...after making Sor Juana, after telling the dramatic story of this extraordinary woman-I don't think in the world there's been a woman with the competence and richness of mind of Sor Juana-I said to my own sex, to my beloved sisters, here are five films each with questioning women. Here are examples by which to model your own identities. Maria Luisa Bemberg, qtd. in Caleb Bach 27.
Mar�a Luisa Bemberg is one of the more significant among the handful of women filmmakers working in contemporary Latin American cinema (recognizing her death in 1995). During her brief career, she made films that are not only examples of quality cinematographic production in the Latin American context, but also important feminist interventions into filmmaking. Even she noted her unique position, describing herself and her positive reception as "the first successful grandmother filmmaker in [Argentina]" (qtd. in Bach 23). Her exceptional status in male-dominated spheres-be they artistic, intellectual or social-is distantly parallel to another "avis rara," the woman considered by many to be the first feminist of America,1 Sor Juana In�s de la Cruz. It is therefore significant that one of her last projects is a film on the life of Sor Juana, Yo, Ia peor de todas (1990). True to the life and work of her subject, the director identified the project as part of her continued efforts to break with traditional stereotypes of women: "Para m� era imperativo contar Ia historia de esta mujer, porque uno de los compromises �ticos y morales que asum� cuando decid� hacer cine era tratar de romper el clich� tradicional que tiene el cine sobre la mujer, estereotipo con el cual es dificil que las mujeres pensantes puedan identificarse" (Burton-Carvajal 78, my emphasis).
The basis of the film is the monumental literary psycho-biography of Sor Juana, Sor Juana In�s de la Cruz, o las trompas de la fe (1982), by Octavio Paz. Stephanie Merrim contends in her introduction to Feminist perspectives on Sor Juana In�s de la Cruz (1991) that Paz's work has widened the parameters for feminist study on this notable woman:
Sor Juana In�s de la Cruz at once represents a milestone and a watershed in the critical reception of the Baroque writer's works: as it rounds off both Paz's own intellectual endeavors and the critical tradition surrounding Sor Juana, the study also paves the way for a more enlightened feminist understanding of its subject.... [T]he work avoids the ideological blunders regarding its female subject, be they overt or implicit, so rife in other critical studies. (16)
Merrim takes the necessary steps of problematizing his analysis, yet she also acknowledges its success in dispelling earlier psychologistic readings that were overtly negative and sexist in their assessment of Sor Juana.2
Merrim's largely favorable treatment of Paz provides an unintentional apology for Bemberg's sole reliance on his work, a fact that may otherwise be unpalatable to many feminists to the extent that her feminist film does not utilize in anyway work by feminist scholars such as Dorothy Schons, Rosario Castellanos, Anita Arroyo, or Marie-C�cile B�nassy-Berling, all of whom, between 1925 (Schons) and 1982 (B�nassy-Berling)-i.e. before the screenplay for the film was written-have contributed greatly to a biographical, cultural, literary and historical understanding of Sor Juana from a feminist critical perspective. Despite this deficiency, Bemberg uses the work of Paz to insert a clear and direct feminist message into her film, explicitly highlighting Sor Juana's struggles as a woman in a restricted patriarchal environment. Consequently, his recognition of Sor Juana as a revolutionary and singular figure, most notably for her position as a woman intellectual in a male-centered and male-dominated universe, becomes the motive and driving force of Bemberg's feminist recovery.
Denise Miller discusses Paz's explanation as to why Sor Juana renounced her poetry and ideas, by signing "I, the worst of all," an apparent-although highly conventional for the time-indication of her unworminess. Paz contends that "her final renunciation of learning was the result of having been caught up in an argument between powerful men" (Miller 137), an argument in which she willfully intervened. Conversely, and in line with my interpretation of the film, Bemberg, " sees Sor Juana as a pawn in their game of intrigue and specifically as a woman pitted against men" (Miller 137). That is, the film is overtly and deliberately a feminist reading of Sor Juana's circumstance. Miller recognizes Merrim's contention that Paz suggests a feminist reading of his subject, although ultimately, Miller's reading of the Mexican intellectual turns out more favorably than that of Merrim. Indeed, she suggests that Paz comes off as more feminist than Bemberg, despite the director's intentions. The "emblematic title, the last words of her confession" (Miller 137), is indicative of where the weight falls for Bemberg: Sor Juana, the ultimate female victim of the patriarchy.
Miller's analysis of the scene where Sor Juana (Assumpta Serna) and the vicereine, Mar�a Luisa Manrique de Lara (Dominique Sanda), first meet underscores the pseudo-romantic aspects of the relationship between the two women, thus complicating the film's representation of the nun and her transgressions. Through her intellectual and literary pursuits she transgresses norms for female behavior, and in turn, distinguishes herself from other women (be they nuns or married women) of her day; through her intense emotional relationship with Mar�a Luisa, romantic love is presented as a further transgression of women's behavior of the time. Of course, Paz's work rather successfully (although not altogether convincingly) explains away the attachment between the two women, particularly as this was expressed in Juana's poetry, as merely a reflection of the poetic and philosophical conventions of the period, and believes that ultimately it is impossible to know the true nature of their relationship as it is buried by history and the highly codified social protocols of colonial Spain. Regardless, it is undeniable that Bemberg inserts more than a hint of sensuality and eroticism in the interactions of the two women. Moreover, Miller provocatively notes that "Assumpta Sema starred in earlier lesbian roles and Dominique Sanda in roles that can at least be described as sexually ambiguous" (137), and later, she observes how the former brings an '"always already'. . . vitality (as well as ambiguous sexuality) to the role" (140). These observations further reinforce the rather overt codification of the two women as lesbians, perhaps an attempt to "hook" the audience, who might expect a popular film to have some sort of spicy details (we will return to these issues later on in the discussion).
If the material for the film is grounded in history, Bemberg's feminist interpretation of Sor Juana's life and times is decidedly contemporary,3 yet not unhindered by certain contradictions and ambiguities, some of which have already been alluded to above. There is also the fact that the film was made and released in the early 1990s when Peronism had returned to power in Argentine politics. To speak of Per�n and his politics is to also evoke the more famous member of the couple, Evita. Thus, the very title of the film is an expression with dual significance: its immediate historical referent and its implied reference to "the worst woman of all" (due to her personal and political illegitimacy in the eyes of the powerful Argentine oligarchy) in contemporary Argentine history, Eva Per�n.4 This double-entendre becomes clearer if one is aware of the relationship between the upper class, of which Bemberg was solidly a member, with the Perons/Peronism during her lifetime. The Peronist movement appealed to and was supported by the working class, and thus was in direct opposition to the goals and values of Argentina's upper class. It is a curious coincidence that young Bemberg married Carlos Miguens (whom she later divorced) on October 17, 1945, the very same day that General Juan Domingo Per�n was released from house arrest and large demonstrations of thousands of workers converged on the Plaza de Mayo to celebrate (King). But not so incidentally, Bemberg's class position figures into all of her films, which concentrate exclusively on female characters who are of a privileged socioeconomic status. As Bemberg's Sor Juana shouts to the men who persecute her at the film's climax, "�Somos distintas!" (here it is women with respect to men), one can also see this phrase has a double significance for Bemberg herself. Not all women are the same, nor does her feminist defense of women categorically apply to all women, but rather, those with whom Bemberg most identifies: women of the bourgeoisie or aristocracy (we must remember that Sor Juana, despite her somewhat humble beginnings, including her illegitimacy, did live quite a privileged existence in the court and convent). In the Sor Juana film, this group of women is further broken down into the intellectuals (las mujeres pensantes) vs. the non-intellectuals, the sexually desirous vs. those lacking desire, divisions that are significant to a feminist reading of Yo, la peor de todas.
One of the most widely recognized and discussed of her films is Camila. In addition to its Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film in 1984, "the film, which at the time cost a mere US$370,000, seized the imagination of the Argentine people, especially women" (Bach 23). The focus on a well-recognized event in the Argentine historical consciousness no doubt increased the interest and favorable reception on the part of the Argentine public. The specific popularity of the film among women has two likely motives: 1) its engagement of the melodramatic mode, a category of film often associated with women for its appeal to romance and excessive emotions (again, it is curious to note that Eva Per�n's brief career as an entertainer included her roles in stage, radio and film melodramas in the 1930s and 1940s); and 2) the explicit feminist message it carried. Both of these reasons indicate that her films are definitely directed toward female viewers and intended to challenge or subvert historically dominant film conventions from a decidedly feminist position. But we should also bear in mind that her employment of melodramatic elements is a thorny issue, as the melodrama is a genre more associated with working-class, i.e. lower class, women (much like Evita, the great defender of the descamisados), and in general the genre has been seen as politically conservative rather than liberal in its intent (although this evaluation can also be linked to the class and gender bias attached to the melodrama). A more in-depth analysis will investigate these conflicts, and what they imply for a feminist understanding of the film.
