A Study Guide for Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz's "Vicarious Love"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz's "Vicarious Love," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Sep 28, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535842112

Book preview

13

Vicarious Love

Juana Inés de la Cruz

C. 1665–1695

Introduction

Vicarious Love, a sequence of nine smaller poems by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, was written in Mexico in the late 1600s. The poems are written in different styles, and each imagines a different situation having to do with love: one, for instance, presents a woman yearning for a man who she knows is bad for her, another is about a widowed wife, another has its speaker assuring her lover that he will see her love in nature, et cetera. Any one segment would itself be considered a wise, thoughtful, and worthy meditation on the nature of romance. Together, they show just how little the popular idea of love today is different from what the poet knew more than three hundred years ago.

No one has ever established that Sor Juana was in a romantic relationship herself, but generations of readers agree that her presentation of love is perfectly accurate. Having taken her vows as a nun for the first time when she was sixteen (sor is a title, similar to sister), it is very likely that her understanding of romantic relationships was based on observation of others—that she was, as the poem's title states, living vicariously through their experiences. In the hands of a less skilled poet, writing about others' experiences might show a lack of authenticity, but Vicarious Love succeeds because of the rich imagination of the poet.

In her time, Sor Juana was a well-known intellectual in the capital of colonial Mexico, now known as Mexico City. Today, she is recognized as one of the country's most formidable writers, even though her main focus, working with the sick and the poor, left her with little literary output.

Author Biography

Juana Inés de Asbje was born on November 12, 1651, in the village of San Miguel de Nepanla, nearly sixty miles from Mexico City. Her mother, Isabel Ramirez, had a total of six children, although she was never married. Being the child of unwed parents made Juana and her siblings outcasts in heavily Catholic