SOR JUANA
Octavio Paz, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden
Harvard University Press, 1988
547 pp., $29.95
A SOR JUANA ANTHOLOGY
Translated by Alan S. Trueblood, Foreword by Octavio Paz
Harvard University Press, 1988
248 pp., $29.50
Some in the women's liberation movement would have us believe that systematic discrimination against women can be corrected by raising women in the image of men. In the wake of this goal, a linguistic orthodoxy has developed.
What this and all other liberation movements miss is that discrimination, persecution, exploitation, war occur when our selfish instincts are channeled to fuel and serve a larger and deeper passion we humans share, particularly when we appear as a group, and this passion is the passion for orthodoxy. Orthodoxy aligns the most disparate individuals into a conspiracy to destroy anyone who does not conform to its dictates. The history of Western culture is the history of orthodoxy, a succession of orthodoxies.
Orthodoxy operates in someone else's name; it is a mask and, under its protection, even the weakest among us become daring, passionate heroes. It makes little difference if such orthodoxy appears in the name of religion, psychotherapy, science, humanism, progress, the church or the state. Orthodoxy separates the liberated and the nonliberated, those who are in and those who are out.
Each orthodoxy has its own rewards and punishments. Some of the punishments are highly visible (torture and jail), others less so (discrimination in jobs, training, advancement), and others totally invisible (whole ranges of human mental, spiritual, imaginative faculties are excluded from the exercise of making life).
This is why the nonconformist, the individual who chooses to live his/her life in freedom by not surrendering to the spaces marked by orthodoxy, needs very powerful protectors. The truth is not going to liberate him/her. The unprotected will fall. Societies are not commonly aware of their own orthodoxies; only some individuals are. But in order to understand these individuals, we need to narrate their lives primarily against the background monster of orthodoxy. It is against this background that their lives gain from the silence, as if for the first time, of seeing our own lack of freedom.
Such biographies are exemplary and rare. The writer needs to be extraordinary, for by writing from the space of no-orthodoxy, his own writing is an exercise in freedom. Such an extraordinary writer is Octavio Paz, the author of this biography on Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (1648-1695). Fortunately for the English-speaking reader, this biography is accompanied by another volume containing the original writings of Sor Juana, her poetry, and the two prose writings that set her above the liberated women of her time and ahead of most of those of ours.
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