Her revision of the texts and contexts of women-be they literary or historical-is what David William Foster recognizes as Bemberg's "politically feminist" project (16). For Jane Burke, what guides us to a feminist reading of her work is the subversive character of the female protagonists: they are both complicit and contesting (not unlike Bemberg herself). Camila (like Sor Juana) "es un personaje moderna, es la hero�na que se rebela ante el Padre, la Famila, la Ley, la Sociedad, la Religi�n y las Costumbres. Es el sujeto que lucha por la libertad individual, sin constricciones" (Ruffinelli 21). Camila O'Gorman and Juana In�s Ram�rez de Asbaje are women who realize their own destinies despite the threat of punishment: be it the physical death of the former, or the intellectual-spiritual demise of the latter. It is no accident that both women are identified with intellectual activity: Camila reads (some censored) books constantly, albeit romances (yet again, another connection to popular/mass culture); in fiction and real life, Juana In�s read and wrote prolifically. These characters, inspired by history, are decidedly Bemberg's: they inhabit a highly privileged environment, they love with great-and dangerous-passion, and they are "free" thinkers with a passion for knowledge.
The filmmaker herself depicts the tone and style of Yo, Ia pear de todas as "abstract" and "conceptual," as opposed to concrete, realistic and historical. She describes the atmosphere of the film as highly stylized and rarified, aspects that are communicated through the predominance of interior scenes, the Baroque-inspired "cold blue" photography, and the "correspondencia entre imagen y sonido, de una forma muy conceptual, densa, fr�a, geom�trica, distanciada" (Burton-Carvajal 83). Bemberg's Yo, Ia pear de todas can be thus characterized as having both a popular/mass and an elite/abstract sphere of reference, a dynamic that speaks of the director's desire to have both national and international appeal. The former characterization explains the film's reliance on commercial film techniques, including the well-known and quite beautiful lead actors and situations both highly sensual and melodramatic, such as when the panting vicereine begs the kneeling nun to open her bodice during an apparent fit of hyperventilation. These elements are juxtaposed with the abstract and austere (at the level of costume and setting, the chromatic and tonal details associated with the vicereine and the nun-the former light and luminous/warm colors, the latter deep, although not bright/cool colors-are juxtaposed with this austerity) settings, not to mention the choice of a historical subject treated through a feminist-albeit moving toward avant garde/non-mainstream-lens. For Miller, this feminist treatment is not without its problems, although she does acknowledge Bemberg's politically feminist agenda for Paz's work. Miller additionally notes that Bemberg's abstract settings parallel Paz's tendency toward the literary, the intellectual and the abstract in his analysis of the nun's life and work. John King describes the "painterly, chromatic features in a series of tableaux that drew their inspiration from Baroque painting" (27), which serve to create an atmosphere that is more abstract, universal and atemporal, rather than locally specific (i.e. located in Mexico; she in fact rejected plans to film in Mexico using a Mexican crew and actors, thus diverting the nationally specific importance of the writer) or historically truthful. In other words, much like the film Camila, Bemberg sought to dehistoricize her subject matter to give it a contemporary feminist meaning.
With these complexities in mind (as we proceed through the Garden of Forking Paths), one can identify specific strategies utilized by this filmmaker to communicate her feminist viewpoint. These include the spatial relations of characters within and among scenes which explicitly highlight differences between men's power and control and Sor Juana's struggles for the same; the use of masquerade and costume to highlight the constructed nature of gender identity; and the deliberate repositioning and/or subversion of cinema's dominant male gaze. In terms of the feminist message of the film, the aforementioned cinematographic and narrative devices can be split into two areas of emphasis. The first involves the unequal power relationship between men and women, a dynamic often communicated through the separation of male and female social spaces, as well as the attitudes and activities expressed in those spaces. The second explores the ambiguities of Sor Juana's gender and sexual identity, emphasizing the personal suffering that grew out of institutional restrictions on her, as well as her attempts to free herself from these restrictions through her intellectual activities and relationships with other thinking women (specifically the vicereines, Leonor Carreto and Maria Luisa Manrique). These two areas are necessarily interrelated, as they are integral to the inherently difficult task of realizing a feminist repositioning of the cinematographic experience.
Bemberg did not likely consult Jean Franco's discussion of Sor Juana found in her Plaiting Women (1989), as it was published after the writing of the screenplay for the film (i.e. 1987). Furthermore, Franco's emphasis on the literary and the theoretical, rather than the biographical and the personal, did not necessarily lend itself to good story telling in the way that Paz's indepth and lengthy work did. Nonetheless, she makes two key observations in her essay, "Sor Juana Explores Space," which have direct relevance to the discussion of Bemberg's feminist representation of the writer and her life story. Franco engages the theoretical formulations of Michel Foucault, specifically, the term "discursive practices" and the concept of "domains of discourse," which he used to interpret the institutional structuring of power and control. She analyzes the importance of social-institutional spaces (Home/Family, Court/State, Convent/Church), the masquerade and the disguise in the literature and society of New Spain, and how these function in Sor Juana's writing.
Franco uses an example from the play, Los empe�os de una casa, describing how "[t]he house becomes a space of disguise, transvestism, play, and riddles..." (26; my emphasis). Again in specific reference to her dramatic pieces, she asserts that the nun was able to acquire "a symbolic mobility that enabled her to change her gender, class, and race" (Franco 29). She thus purports that Sor Juana used masks (parody, allegory, mimicry) as means of obtaining some sort of (discursive) authority in an otherwise limited social situation. For Franco, the device-dramatic and/or rhetorical-of the mask makes any knowledge of Sor Juana's gender identity (feminine, feminist or otherwise) less than clear. Additionally, the fluid gender identity expressed in her writing was linked to certain spaces of power that were typically occupied by men. So if her secular poetry and theater allowed her to achieve a degree of symbolic power in the eyes of the viceregal court, her theological treatise, the Carta atenagorica, caused a grave conflict with the church fathers because of it's audacity, all the more terrible because she was a woman.
The mobility and mutability of Sor Juana's gender identity that is posited by Franco acquires extremely interesting dimensions when read along with Jacques Derrida's elaborations on the autobiography, this being an essential element in the identification of Sor Juana as a feminist and defender of women's rights (here I refer to the well-known essay she wrote in her self-defense, the Respuesta a sor Filotea de la Cruz). During the round table on "otobiography," an extended group discussion on autobiography that takes place with Derrida, Christie V McDonald refers to an idea of Edmund Husserl that Derrida presents in Speech and Phenomena, in which the former notes that when the word "I" is read, it is most obviously estranged or dislocated from its normal meaning (as a self-referential diegetic shifter in oral expression). Here is where the autobiography becomes otobiography: it is the deciphering ear of the other that ultimately interprets, or signs for, the autobiographical "I." The role of the ear in interpretation is key to understanding the autobiographical subject; this ear may be large (undifferentiating) or small (keen, able to hear). The ear's difference (i.e. differences among ears) is important because "the signature becomes effective...not at the moment it apparently takes place, but only later, when ears have managed to receive the message" (Derrida 50). It is the ear of the other that signs. The "I" of auto/otobiography thus refers to both addresser and addressee: what the addressee hears constitutes the autos of autobiography, when the other comes to sign, and allows this subject to be heard and understood. And so, the signature is only effective when received, when autobiography becomes otobiography. Reception, and the attendant signing of the text that occurs when the text is heard/received, is also an act that has political implications.
Derrida further elucidates the significance of the signature of the individual work. The signature refers to both a proper name and the whole textual operation. Here he takes up McDonald's introduction of gender into the equation, particularly as this relates to the whole "I" question in autobiography. With the subject pronouns "I" and "you" (je/vous in French; yo/t� or usted in Spanish) the grammatico-sexual mark is imperceptible, that is, the grammatical form itself does not bear the mark of gender. The logico-grammatical aspect of the problem concerns the other (the addressee, the one who hears) to whom the signature is entrusted. Derrida asks if the difference of the "other as other" need be marked sexually a priori. He believes that it is difficult to decide, for if this were the case, the sex of the addresser would have to be determined before the other took responsibility for the signature. This leads to the suggestion that the sex of the addresser is mutable, to be decided by the addressee when he or she signs at some later point in time. And quite often, the signature only takes place posthumously. The "I" shifts back and forth among a series of dualities, which in turn become pluralities and ambiguities: it is both male and female, mother and father, life and death, Eros and Thanos. The essential ambiguity of all this is revealed when Derrida states that
The sex of the addresser awaits its determination by or from the other. It is the other who will perhaps decide who I am-man or woman. Nor is this decided once and for all. It may go one way one time and another way another time. What is more, if there is a multitude of sexes (because there are perhaps more than two) which sign differently, then I will have to assume (I-or rather whoever says I-will have to assume) this polysexuality. (52)
Nietzsche wrote of this essential plurality, when he said that he was two-both his mother and his father-two different sexes, "who are also life and death" (53). He-and whoever writes themselves in autobiography-writes for both the dead and the living, and those who will live in the future. In this sense, the proper name is meant to exist without the bearer of this name, and in fact, even in death (and sometimes only in death) the signature is continually performed.
