ASUNCION LAVRIN ON MARíA DE SAN JOSE
Kathryn Myers and Amanda Powell, A Wild Garden out in the Garden. The Spiritual Journals of a Colonial Mexican Nun. (Bloomington: Inidana University Press, 1999).
The fascination of how a life has been lived explains why autobiographies and biographies remain a common and popular to learn history to most people, academics and non-academics alike. Until recently, students of colonial Spanish America have had trouble in rescuing the life of common folk and women, but in the last decade and a half, with much effort and patience some mini-biographies of common people of both sexes have been carved out of archival sources. As a good example, let me cite Struggle for Survival in Colonial America, edited by David Sweet and Gary B. Nash, a volume that stands out as model of comparative studies.[i] Turning specifically to women, the attraction exercised by the literary genius of or Juana Inés de la cruz has overshadowed all other women. Her “factual” biography is limited in information but the complexity of her writings has sustained intense scrutiny and interpretation, and created a corpus of academic works unrivaled by any other colonial figure, male or female.
Recent historiography and literary criticism are mapping a new territory of investigation using historical texts and archival materials. A a result, the Sor Juana monopoly is beginning to relent, allowing us to look into the lives of other women, lay and religious.[ii]
Thus, the veil covering the lives of other women is beginning to lift. Thanks to the scholarship of Kathryn Myers, a new subject has been added to the line of female subjects in colonial Spanish America: Mother María de San José, a Dominican nun of Puebla and Oaxaca, who lived between 1656 and 1719 in New Spain, as colonial Mexico was known then. Between mid seventeenth and mid- eightenth century, some women religious in New Spain, as well as in the rest of the continent, were busy writing poems, plays, histories of their convents and spiritual accounts of their souls, all under the careful supervision of their confessors. Why is that so little of it is known today? Their works were not destined to be read by any others than confessors or male historians of hteir Orders. The former ensured the orthodoxyof the writings; the latter used these texts to write biographies of notable nuns or their convents.
The nature of the writings of most nuns is geared towards the spritual, not the description of daily life. The main preoccupation of writers and confessors was the life of the soul, the struggle of the spirit to achieve religious perfection. Biographies and funeral sermons written by dedicated admirers skipped much of the years before profession and selected aspects of their daily lives that informed on their spirituality. The autobiographical writings of María de San José, unlike others, are significant because they saved a great deal of information about her life, her family, the customs of the period and life within the convent, as the sample excerpted in this anthology makes abundantly clear. At the same time, and throughout thousands of tightly written pages, it disclosed Madre María’s spiritual life. For those reasons, as a historian, I would like to see the biography of Mother María de San José considered as a model for comparative studies under several rubrics: Private daily Life , Gender Relations, and Spiritual life
Private and Daily Life and Gender Relations.
This autobiography is rich in details about social interactions and personal emotions. The affective nature of María de San José’ relation with her parents and siblings becomes transparent in her words. Each one of the members of her family is remembered for those qualities that left the deepest marks on Sor María , such as the father’s piety and the mother’s propriety and care for her children. Sibling relations are very well portrayed., such as the extreme jealousy and tension between María de San José and her older sister Francisca, who carried out a vendetta against Juana (later changed to María de San José) that eventually made her very ill. She suffered from anorexia for a while, perhaps for her entire life, possibly the result of intense family pressures. On the other hand, the consolation offered by another sister shows the complexity of familial ties. Her only brother Tomás isnpire awe in her, and his actions reveal the nature of patriarchal authority within colonial families. However, her narrative reveals how women used their own ways and means to claim their share of authority. Her mother assumed the role of family speaker to the Bishop of Puebla when Tomás picked up a quarrel with the ecclesiastic and stopped speaking to him. The imbrication of relationships and daily activities reveal much about child rearing and home management hardly available in other writings. Sor Maria’s was not a peaceful or pleasant household , and the poignancy of looking into a home full of people who vented their anger and exercised their dominion over others is an important feature of this autobiography.
