, persuading her by reason’s light" (214-217). Nevertheless, the natives know there is often little difference between persuasion and force. The "gallant Indian" Occident reveals their potential similarity through the figure of zeugma: "I must bow to your aggression,/but not before your arguments" (Loa scene 1 stage directions; 203-204).¹⁸ In the very act of distinguishing between aggression and persuasion, he manages to imply their resemblance: like weapons, some arguments leave little room for autonomy.

America, Occident’s female partner, makes the similarity between force and persuasion even more explicit by alluding to persuasion as weaponry of "verbal steel," potentially more devastating than gunpowder:

If your petition for my life

and show of Christian charity

are motivated by the hope

that you, at last, will conquer me,

defeating my integrity

with verbal steel where bullets failed,

then you are sadly self-deceived.

A weeping captive, I may mourn

for liberty, yet my will grows

beyond these bonds; my heart is free,

and I will worship my own gods! (226-236)

Despite the Aztecs’ attempts to maintain some distinction by insisting they can hold on to their dignity in their own hearts and minds, they soon capitulate to Religion and her verbal steel, and anxiously ask for more information about this new god. Religion confesses her devious rhetorical strategy to the audience: she uses the natives’ own preexisting beliefs to entice them, by making communion appear familiar. "Mock on!," she taunts, "For with your own deceit,/if God empowers my mind and tongue,/I’ll argue and impose defeat" (273-275). Her persuasive deployment of verbal steel sounds very much like force.

Here, in a drama celebrating the Eucharist we are nonetheless led to question the sincerity of the natives’ easy capitulation to Eucharistic splendor. Occident’s desire to "be made free/of old beliefs that shackle me" should make us wonder whether his conversion is a purely pragmatic decision. Perhaps he concludes it is the price he must pay to become literally unshackled, even while the steel chains of persuasive "education" linger (379-380).

The politics behind Sor Juana’s use of Aztec characters are suggestive, but difficult to pinpoint. On one hand, the antagonistic relations between rhetor and audience, or teacher and pupil, that mark the early interaction between Religion, America and Occident illustrate what Gemma Corradi Fiumara has called "certainly not listening so much as endurance or forced feeding, hypnotic induction, or epistemic violence" ( 93). This serves in contrast to other more positive kinds of rhetorical listening that Sor Juana reveals later in the text. A significant aspect of Sor Juana’s rhetorical aims are to spell out negative and positive forms of listening. The ugliness of the attempted conversion is also painfully honest self-disclosure, an unflinching reflection on the work of her own convent and her religious compatriots.

Nevertheless, I would treat with some skepticism Patricia Peters’ comments that The Divine Narcissus is a "remarkable reflection on the plight of the Aztecs under the scourge of Spanish colonization" and that a performance of it "would have constituted one of the earliest examples of anti-colonialist drama" (Cruz, Divine Narcissus, Introduction xxii). The questioning of Spanish conversion methods constitutes powerful but brief moments in a largely orthodox text, and it might even be argued that it has been inserted to render actual native viewers more receptive. Another possibility is that Sor Juana’s sympathetic portrayal of Aztec culture is a strategy of proto-Mexican nationalistic self-assertion in response to Spain more than compassionate subversion on behalf of natives. Jacques Lafaye suggests that after 1650 a marked increase of interest in the Aztec past took place in New Spain, possible at this point only because, thanks to the thoroughness of the Conquest, an actual threat from Aztec culture no longer existed (page?). The author persona of The Divine Narcissus interestingly speaks in the loa through the characters of both the Spaniard Religion and the Aztec America (see Loa scene 5, especially lines 481-485). This curious embracing of dual citizenship, in effect, underscores the complicated way in which criollas like Sor Juana assimilated the Indian past for their own nationalistic purposes. To write rhetorical theory that was relevant to her own historical moment, Sor Juana had to imagine belonging, at least temporarily, to two competing cultures. She was well-positioned to do this.

With The Divine Narcissus, Sor Juana introduces a theory of persuasion which acknowledges the blood of other races, and proposes to erase ("unstain") blood differences through Christian conversion. She also considers the ethics of persuasion when different "bloods" meet, and she questions the difference between acts of force and persuasion in imperialist contexts. Just a few years later, in La Respuesta, Sor Juana defines literacy as a social act and defends women’s literacy. She thinks about how interruptions—breaking apart from one’s group—can both impede and enable literacy skills and at times make possible women’s participation in literate activities. Finally, she articulates the role of silence as a strategic response for women, inscribing a theory of rhetorical silence. Whereas the dominant rhetoric of The Divine Narcissus is one of reception, and makes an appeal for merging, La Respuesta proffers a rhetoric of renunciation, resistance, and differentiation from others. Traces of both ideas mingle in both works, however, demanding that we consider all the nuances, complexities, and rhetorical possibilities with careful attention. Encompassing the rhetorical contributions of figures like Sor Juana covers important new ground for rhetorical studies, allowing us to sketch a "distinctively American paideia" (Rhetorical). This new ground for the American rhetorical scene confounds disciplinary and geographical biases that would otherwise confine the figure of Sor Juana to Latin American Studies and confine the topic of rhetoric to a European-United States nexus.