This plurality and mutability are all very key for the Sor Juana debate as it is carried out in Bemberg and Paz's interlinked interpretations of the nun's gender subjectivity, and more importantly, as they both derive from the her autobiographical writing. In the case of Bemberg, the nun's signature is underscored by the title, which is itself a signature that employs the mutable "I" (Yo) along with gender specific markers (la...todas): Yo, la peor de todas. Yet, this signature is not the proper name, but rather an undifferentiated and shifting subject pronoun combined with a string of additional markers, which all together represents a phrase that was commonly used by Catholic nuns at the end of their confessions in the seventeenth century. Nonetheless, Bemberg's interpretation can also been viewed as an indication that Sor Juana's autobiographical signature is still alive and still being performed. Not only that, what Bemberg "hears" from Sor Juana's autobiographical "I" manifests a certain kind of polysexuality that is well worth considering. Beyond those listed above, other relevant (and mutable) dualities for Bemberg's Sor Juana include: hetero and homosexuality, platonic and erotic love, women's roles as nuns and mothers, intellectual and non-intellectual activity/subjectivity. One can even see the film as one version of Bemberg's own autobiography derived from her reading of Sor Juana's biography by Octavio Paz, which in and of itself was somewhat of an autobiography of Paz and his own intellectual and artistic personality.
Curiously enough, Bemberg's film unconsciously engages both Franco's theoretical formulations on Sor Juana's relationship to the patriarchal structures and spaces of power of her time, as well as the Derridian discussion of the gender(s) of the autobiographical "I." In Yo, Ia peor de todas, the unequal relationship between Sor Juana and the male-controlled society is constantly communicated in the film by spatial relations. The film's portrayal of gender inequality is communicated in terms of physical spaces/relationships; both between and within scenes, and further distinguished through elements such as lighting and sound, there is a distinction made between male versus female-dominated spaces versus Sor Juana's own space, an implicit reference to her mutable polysexuality suggested by Bemberg. The three opening scenes of the film exemplify the employment of the space/power dynamic that frames the Sor Juana story.
In a room that is dark and somber, the newly appointed viceroy, the Marqu�s de la Laguna (H�ctor Alterio) and Archbishop Francisco Aguiar y Seixas (Lautaro Mur�a) converse with one another in hushed tones. These two men are representatives of the secular and the spiritual patriarchal powers, i.e. the male-dominated institutions of Church and State, which-as Franco recognizes-aspired to control and dictate the ways of being, knowing and doing in colonial Spanish society. During their terse discussion, the viceroy notes that "[l]as cosas de Dios y las de C�sar han sido un poco mezcladas," to which the archbishop ominously responds, "Confundidas, quiz�s." This exchange exposes the archbishop's aspirations for power and control, while it more generally establishes an atmosphere of danger and conflict, both by-products of men's will to dominate and subjugate. In this scene, and as evidenced throughout the film, the relationship between Church and State is not peaceful or harmonious. The initial focus on men and their aspirations to power over society also indicates that Bemberg's interpretation of Sor Juana-much like Paz's version-revolves around her identity as a woman in a world dominated by men.
The next scene begins with a close-up shot of a fountain in the convent courtyard. An apparent allusion to the baptismal waters, it exemplifies the purity and innocence of a women's Utopia. As a group of nuns laugh and chat in the courtyard of the convent, light and playful Baroque music accompanies their activities. The bright light, the unrestrained laughter and pleasant music immediately define certain aspects of this female-dominated space, most obviously, the expression of freedom and innocence in an otherwise restricted environment. But not all women are created equal, there is a third space that pertains to Sor Juana-the solitary mujer pensante-herself. Viewed alone in her quarters, she spins a globe and contemplates. This act implies that through her study and writing, the entire world is within her reach, but only as a fiction, in her imagination. Through her solitary intellectual pursuits she gains knowledge of the world and also creates her own space. The distinction between this "room of one's own" and the animated, female-dominated space of the convent is made with the noise and chatter of the nuns below in contrast with the atmosphere of silence, deep thought and contemplation when Juana is alone in her quarters.
In the scenes involving interactions between men and women, the uneven power relations between genders is also constantly foregrounded, frequently through the positioning of the male and female characters in relation to one another. The visual aspects of certain scenes serve to highlight the dialogue of these cross-gender interactions, and also Sor Juana's conflict with religious powers over her intellectual and literary activities. One example occurs in a dark and prison-like corridor of what appears to be either a convent or a monastery, where two nuns meet secretly with Archbishop Aguiar y Seixas. In an obvious gesture of submission, they approach him kneeling and in a lowered position (a detail that is likely not historically inaccurate); a further testament to his overt and overemphasized misogyny, he also demands they cover their faces to address him. He speaks of the need to control spiritual laxity in the convents, to which the two nuns agree and promise their support. The corrupt nature of the Church is highlighted when one of the nuns-significantly, the future Mother Abbess-asks the archbishop if there will be any (economic) benefits for those who support him, specifically the protection of their "investments" (las rentas). He revealingly replies that secrecy is one of the pillars of the Church, and then proceeds to ask for a list of "good" and "bad" nuns. The future abbess responds that she will give him three lists: the pious, the lukewarm and the shameless. The archbishop then asks in which list is Sor Juana included. Her answer is silence, as she offers the lists to him without any sort of reply to his question. His overdetermined misogyny resurfaces, as the archbishop gestures to his assistant to take the paper from the nun's hands, of course, as he would not accept anything that has been touched directly by a woman. When the nuns leave these dark quarters, the archbishop's secretary closes the iron gate behind them, locks it with a key and proceeds to purify the space with incense.
The sharp social separation of women and men is conveyed through the visual elements of lighting and the positioning of characters in relation to one another. However, this is not a black and white division, in which the women are categorically opposed to or supportive of Sor Juana. This ambiguity is evident at a further point in the firm, when a group of nuns collect her writing from her cell to pass along to the archbishop, who is concerned about their content. In the darkness, they work in silence under the vigil of the new Mother Abbess (one of the two who met earlier with the archbishop to discuss the behavior of Sor Juana and her sisters). The complicity of the women is thus directly linked to the control of men, and more significantly, the male members of the church who seek to repress and subjugate the women in their charge, an interpretation that is intensified by the religious music that accompanies their work of censorship.
Throughout the film, the binary division of men and women is reinforced; the men are categorically represented as the forces that control and contain (with the possible exception of her friend and intellectual comrade Carlos de Sigiienza y Gongora, played by Gerardo Roman), and the women as those that liberate and promote freedom. For even the nuns who are willing to assist the archbishop in his persecution of Sor Juana are, after all, following his orders to avoid problems of their own, and possibly reap material benefit in return for their compliance. Still, to what extent does this binary pattern complicate the representation of women's gender and sexuality, and specifically that of Sor Juana, throughout the film? The interactions of her and Maria Luisa reveal an effort to represent the complexities of women's roles within the restrictions particular to the time (although ultimately they reveal more about our time than Sor Juana's). The specific strategies of gender representation involve the use of/allusions to masks and disguises (both literal and figurative), and the disruption of the "male gaze" of the cinema. At this point, we should also keep present that while these strategies serve to promote a feminist agenda, and specifically to make a strong statement about the troubles of the woman intellectual under the patriarchy, they are not without their faults. The apparent romance between the nun and the vicereine, as well as the slippery representation of the gender identity of the two women, are two areas that will elucidate the problematic aspects of Bemberg's feminist film.
On the Other Side of the Looking Glass: Is There a Female Gaze?
In "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Laura Mulvey's classic feminist intervention into film theory, she established traditional, i.e. male-dominated, cinematic practice as gendered. In classic narrative cinema, the camera, and by extension the male spectator, is/are active/looking and the female spectacle is passive/looked at, in other words, the cinematic "gaze" is essentially male. Both the men within the film, as well as those in the audience, are the active consumers of the passive, objectified female body. Informed by Mulvey's theoretical discussion of the gendering of spectatorship, Bruce Williams nuances the contemporary significance of Camila in terms of Bemberg's feminist film aesthetic. Rather than a complete reformulation-or rejection-of preexisting film codes, Williams explains how she
[P]resents a sensorial repositioning of gendered subjectivity, thereby reassessing the traditional visual dynamic of the classical cinema and destabilizing the primacy of the male gaze. This process in particularly subversive in that in never completely redefines cinematic discourse. Rather, Bemberg questions film practice from a place of disturbingly close proximity to traditional canons. (62)
Bemberg's efforts to capture the varied facets of women's experiences-albeit exclusively women of privilege-in the patriarchy are concentrated in her repeated rupture of the male gaze (both within the filmic narrative and between the spectators and the film). Throughout the film, Camila's active gaze defines her as a subject who looks and expresses desire and agency. The "power of the look" is placed in her control, granting her the voyeuristic privilege of the gaze that in most films is the domain of the male characters and spectators. Foster has determined that "Camila's exercise of a personal choice in sentimental love is given contemporary feminist dimensions in her key role as the assertive partner-a role epitomized by the fact that, in a key scene, it is Ladislao's derriere that is showcased in the obligatory but now wryly ironic gesture of sex-symbolization" (22). These examples thereby confirm Barbara Morris's assessment of Bemberg's cinema, as one that "da voz e imagen no sexistas a la mujer, pues reconstruye la fuerza de la mirada y de la voz femeninas... como un intento de crear un aut�ntico cine femenino en temas y discurso" (255). Thus within an apparently conventional and familiar framework (romantic melodrama/women's film), this filmmaker offers subversive moments that thwart traditional forms of gender representation within established narrative and visual codes of cinematic discourse.