Gender relations among male ecclesiastics and nuns are also indirectly, but forcefully revealed, especially if the entire manuscript is carefully analyzed. While submission of female to male was prescribed within the church and Sor María observed the proprieties established by social and religious rules, she began to exercise a strong fascination to her confessors, whose behavior may be judged either negative or positive towars her spirituality but, who in no case ceased to be less than fully involved in a dialogue of power with the nun. I’d like to raise a question that has begun to intrigue me. Why is that men avidly read not just this nun’s but other nuns’ writings as well? Was there any sort of pleasure –intellectual or personal–in the scrutiny and judgement? This is a question few have asked and that may be difficult to answer but I feel that we must confront. Many men looked at women’s writings with some condescension, as Sigüenza y Góngora did with the accounts of the nuns of Jesús María that he sought, and used to recount the story of the convent and that of the foundation of the Carmelite convent of San Jose.[iii] However, men (lay as well as religious) needed these women as sources of information and as witnesses to the presence of God through their visions and intimate experiences of love and understanding of the divine nature of Christ, an insight that apparently confessors or writers seldom had. Fr. Joseph Gómez, the biographer and spiritual director of Sor Antonia de San Jacinto, of the Santa Clara convent in Querétaro, fell under her spiritual spell. He was not alone, two other of her confessors vied for her attention and requested to be present by her death bed. As he sat for many hours in the confessional with her, Fr. Joseph wrote that he felt confused and hoped not to be punished by God for being the witness such great love to God and also the writer of such excesses of spirituality.[iv] Why, do I ask myself, this insistence by the Bishop of Oaxaca that Sor María herself write the text and not a scribe? Even a suspicion of potential change of her words does not bar the possibility of a wish for the very handwriting of someone who was inspired by God. The analysis of the male perception and reaction to female writing should be further analyzed.
Another thought I would like to entertain in terms of this special and ambiguous relationship between readers and writers Sor Maria’s writings were supervised and scrutinized by a contingent of men through whose hands passed every aspect of her life and thoughts, and spiritual life. All nuns, including María de San José, claimed that they wrote under forced circumstances. We have accepted this expression as a rhetorical devise, but let me suggest another possibility: that some nuns really recoiled before the thought of being analyzed, examined, and intellectually undressed by some many men. The nature of this resistance needs further exploration.
The power of Sor Maria’s writing and her voice emerges clearly throughout every page in a stunning process of recollection. This exceptional process of introspection and reflection adds a distinct vitality to this diaries. It is also the potential theme for the now fashionable studies of memory and the forms of remembering. Sor María de San José returns to her past and continuously peels layer after layer of her life and recasting it and herself into new shapes, always daunting to the reade . This feat of the imagination is worth noting and comparing with those of other women under the same circumstances.
Spiritual Life.
Notwithstanding the great importance of daily private life, the other fascinating characteristic of this document is the revelation of the inner life of a woman who wanted to be a nun. Although achieving more maturity in other parts of her diary, the memory of her fist visionary experience and the type of observance she followed as a lay woman are valuable portraits of seventeenth century Catholic spirituality. Although the writings of Spanish nuns guide the thread of Sor Maria’s inner religious life, the evidence of the transfer of that aspect of culture to New Spain is historically important and exciting. This text allows us to connect European spirituality to Spanish America and North America. Given the fact that some historians in the past doubted the vocation to enter a nunnery and the reality of faith and belief as motivations to profess, the diary of Mother María should serve as a testimony that women who professed wished to be where they were and that families were not always interested in marrying their daughters off for social and economic reasons. The agony and the rewards of religious life were enough to satisfy a sector of the female population several centuries ago, our contemporary disbelief notwithstanding. This diary-autobiography should lead us into a deeper analysis of the techniques of writing and expression under patriarchal and Christian canonical circumstances, and to the most intimate and sincere experiences of religious life, piety and belief.
NOTES
[i] David G. Sweet and Gary B. Nash, eds. Struggle and Survival in Colonial America (Berkeley: University of California press, 1981). See also, Robert Padden, ed. Tales of Potosi
[ii] Electa Arenal and Stacey Schlau led the way with their anthological study of hispanic women’s lives, offering long excerpts of the writings of key female figures in Spain and Spanish America. See, Electa Arenal and Stacey Schlau, eds. Untold Sisters. Hgispanic Nuns in Their Own Words (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989)A commendable efort to unite North and South American scholarship on women religious is, Rosemary Radford Ruether and Rosemary Skinner Keller, eds. Women and Religion in America. Vol. 2, The Colonial Periods. A Documentary History (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1983). This volume includes Spanith, englsih and French America and is based on texts by women, many of them from archival collecions or little known sources.
[iii] Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, Parayso Occidental . (Mexico: Juan Ribera, 1684). Facsimil edition (Mexico: UNAM/CONDUMEX, 1995). In his Prologue to the Reader, Sigüenza sates that this is a book on women written for women and that it does not require heavy marginal annotation or a florid style.
[iv] A friend of Fr. Joseph also confessed how edified he was by the example of so much piety in the nuns of New Spain. See, Asunción Lavrin, “La religiosa real y la inventada; Diálogo entre dos modelos discursivos.” In Monika Bosse , Barbara Potthast and André Stoll, eds. La creatividad femenina en el mundo barroco hispánico (Kassel: Edition Reichenberger, 1999). Also appeared in Historia y Grafías (Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City), Vol. 14, May 2000, pp. 185-206. See also, Asunción Lavrin and Rosalva Loreto, eds. Monjas y beatas La escritura femenina en la espiritualidad barroca novohispana. Siglos XVII y XVII (Mexico: Universidad de las Américas/ Archivo General de la Nación, 2002).