1 Sor Juana’s status as a popular icon should not be overlooked, however. For example, her face currently graces Mexico’s 200 peso note; Chicago’s Mexican Fine Arts Center celebrates an annual Sor Juana Festival featuring Mexican women artists; education reformers in 1940s Guadalajara used the figure of Sor Juana to gesture toward a cultured middle-class education for girls that surreptitiously endorsed religious values (Fernández Aceves 19); and Sor Juana has been considered alongside the Virgin of Guadalupe and Cortés’ companion/translator Malintzin-La Malinche as influential to the construction of a Hispanic feminist theology (Loya).

2 For Sor Juana as accomplished rhetor working within classical traditions, see Perelmuter Pérez. For more general discussions of Sor Juana’s rhetorical skill and Sor Juana as feminist, see works by Arenal, Merrim, Franco, Kirk, Kothe, Lavrin, Ludmer, Morkovsky, Myers, Sabat de Rivers, Schons, Scott, Swearingen, Ward.

3 Hereafter, The Answer/La Respuesta will be cited as La Respuesta.

4 La Respuesta was published for the first time in 1700, five years after Sor Juana died, but it is assumed to have been circulated to a sizable number of readers in addition to the bishop.

5 Swearingen discusses the potentially empowering aspects of Sor Juana’s use of this trope in the context of a female tradition of humility.

6 The Spanish words she uses are repugnantes and rumor. Arenal and Powell translate these words as opposed to and noise.

7 The Spanish reads: "…es necessario ponerle algún breve rótulo para que se entienda lo que se pretende que el silencio diga" (La Respuesta 40-42).

8 Sor Juana actually uses the phrase "silent rhetoric" (retórico silencio) in one of her devotional pieces: "Now these most noble creatures gave to their queen devoted obedience, the fish praising the Star Fish [the virgin Mary?] with silent rhetoric, and the bird greeting the new Dawn with harmonious song, offering their flight to serve that royal eagle, climbing toward the throne of the Holy Trinity…" ("Ejercicios de la Encarnation," Obras Completas IV.487; my translation). Her monumental poem, El Sueño (written around 1685), reveals her fascination for silence in general, and makes a brief reference to Galen as "a silent master, though exemplary/orator" (519-520).

9 Cheryl Glenn expanded her ideas on the rhetoric of silence at the recent 4Cs in Atlanta ( "Toward a Feminist Delivery").  Another historical source for a rhetoric of silence appears in the early 2000 BCE Egyptian text, The Instruction (or Maxims) of Ptahhotep (Kennedy ch.6).

10 However, in her introduction to The Divine Narcissus, Peters suggests that it may never have been performed (Cruz xix).

11 Auto sacramental is a generic designation for a religious play that is often allegorical.

12 Another text Sor Juana may have known is Torquemada’s Monarchia Indiana, published in 1615 and based on Bernard de Sahagún’s careful ethnographic studies. Torquemada corroborates the bloodiness and immensity of the sacrifices. Méndez Plancarte asserts that this was Sor Juana’s source (III.503). For an engagingly moralistic description of Aztec practices, see Prescott.

13 See Abbott’s discussion of how contemporary authors separated rhetorical and conversion treatises, tending not to see traditional rhetoric as applicable to the native situation (102). His book, and my analysis of Sor Juana’s work, nevertheless show how rhetorical work was being done in the New World, particularly in reference to indigent populations, even if it wasn’t officially called "rhetoric."

14 [Cite poems in Nahuatl.]

15 Shirley Brice Heath shows that in the formative years of New Spain, religious language policy encouraging the use of Nahuatl contradicted the language policy of empire, which mandated Spanish.

16 The Spanish is more generous toward the natives. There is no mention of "superstitious depths"; both Aztec and Spanish religious practices are referred to as cultos (forms of worship; cf Loa 95, 178). But the emphasis on peaceful persuasion remains intact. A closer literal translation of these lines is: "I will also go, since piety inclines me to succeed (before your fury lays them low) in alluring [or persuading] them, in peace, to receive my form of worship [culto]."

17 See, for example, the frontispiece of Reclaiming Rhetorica (Lunsford).

18 The Spanish version of these lines is equally pointed and also employs zeugma: "Ya es preciso que me rinda/tu valor, no tu razón."
 
 

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