Yo, la peor de todas also highlights and problematizes the male gaze in ways that break with traditional gender representation in film. The gaze "comes into focus" in a flashback scene to Sor Juana's preconvent days as a lady-in-waiting in the viceregal court, in which she is subjected by a group of men to an difficult oral examination to verify her already notable erudition. The room is large and dark, emphasizing the serious nature of the situation, further intensified by the black clothing and very somber faces of the group that surrounds a young, beautiful and demure Juana seated at the head of the long table. Notably, her benefactress, the Vicereine Leonor Carreto (the Marquise de Mancera), is seated opposite Juana at the table, dressed in masculine attire. Juana's appearance is elegant: she is adorned with makeup and jewels, and according to most film conventions would be another example of the beautiful woman as object of the male gaze. However, through the verbal content of the scene, Bemberg subverts the traditional relationships between male and female characters, and (male) spectator and visual image: this woman speaks and is quite intelligent! Contrary to the expectations of her examiners, she answers all questions correctly, demonstrating both erudition and grace. This scene thus dramatizes Bemberg's specific challenge to the stereotype of beautiful women that has typically conditioned the representation of women in art, literature, and film. Beauty and the active assertion of knowledge are no longer incompatible. Moreover, the use of chiaroscuro lighting establishes an overt and purposeful visual contrast between the young scholar and her audience that obviously functions to highlight gender differences and conflicts: Juana's luminosity-both internal and external-is in stark contrast to her dark and somber surroundings, be they the dour looks of her examiners or the physical atmosphere of the room itself.
In Yo, Ia pear de todas, the binary opposition of men versus women is intensified through the play of light and darkness, illumination and enigma, and even beauty and erudition. These dichotomies serve to enhance-and at times subvert-the dynamic of look and desire, as is further demonstrated in a continuation of the flashback to Sor Juana's preconvent days. Here we witness what would appear to be a passionate exchange between the protagonist and another courtier, as they stand alone together on a dark and breezy terrace. The physical beauty of Juana, in most films a necessary component for portraying men's fantasy of woman's desire, is once more apparent. Yet here we see how sexuality, desire and the pursuit of knowledge interact in unconventional ways. As they gaze at one another in the darkness he gives her tender kiss, which she willingly accepts. But for her, sexuality-most particularly, the corporal component of sexual desire-and knowledge are conflated. Immediately following this kiss, Juana appears pensive, reflecting aloud on the moment by saying, "Ahora se Io que es un beso." Contrary to conventions, love is viewed by Juana In�s as an intellectual or mental exercise. Nevertheless, she also returns his kiss, with force, confidence and passion.
If this scene supports the idea of the intellectual and knowledge-hungry Juana, it also implies the existence of another woman, hitherto buried by history, but who, despite her long status as a nun might have experienced more "human" emotions, such as sexual or romantic desire for others. As a group, these scenes also seem to provide the necessary hint of sexuality and femininity (with the visual and narrative emphasis on Juana's [Assumpta Serna's] beauty, grace, and sensuality) necessary for a commercially successful (melo)dramatic film. There are also parallels between Bemberg's treatment of the gaze in a film like Camila, and its use in Yo, la peor de todas. The examples from both films reveal how Bemberg constantly skirts the line between traditional representations of gender-seen in the deliberate physical beauty of protagonists, the emphasis on the look and desire to develop gender identity, the open use of the melodramatic formula-and the conscientious subversion of these patterns, all the more provocative for their proximity to the norms.
In both films, passion and desire-which include romantic intrigue and sexual innuendo-are central elements of the narrative; similar to Camila, Bemberg's Sor Juana also exudes passion, as the director explains, "Ia pasion forma parte del ser de Juana. Todo, todo Io que la roza, todo lo que ella vive es de una manera pasional" (Burton-Carvajal 81). But unlike Camila's transgressive sexual passion, Sor Juana's passion-and therefore agency and subjectivity-emanates from the mind and not the body. This refers to a distinction between passions and desires of the mind versus those of the body, a concern in the artistic and intellectual culture of the Spanish Baroque. Infused by the neo-Platonic currents of the time, Catholic doctrine emphasized the mind/body split: the rejection of earthly corporal existence, marred by sin and the confines of mortality, and the elevation of the mind and spirit as the more noble and heavenly path for humanity. A number of scholars, including Octavio Paz and Jean Franco, have certainly recognized the importance of this distinction in Sor Juana's work (El primera sue�o serves as a prime example), a concern she shared with other Baroque writers. Thus Bemberg's portrayal of the nun's "true passion" has a concrete historical basis, certainly gleaned from her and co-scriptwriter Antonio Larreta's reading of Paz's work. But also significant from a contemporary perspective, is that Bemberg has admitted to her desire to respect a Catholic viewpoint by deemphasizing the priest's sexuality in Camila, a move that likely conditioned her desire to do the same in her presentation of Sor Juana's sexual identity.
On more than one occasion Sor Juana purported that her status as a nun and a virgin neutralized her gender.3 Franco views Sor Juana's rejection of a strictly feminine identity, and her frequent adoption of a neutral or masculine persona, as a strategy designed to reject the accepted conventions of women's writing, namely that of "mystical nuns whose goal was ultimate silence" (23). The frequent and deliberate destabilization of her feminine identity allowed her voice to emanate from a position that was neither male nor female. Franco's observations on the symbolic mobility of Sor Juana's gender find a parallel in Paz's discussion of mirrors in the nun's work. Often contemplated through the dialectic between portrait and model, in Baroque literature, mirrors are devices that serve to question and elaborate the distinction between reality and imagination, essence and appearance (dichotomies that evidence the continued influence of Platonic thought). In Paz's view, Sor Juana's apparent obsession with mirrors and portraits also encompasses speculations on her gender. In the film as well, and very likely the result of Paz's influence, Sor Juana's gender identity is fluid and multiple, and, not very clear. This is a deliberate move that serves to destabilize the notion of a singular and homogenous feminine identity for women, but also obfuscates the "true" nature of Sor Juana's gender, and Bemberg's representation of it.
Paz identifies the essence versus appearance dichotomy as a speculative device that is employed by Sor Juana in her poetry through "the dialectic between the portrait and the model, the image in the mirror and the original, appearance and reality" (Paz 84). According to Paz, this dialectic is a key element of her literary (and according to both Bemberg and Paz, personal) transgressions of the norms of feminine identity. He explains that if her taking up the pen (in all its phallic connotations) made her more masculine-as writing was the near exclusive domain of men-then her nunhood neutralized her gender. Real and symbolic, Sor Juana wore/wears many masks, and thus, Paz's reference to this Baroque problematic also functions nicely to underscore the constructed nature of (gender) identity. Throughout Bemberg's film, Sor Juana's habit and veil-or in her pre-convent days in the court, the young Juana's outward beauty and grace-appear as "masks" (recall Franco) that not only highlight the protagonist's struggles with cultural and social restrictions on her intellectual development and activities, but also allow us to question the validity of gender constructs in our own time and space.
"M�s monja que mujer, m�s poeta que monja"
A spatial element, the bars of Sor Juana's locutory accentuate the dynamics of freedom and containment, essence versus appearance, and also influence those aspects of the narrative central to the film's treatment of gender. The presence and absence of the bars intersects with the notion that gender roles are constructs, roles to be acted out, and not essential characteristics of men or women (obviously, the film is more concerned with the latter). In the specific case of the relationship of Sor Juana and the vicereine, Mar�a Luisa, this leads to complications, and the implicit allusion to multiple feminine gender identities-nun, mother, intellectual, poet, virgin, lesbian-which coexist with one another, despite their socially mandated incompatibility. Additionally, the bars of the locutory, in the specific instance of how the friendship between the vicereine and Sor Juana develops throughout the film, also help to convey the rather explicit suggestion that the intense and passionate relationship between the two women had a sexual component. To further complicate matters, the bars-both as a visual element of spatial separation between gendered subjects and as a narrative referent that signifies social restrictions on gender identity-support the melodramatic and romantic aspects of the story, and thus reinforce the covert presentation of Sor Juana and Maria Luisa as the ill-fated lovers who must fulfill their tragic destiny as punishment for their transgressions of the celibate (for Sor Juana the nun) and heterosexual (for Mar�a Luisa the married vicereine) norms of female/feminine sexuality imposed on them by society.
As their first meeting with one another begins, the spatio-visual separation of the bars of the locutory-concretely apparent to the viewers of the film, and certainly a reality of the time-is noted directly by the vicereine when she asks Sor Juana if they can be done away with somehow, to which Juana replies, "Ni los veo." She then begins to explain to Maria Luisa the freedoms offered to her by convent life (quite real freedoms, as historical investigations by scholars like Josefina Muriel, Asunci�n Lavr�n, and Electra Arenal and Stacey Schlau have confirmed6). She tells the vicereine that life in the convent allows her to study, write, teach, and have books. Bemberg's critique of the various social institutions as patriarchal and oppressive is found in Mar�a Luisa's response to Sor Juana's claims. She offers Juana a series of comparisons between their two lives and the limitations placed on them as women: "vos cem's el velo, yo Ia corona; no os dejan salir del convento, �crees que puedo escapar dejar del palacio? Observais la regla, yo el protocolo. A los veinte a�os entrast�is al convento, a m� a esa edad, me casaron. Me pregunto, �para cu�l de las dos es mas peque�o su mundo?" Sor Juana then asks her if she may answer with four of her verses: "para el alma no hay encierro, ni prisiones que le impida, porque solo la aprisiona la que forma ella misma."
Th�se verses seem to be deliberately included to highlight the primacy of neo-Platonic thought to Sor Juana's poetic, spiritual and personal life, which not only reiterates the conclusions of previous studies of her work, it also deflects the "danger" of misinterpretations-resonant in both the context of film, as well as in the body of Sor Juana criticism and interpretation-of the nature of the relationship between the two women. The scene is quite significant for the obvious connections it establishes between the meeting of the two women, which is one of the first signs of their soon-to-be deep and intense friendship, and the threats and restrictions of patriarchal repression-communicated both visually by the bars that separate them, and narratively in the comments of the vicereine. This is precisely one of Emilie Bergmann's criticisms of the film, i.e., the causal relationship that is established between the expression of homoerotic desire and Sor Juana's demise. This fact is curiously overlooked by the filmmaker herself, who continually denies she is representing the women as lesbians, but instead qualifies the passionate and Platonic relationship between the two as a dramatic device, a detail that also supports Bemberg's cozy relationship with commercial film conventions.7
In many ways Bergmann's criticism is valid, for Bemberg repeatedly links Sor Juana's troubles with the patriarchal powers to her "passionate" and "erotic" relationship with the vice-reine, a move that has damaging connotations for the film's (apparently unintentional) attempts at representation of the lesbian subject. Still, we are troubled here by our own historical blindness, for despite the obvious prospect that lesbianism is not exclusive to the twentieth century, the experiences and attitudes of contemporary lesbians are not necessarily the same as those of the past. Coupled with the highly the codified social protocols and literary conventions of Sor Juana's day, which viewed artifice and camouflage as the pinnacle of artistic and intellectual talent, it is difficult to determine-and most particularly in the poems actually written to /for the vicereine-that what is expressed is lesbian desire as we know it.
If one wants to argue that the erotic content of Sor Juana's poems to the vicereine, Mar�a Luisa, is a transparent reflection of her deep affection (in the sexual and romantic sense) for this woman, and thus discount Paz's explanation that the poems are merely reflecting the poetic, philosophical and social conventions of the time, then what is one to do with the poems written in a feminine voice to a masculine subject? Bergmann, who vehemently denounces the homophobic interpretation of Paz and Bemberg regarding Sor Juana's sexuality and the relationship she had with the vicereine, provides an example of such a poem that is used in the film (inaccurately, in that the vicereine's character reads it as if it were written to her, which in reality was not the case): "Baste ya de rigores, mi bien, baste; ...pues ya en Hquido humor viste y tocaste / mi coraz�n deshecho entre tus manos" (240). This is one example of many, and one that certainly deserves to be considered as an "authentic" (i.e. truthful and accurate) expression of erotic passion as much as any of the poems written expressly for Mar�a Luisa, her benefactress.
Bemberg explains that her own interpretation of the "true nature" of the friendship between the women was conditioned by Paz's explanations of the poetic conventions of the time. He provides an example from an unidentified glosa written to Mar�a Luisa: "There is no obstacle to love /in gender or in absence, /for souls, as you are well aware, /transcend both sex and distance" (219). Paz further reminds us that the relationship between the two women was, after all, that of superior /patroness to inferior /commissioned artist, maintaining that "[w]ith no sense of embarrassment she calls herself the servant, even the slave, of the Viceroy and Vicereine. She knew perfectly well that she was neither; in identifying herself in this way she was merely following a social and political convention" (Paz 197). According to Paz, the complex poetic and cultural protocols for the expression of love, dedication, and even desire, trace a trajectory-philosophical, religious, poetic-from Platonism into Arabic Sufi mysticism into the Troubadour poetry of Provence, and then into Renaissance and Spanish Golden Age literature and culture (Electra Arenal and Amanda Powell also consider the influence of Troubadour poetic conventions that likely conditioned the overt eroticism in Sor Juana poems to the vicereine). Sor Juana's location in these traditions allowed her to "manifest in her poems to the Countess of Paredes the rhetoric of lovers combined with legal and familial language . . . the faithfulness of the lover, the loyalty of the servant, and the affection of the son were synonyms that designated an identical devotion" (198). While it is certainly possible that a lesbian relationship existed between the two women, it is less likely that her affections would have been transparently communicated in the poems she wrote to the vicereine.8 Bemberg's-and Paz's as well-representation of Sor Juana's lesbian subjectivity says more about her than it does about the person she has chosen as her subject matter.
Furthermore, we should also bear in mind the distinction between the real Sor Juana and the one that writes, especially since Bemberg's (and Paz's) understanding of the poet and her complex-and certainly at times, ambiguous-gender identity is gleaned from her writing, most particularly her autobiographical treatise, La respuesta. What is more, even the figure of Sor Filotea de la Cruz exemplifies "the confusion between the notion of the author and that of the person" (46-47) discussed by McDonald in the round table with Derrida, and moreover, the slippage between the gender of the person and that of the author. Sor Filotea was in fact not a nun at all, but rather Bishop Santa Cruz of Puebla, the one who first urged Sor Juana to write her Carta qtenag�rica, in which she refuted a sermon delivered by Brazilian Jesuit Ant�nio Vieira in 1650. He subsequently published it prefaced by a strong admonition of the nun and her intellectual activities, signed with the name "Sor Filotea de la Cruz." Evidently, gender mutability is not the exclusive terrain of Sor Juana: be she real person, writer or twentieth-century feminist icon.
Still, in Bemberg's rendition, the relationship between Mar�a Luisa and Juana In�s is rife with highly romantic and sexual connotations that ultimately work in the direct service of melodrama, and also reinforce the "conventionality" of Bemberg's narrative technique-despite the abstract and artful fa�ade. Yet, if we indeed interpret it as a "romance" between two women, the fact that it is represented by a woman and directed toward women, in and of itself undermines the typical conventions of popular melodramatic cinema. While it is imperative that one not loose sight of the decidedly problematic aspects of Bemberg's representation of the desiring lesbian subject (consider Bergmann), it is equally important to recognize the great ambiguity surrounding this representation. Not only does Bemberg explicitly deny that what she is doing is portraying the relationship between the two women as lesbian, the details of the film itself frustrate any definitive answer in this regard. Most likely cognizant of Paz's explanation that the apparent intensity of the friendship was the product of conventions of the time, Bemberg probably wanted to accept Paz's interpretation of the friendship between the young Juana and Vicereine Leonor Carreto, observations which seem equally applicable to that of Sor Juana and Maria Luisa:
There have been celebrated masculine friendships based on the shared passion for ideas, the arts, or the sciences. But this experience, one of the highest we can aspire to, is not exclusively male: the relationship, tinged with mutual admiration, that joined these two women was such as friendship of the spirit. (90)
This would of course reinforce the director's focus on women who engage in intellectual activity, as opposed to women in general. The fact that she ends up sexualizing and romanticizing the relationship between the Mar�a Luisa and Juana In�s seems to detract from this purpose, and because of this, the gender identity and sexuality of Bemberg's Sor Juana is both mobile and multiple, but also essentially ambiguous. The commercial filmmaker inside Bemberg seems to say: women-intellectuals or not-must have something 'sexy' to offer the spectators; if these women think, they must also desire.
The scenes involving the development of a friendship between Mar�a Luisa and Juana In�s also reveal key aspects of the director's treatment of gender in the film, most particularly in relation to the central female protagonists. Sor Juana is found in the confines of her private cell, appropriately engaged in intellectual activity, consulting some texts that lay open in front of her. This visual image qualifies Sor Juana as the solitary woman intellectual, always hard at work, yet also alone. The presence of the vicereine is "announced" by the off-screen sounds of a mandolin, at first discordant and disconcerting, then rising to achieve harmony. This detail seems to reflect the nature of the relationship between the two women, and the ultimate positive effect that the vicereine had-in reality-on Sor Juana's life and work (it was she who took the nun's works back to Spain and had them published, a historical fact that is deliberately included in the film). Notably, the vicereine first mentions the bars of the locutory to explain her transgression of protocol, which would prohibit outside visitors in private quarters.
The beginning of this scene appears to thwart the possible categorization of their friendship as primarily sexual/romantic, for the subject of their conversation immediately reveals their intellectual camaraderie. Mar�a Luisa speaks of the nun's voluminous library, having heard from others that it is one of the biggest and the best in New Spain. However, she is quick to warn Sor Juana of the danger of her intellectual pursuits, for she makes a point to mention that some of the books-those of Descartes, Gassendi, Kirscher, specifically-found in the nun's collection are dangerous and have been prohibited in Spain under the Inquisition. Sor Juana defends herself, explaining to her friend that here (in New Spain) they are far from Rome (i.e. the Pope) and that her confessor is the one who censors her, thus acknowledging the control of Church and State over cultural and intellectual production. Regardless, Mar�a Luisa is still very concerned by her friend's audacity in these matters, and reiterates the threat of the Inquisition by describing the horrors of an auto de fe she had witnessed in Spain, in which she saw "m�s de cien personas quemadas vivas-vagabundos, prostitutas, lun�ticos, alg�n jud�o."
By this time she is visibly shaken by her own words, and apparently truly afraid of the consequences of Juana's daring in her scholarly pursuits. Her emotions have taken over, and she exclaims to the nun, "�Te Io ruego, Juana, no desafies a Ia Iglesia!" Completely overcome by her emotional distress, she begins to hyperventilate, and is on the verge of fainting. Halfway between a gasp and a whisper-and only augmenting the (sexual? emotional?) tension between the two women, she begs for Juana -to open her bodice. Juana immediately-and obediently-falls to her knees at the feet of her friend to carry out this imperative request, all the while gazing at her distressed companion with a look of deep compassion. The delicate movement of her hands only augments the pseudo sensual/romantic connotations of their interaction as she opens the vicereine's bodice.
Although this scene initially accentuates the intellectual ties between the two women, as well as Sor Juana's tenacity with regards to her scholarly activities (the trials of "la mujer pensante"), the ending is undeniably emotional and sensual. This reinforces the ambiguity of Bemberg's treatment of the relationship between the women, and her resistance to making a definitive claim as to Sor Juana's sexual identity. But the scene also goes on to assert the impossibility of a homogenous and monolithic feminine identity that would apply to all women, for upon noting the pregnant state of her friend, Sor Juana exclaims, "No Io sab�a." She then goes onto explain that "Ia matemidad me asusta, no Ia entiendo, el mio es un cueipo abstracto; mis hijos son mi telescopic, mi astrolabio, mi reloj solar, mi lira, mi aut�mata; mi espejo de obsidiana donde leo el pasado y deslumbro el future, mis imanes, mis plumas, mis escritos...". Her words serve as a defense of her intellectual activities, and also assert a feminine identity that is not grounded in psychological or physical submission to men, including the material and social function of woman as childbearer. Both nature and culture are denied.
The dichotomy between the material /physical (represented by Mar�a Luisa, although also apparent in Sor Juana during a later altercation between her and the Archbishop Aguiar y Seixas, to be described below) and the intellectual /mental is constantly reinforced in the film, which in turn functions as a way of problematizing the symbolic /social norms of gender expression for women. Her seemingly total disconnection from her existence as a female is only validated by the fact that she is a nun, who will likely never know the experience of motherhood, and an intellectual, and thus, also removed from the corporal/sensual and given to the mental/rational. As a married woman and mother (obvious signs of her socially sanctioned heterosexuality), the expression of passion and sensuality is totally permissible to the vicereine, as her response to Juana indicates. With feeling she says to her friend, "�qu� bella �res cuando te apasionas!" only to reinforce their difference and the "lesser" status of Juana as a childless woman, "pero... una mujer sin hijos es incompleta, no se puede negar la naturaleza." This moment constitutes the crux of the scene, for Sor Juana retorts that all women are not equal, some-like her-need solitude, a statement that confirms more than one possible personal and social identity for women. Of course, the vicereine's position is still maintained, for she responds to her friend's claim that God did not instill her with the restlessness of knowledge over the desire to love. This rather problematically reiterates the "romantic" aspects of their relationship, as well as the "typical" propensity of some women to strong emotion and their preference for romance, and the accompanying suppression of the rational and the intellectual. The division of the mind and body also separates the two characters into "acceptable" categories: the nun remains pure of mind and spirit, the wife and mother exudes emotion and corporal sensuality.
One must also grapple with the vicereine's more aggressive bisexuality (Miller correctly observes that the vicereine/Sanda occupies the traditional position of the central male character(s), the channel for the male gaze/desire of the spectators), which at one point leads her to assume the role of domineering dominatrix. For some, this presentation is rather questionable, especially to the extent that it is contrasted with Sor Juana's poetically, yet platonically, expressed homoeroticism. There is one particular encounter between the two women that functions in obvious juxtaposition to the flashback of the exchange of a kiss between a young Juana In�s and a male courtier. The vicereine has come to visit Juana to present her with a gift of a miniature portrait of herself. Here in the privacy of Sor Juana's cell, Mar�a Luisa simultaneously acknowledges the ambiguity of Juana's gender (me pregunto, �c�mo es Juana cuando est� sola?: m�s poeta que monja, m�s monja que mujer), as well as her own desire to see the nun stripped of her (socially and culturally conditioned) gender-neutral mask: "�Qu�tate el velo! Es una orden!" She then suggestively exclaims that "esta Juana es mia, solamente m�a." Not surprisingly, as (Sor) Juana is "exposed" in her natural and overtly female state, the infamous "lesbian kiss" occurs. Here, Bergmann correctly protests that Juana's awkward, shy and innocent reaction to the vicereine's "advances" is out of line with the nun's otherwise assertive, take-no-prisoners attitude. Furthermore, the fact that once Mar�a Luisa leaves and before putting her habit back on, Juana lovingly takes the miniature portrait out and caresses it in a somewhat transparent expression of admiration and desire, makes the claim that what is represented is not lesbian desire and/or subjectivity-problematic as its representation may be-difficult to accept.
Bergmann explains how the film is "shaped by a narrative of female abjection, the defeat of a risk-taking, exceptionally gifted, and accomplished woman crushed by the patriarchal social order" (229), all of which are supported to one degree or another by the historical record of Sor Juana's rejection of secular writing in the final years of her life, with the "female abjection" further confirmed by her adoption of the writing conventions of other nuns of the time: the signature, "Yo, la peor de todas." She is troubled by the film's implicit suggestion of an apparent causal relationship between Sor Juana's defeat and the homoeroticism expressed in the nun's poems to the vicereine. Though, as Bergmann herself points out, the majority of the love /erotic poems included in the film were not even the ones written to /in honor of the vicereine. This detail weakens the alleged connections that Bemberg makes between Sor Juana's ultimate defeat (only momentary, as one of the messages that proceed the final credits attests that "Today she [Sor Juana In�s de la Cruz] is considered one of the greatest poets of the Spanish Golden Age") and her (repressed) lesbian desire. Moreover, other scholars who have written on the film, most particularly Nina Scott (whose work is employed by Bergmann as part of her negative critique of the film), have had nothing but praise for the film's portrayal of the nun's erotic life. Scott describes the "erotic elements in the relationship between Sor Juana and Mar�a Luisa" as being "delicately but forthrightly" (153) handled, and sees in Bemberg's film the presentation of "a definite physical attraction" (153) between the two women (despite the denial of such by the filmmaker) that is not at all problematic, and is in fact, praiseworthy.
Another reaction to Bemberg's audacious portrayal of the seventeenth-century nun as a desiring female subject is located on the extreme opposite end of the ideological spectrum as that of Bergmann: conservative Mexican Catholicism. Tarisco Herrera Zapi�n attacks both Paz and Bemberg for their suggestions that Sor Juana was a lesbian, as well as their unkind portrayal of clergy members, such as the archbishop ("La personalidad de los arzobispos es tratada por la guionista en forma a�n m�s grotesca que la de las damas, ofendidas a mansalva por la guionista y por el autor en que ella se inspir�" [Herrera Zapi�n 167, my emphasis]). He takes umbrage at the scene in which Mar�a Luisa breathily reads aloud a love poem by Sor Juana-not originally written for the vicereine, but used in the film as if it were-to her husband. Admittedly problematic, this poem is used in the film as if it were a declaration of Sor Juana's deep feelings for her friend, to which "el marqu�s comenta entonces soezmente 'Seguis haciendo estragos, Mar�a Luisa'" (Herrera Zapi�n 164; emphasis added); and when Juana is more concerned about the condition of Mar�a Luisa following the birth of her son, than about the new baby, Herrera Zapi�n is disgusted that "todas las religiosas est�n felices por el nacimiento del nino, pero Juana In�s est� morbosamente preocupada por la madre" (165; my emphasis).
Shortly before the viceroy receives word that his appointment is up, thus obligating he and his family to return to Spain, a group of Churchmen have a meeting about Sor Juana and her work. The group includes her confessor, Antonio N��ez de Miranda (Alberto Segado), her friend, Carlos de Siguenza y G�ngora, the traitorous (as he made public, after promising otherwise, her polemic refutation of the sermon by the Brazilian Jesuit, Ant�nio Vieira) bishop of Puebla, Manuel Fern�ndez de Santa Cruz (Franklin Caicedo), and the true persecutor of her person and work, the Archbishop Aguiar y Seixas. The scene represents the mounting conflict between the secular and religious that surrounds Sor Juana's work as a writer, and more importantly, a nun /woman writer, which in the final analysis-according to Paz and Bemberg at least-leads her to renounce her secular writing. Even more significant is the underlying conflict between men and women caused by the power and domination of the patriarchy over women's lives. The dark scene begins with the archbishop referring to her verses as lances in the side of Our Lord, to which another scandalously comments that merely touching her poems burns his hands, and yet another proffers that "esta poes�a exhibe la m�s perversa sensualidad." Scenes like this have garnered the criticism of scholars like Herrera Zapi�n, who considers Bemberg's presentation of the religious men as evil and misogynistic as a harsh affront to Catholicism, and Bergmann, who views scenes such as this as indicative of the causal relationship the director establishes between the relationship of Sor Juana and Mar�a Luisa de Manrique and the former's demise, and thus ultimately, an indicator of Bemberg and Paz's homophobic stance with respect to the possible lesbianism of the nun.
Yet the ultimate dramatic event does not occur in the context of the "romance" between Juana In�s and Mar�a Luisa, but rather a violent confrontation between the nun and the Archbishop Aguilar y Seixas, when he learns of her attack against his friend, Vieira. Whether Sor Juana's demise is covertly linked to her relationship with Maria Luisa, or the overt suggestion that she was actually caught up in larger political conflicts and power struggles between men of the Church (a problem that would have only been exacerbated by the return of the viceroys to Spain, and the subsequent absence of their favor and protection), her downfall is shown to be the product of a some sort of conflict with the patriarchal control of the Church fathers. The possibility that she is simply an unwitting pawn in political and /or intellectual rivalries between men is reiterated by references to the controversy surrounding the writing and publication of her refutation of Padre Vieira in her Carta atenagorica. As previously mentioned, the piece was written at the bidding of the bishop of Puebla, and in Paz's interpretation of things, most likely the result of his desire to embarrass or harm his rival, the Archbishop Aguiar y Seixas, who was know to be a supporter of Vieira's ideas. This interpretation significant to the film, and in addition to brief scenes alluding to the archbishop's dangerous conservatism in intellectual matters (he is seen at one point demonically presiding over a book burning ceremony as Sig�enza y G�ngora and N��ez de Miranda look on quite disturbed), the conversation between Sor Juana and bishop Santa Cruz, in which he strongly encourages her to write the refutation, only serves to strengthen its importance. It would seem likely that on one level Bemberg would want to emphasize Sor Juana's persecution for intellectual reasons, although we now know that there is more to it than that.
The spatial configuration of this scene (the position of actors in relation to one another and their surroundings) is once more a key component of this cross-gender interaction. As the scene begins, we encounter the "jailed" Sor Juana, viewed behind the omnipresent bars of the locutory as she reads Vieira's sermon. But it is not only the bars that serve to frame for this infamous-albeit fictionalized-conversation. At one point the nun is viewed close-up with her face next to a flickering candle, an object which clearly symbolizes her identification as an enlightened and rational being in contrast to the paranoid and backbiting behavior of the men that surround her, including her current visitor. The symbolism of the candles, and their role in representing the conflict of reason and knowledge over blind and persecutory religious zeal, is again clarified as the scene closes. Following her reluctant agreement to hand over to Santa Cruz the refutation of Vieira she has written, she places the text on a table located just beyond the bars of the locutory. Here, the camera slowly moves in to a close-up of the table on which the piece now lays, flanked by a statue of a crucified Christ and the lighted candle. The crucifix itself is dually symbolic, as it is a reference to a key event in the founding of the Catholic Church, as well as a foreshadowing of Sor Juana's own "crucifixion" at the hands of her male persecutors. This figure is in contrast to the flaming candle, obvious symbol of the light of reason, and thus, a metonymic reference to Sor Juana herself. Her victimhood now firmly established, from here on out she will only know suffering and persecution.
Naturally, once Archbishop Aguiar y Seixas finds out about the attack on his friend Vieira, deeply offensive because she is female, Sor Juana confronts powers that are far beyond her control as a nun and woman. Significantly, this information is communicated by her old friend, the former Mother Abbess, who now lies sick and dying in a hospital (now another source of support that will soon disappear), where Juana goes to visit her only to learn the terrible news of the forces against her. Not long after this scene, the real confrontation between Sor Juana and the fathers of the Church-naturally headed by the archbishop-occurs. It is not incidental that the scene takes place with her "behind bars," i.e. in the confines of the locutory.
She is at first humble, bowing to the group of men in acknowledgement of their superior status. But this humility is short-lived, as the archbishop cannot control his desire to persecute and debase her (she is a woman, after all). He speaks tauntingly of her alleged persecutors, pointedly asking if she has been able to identify any of them. Making specific reference to the Carta atenag�rica, he admonishes her for the audacity of the work; "�fEste trabajo] no est� un poco lejos de la piedad? �Una obra algo alejada de lo que podr�a esperarse de una religiosa?" Her confessor, N��ez de Miranda, momentarily steps in to defend his spiritual daughter, only to be reprimanded and silenced by the powerful archbishop. When the archbishop dares to suggest that God did not create woman to philosophize, Sor Juana can take it no longer. With words that must have been inspired directly by the Respuesta a Sor Filotea, she breaks her respectful decorum and demands to know where such a thing is written, sarcastically adding, "�Que revelacion divina hab�is tenido? �Si no fuera mujer, nada importar�a, ni siquiera mis atrevimentos teol�gicos!" These words stand in sharp contrast to the silence of N��ez de Miranda and bishop Santa Cruz. The archbishop, however, is not about to passively accept her accusations, and before abruptly turning his back on her to leave (and thereby end the conversation on his terms), he adds the final insult by calling her responses the impertinences of a pathetic bastard (incidentally, Eva Duarte and Juana Ramirez bear similarities in that they were both illegitimate children, and they both left home at an early age to pursue careers as artists in the "big city;" what is more, they both figure into the pantheon of female icons of Latin American history).
Of course Bemberg is not going to have this be the last word. In response to the cruel and misogynistic words and actions of the archbishop, Sor Juana shouts a warning to him and the men who obediently accompany him that directly highlights her identity as a flesh and blood woman: �Esperad! �No os vay�is! Somos distintas, es verdad, tenemos otra forma, otro olor." Her tone turns threatening, as she dares them: "�Venid! �Oledme! �Admitidlo! Somos el di�blo para vos. ��El di�blo lo llev�is en el coraz�n!!" Ultimately, she is more a woman than a nun or a poet (woman, all too woman), and thus subject to the persecution of men for transgressing the accepted expectations for her gender. Sor Juana has lost her mask, the protection and freedom afforded by her nunhood has finally vanished, leaving her weak and vulnerable. Before the men leave for good, her confessor returns to inform her that he can no longer be her spiritual father. Viewed at a long shot in the confines of her locutory, her solitude, abandon and imprisonment are further accentuated by the distant view, which makes her appear all the more alone and weakened by the experience (thus presenting a visual portrait of her overdetermined victimization).
As this climactic scene indicates, and as any Sor Juana scholar knows, she "renounced" her secular writing project in 1693, two years before her untimely death at age 44 (another parallel with Evita, who died at aee 33). The possible reasons for this are many. One could be the pressure exerted on her by the Church fathers (certainly this is the scenario emphasized by Bemberg, as the last scene described confirms), and the absence of the protection and support of the viceroyals, such as she enjoyed during tenure of her friends, the Count and Countess of Paredes; the other could be the general state of chaos in New Spain, most particularly in Mexico City, brought on by famine, plague, and violent Indian uprisings, and which certainly must have combined with the previously mentioned strain of church persecution and a general lack of support for her work (a reason also offered by the film); and yet another could be a religious conversion, as she realized the terrible depths of her sacrilege (some would say "heresy"). In these final scenes, she moves from being a "caged animal;" to a "real woman," i.e. a repentant and humble one; and later holy martyr; and then finally, saint (a move that would seem to constitute an obvious attempt to placate the Argentine church, as was a concern with Camila; Bemberg mentions this in her interview with Karen Jaehne [1986]).
One of the more significant transitions is the move from submissive and self-deprecating (the film is titled, after all, Yo, Ia pear de todas) to saintly nun, which suggests that Sor Juana achieved a sort of religious sanctity at the end of her real/biological life. But lest we assume that Bemberg is privileging a religious interpretation, it should be clear that her sanctity ultimately exists on a literary and political level for this feminist filmmaker. This Sor Juana is represented throughout the film as an early Latin American feminist, and in the end, recognized as one of the greatest poets of the Spanish Golden Age, a claim that is all the more strong, given the reality of her (proto)feminist stance to the restrictions placed upon her.
For Burke it is important to examine how "se revela un discurso femenino, cuya meta m�s b�sica transforma activamente la im�gen de la mujer que tipicamente se ha proyectado. . . . [este] discurso femenino va mas alla de meramente comentar la experiencia femenina y dirigirse al espectador femenino; expone una obvia denunica de la sociedad machista / patriarcal" (1). Bemberg's female protagonists are oppressed and controlled by male authority, both individual and institutional, but they are also women of action: active and acting subjects versus passive and manipulated objects. As we have seen, this stance is often underscored by visual clues in the films, which include the subversion of the male gaze and the related concentration on the female gaze, as well as filmic devices such as the lighting and spatial configurations of scenes, or the wardrobe and make-up of particular characters. It has also been observed how Yo, Ia pear de todas is constantly moving back and forth between the representational strategies of commercial melodrama and avant garde intellectual filmmaking, a dynamic that on a basic formal level is an allusion to deeper complexities apparent in the film.
One of the most significant is the fluid and multifaceted gender identity of its central protagonist, which reveals Bemberg's own confusion between the gender of the real Sor Juana and that of the writer. We must wonder-in the manner of Derrida & Co.-what it is that Bemberg (and Paz for that matter) 'hears' from Sor Juana, how the director reads the autobiographical signature of the person who lived and wrote in terms of her gender indentitzes. After all, this is a feminist film with an agenda, which implies that gender representation is at its core. While this film presents a highly overdetermined representation of gender inequality between the sexes, amongst the female characters as well-and even more significantly-there is a strong distinction made between the women: those who think and desire, versus those who do not. Bemberg evidently realized the great difficultly that Sor Juana had finding a room of her own, as much as we are able to recognize the obstacles the director faced trying to make a feminist film that is not without contradictions.
1 Stephanie Merrim provides bibliographical details on the use of the designation "feminist" in reference to Sor Juana. She observes that this title was officially awarded to Sor Juana in Mexico in 1974, but was also applied as early as 1925 by feminist scholar, Dorothy Schons, in the article, "The First Feminist in the New World," which appeared in the journal Equal Rights. In 1926, Schons published another piece, "Some Obscure Points in the Life of Sor Juana," (reprinted in Merrim's volume) which also furthered a feminist interpretation of the seventeenth-century woman and her work. Here Schons negated the romantic-and sexist-suggestion of biographers like Amado Nervo, who claimed that Sor Juana entered the convent "because of an unfortunate love affair" (Schons 39). Instead, Schons believes that her real motivations were intellectual, her true love learning and the pursuit of knowledge. Shortly thereafter, the label "feminist" was again applied in 1933 by Mexican scholar, Carlos E. Caste�eda, in his aptly titled, "Sor Juana In�s de la Cruz, Primera feminista de Am�rica." Merrim asserts, however, that Caste�eda falls into the same trap as other biographers of the Baroque author-from Father Diego Calleja's work, Vida de Sor Juana, produced shortly after her death, to Alfonso M�ndez Plancarte in his Obras completas de Sor Juana In�s de la Cruz of 1951-when he suggests that her ultimate resignation of secular writing was the result of her religious conversion. Merrim groups this particular interpretation with those that contend she entered the convent because of a "love lost." She believes that these explanations only serve to domesticate and feminize Sor Juana by making her life story conform to a "more conventional feminine mode" (Merrim 17)-either the emotionally distraught Juana, broken by her rejection in love, or the pious and saintly nun, who repented for her egotistical pursuit of fame to find God at the end of her life.
2 A specific example, and point of comparison to the work done by Paz, is Ludwig Pflandl's Sor Juana In�s de la Cruz: La d�cima musa de M�xico (1963). Merrim explains how he "attributes the writer's literary production to the narcissistic displacement onto literature of her 'feminine' maternal instincts" (13). In Jucios sumarios (1966), Rosario Castellanos includes a brief, yet vehement refutation of Pflandl's analysis of Sor Juana, titled, "Y otra vez, Sor Juana." She analyzes the significance of three women in Mexican history: La Virgen de Guadalupe, La Malinche, and Sor Juana. While the differences between the first two, and the implications for women's identity, are fairly obvious (the virgin/model of beneficent and self-denying motherhood vs. the whore/model of irrational and treacherous sexuality), Sor Juana's significance is not as clear. This ambiguity is directly related to her gender, as Castellanos explains, "[t]he initial enigma she poses for us is not her genius (sufficient to worry many doctors) but her femininity. She speaks of it in different passages of her writing, not in terms of a consummated and assumed fact but rather as a hypothesis that perhaps cannot be proven" (328). Castellanos believes that any of the problems Sor Juana encountered because of her writing were specifically related to her status as a woman who also dared to transgress the social expectations for her gender through her pursuit of an intellectual vocation.
3 While Bemberg uses the past-present dynamic in her films to emphasize the struggles of women against the patriarchy-in its various manifestations-throughout history, and most particularly, Latin America history, this connection of past to present, and the particular resonance of a contemporary feminist message, does not only function to expose to issues of gender-based oppression and power. The director has also stated that her emphasis on women's oppression in her films is part of a larger critique of contemporary political violence and repression. This is overt reference to the constellation of oppressive -isms that has plagued Latin America throughout history and, more significantly, during the twentieth century: authoritarianism, fanaticism, fundamentalism and obscurantism. In specific reference to Yo, la peor de todas, she explains how she sought to atemporalize and universalize the general atmosphere of the story to make certain problems-such as intellectual repression and religious fanaticism-relevant and identifiable to contemporary spectators (Burton-Carvajal).
4 That this phrase is meant to have a nationally specific significance is not unlikely. Here we can recall the posters advertising Camila, in which the historical record was resemanticized with a contemporary reference: Camila (Susu Pecoraro) appeared wearing a black blindfold with the words "Nunca jam�s" below her image. That this was a reference to the recently ended dictatorship (1983; the film was released in 1984) is more than obvious. This being the case, one can also extend her use of subtle, yet meaningful, references to the Argentine political climate to the title of the Sor Juana film.
5 On the subject of gender neutrality in relation to Sor Juana's position as a nun, Paz makes reference to her "Romance 48," written "in reply to 'a gentleman from Peru who sent her clay vessels while suggesting that she should become a man'," to which she responded with these verses, "as I will never be a woman/who as wife may serve a man./I only know that my body,/not to either state inclined/is neuter, abstract, guardian/of only what my soul consigns". (Paz 220, 221). In support of Sor Juana's ambiguous gender identity, Rosario Castellanos quotes Sor Juana views on this topic with verses from an unidentified "romance": "I do not understand these things,/I only know that I came here./So that if I be a woman/No one can truly say" (328-29).
6 Lavr�n and Muriel alone have greatly contributed to feminist scholarship on colonial women (as well as contemporary women, in the case of Lavrin). Separately, they have even written on Sor Juana, the role of religion in colonial Spanish women's biography and hagiography, Archbishop Aguiar y Seijas, the Hieronymite Order of which Sor Juana was a member, and women's reading choices in colonial Mexico, as well as the lives of nuns and other religious institutions created to control women's lives (the recogimientos-religious institutions created to reform fallen women-and schools for girls).
7 Although Bemberg seems to want to deny it, throughout the film, the hints -implicit or explicit-that the relationship between Sor Juana and the vicereine, Mar�a Luisa de Manrique, goes beyond the purely and absolutely Platonic have repeatedly been interpreted as overt suggestions of lesbianism. Examples of this interpretation are found in the saucy detail, "Lesbian passion simmers beneath the surface of a 17th century convent," on case of the English-subtitled video version of the film available in the U.S.; the informal observation made by this writer of the film's classification in the Gay/Lesbian sections of some video stores, as well as its inclusion in an online list of lesbian films (lsfh.freeservers.com/custom.html); and in popular reviews of the film written on the occasion of the film's circulation in local film festivals (as in the example of the article, "Life of inspirational feminist depicted in 'Yo, Ia Peor de Todas'" by Jill Schimelpfenig for The Columbia Chronicle, in which she writes, "The Vicereine and Sister de la Cruz share a passionate love for each other that leaves the viewer to question the true extent of their relationship").
8 At the same time, I certainly do not wish to eliminate the possibility that Sor Juana was in fact a lesbian (according to Adrienne Rich's idea of the "lesbian continuum" of female to female intimate relationships, of course she was), or at the very least had a lesbian relationship with her patroness, Mar�a Luisa. And one can also not deny the importance of the figure of Sor Juana for Latino and Latin American gays and lesbians today (Bergmann 232). Chicana writer Alicia Caspar de Alba has engaged the figure of Sor Juana in a poem and a novel (provocatively titled, Sor Juana s second Dream 1999), in terms of the nun's-and her own-lesbian identity. In her poem, "Sor Juana's Litany in the Subjunctive" (published in 1990 as "Leonor Dreams of Sor Juana," and also found in the novel referenced above), she deliberately considers the corporal dimensions of Sor Juana's purported lesbianism. Yet she also expresses the impossibility of establishing actual contact (the distance and doubt expressed by the "subjunctive" verb construction, evoked in the poem's title and employed in the grammar of the poem, "IfI could . . .") with this woman of the past, either physically or spiritually: "if I could lay my cheek /against the tender sinews of your thigh, / smell the damp cotton that Athena / never wore, her blood tracks steaming in the snow;... if I could turn myself / into a bee and free / this soul, those bars / webbed across your window / would be in vain, that black / cloth, that rosary, that crucifix- / nothing could save you / from my sting" (96). These examples show how Sor Juana's sexuality continues to elude us, despite our best intentions.
[Reference]
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[Author Affiliation]
Caryn C. Connelley
University of Minnesota
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