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Readings: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Swift's "A Modest Proposal," Pope's "An Essay on Man"

Our first reading for this week, the letters of one nun (Sor/Sister Juana), to another nun, are, on the surface, some of the most humble words ever written. They explore faith, theology, devotion, and recognize that words are inadequate. To that end, Sor Juana writes, "of those things that cannot be spoken, so that it may be known that silence is kept not for lack of things to say, but because the many things there are to say cannot be contained in mere words" (316). As the introduction to Sor Juana's writing indicates, despite her humility, her writing does reveal a remarkably well-read, well-educated, and self-educated woman writing at a time when women's voices were considered not only irrelevant but unwelcome; her superiors rebuffed her for writing, shaming her further to thinking that expressing herself was wrong. We must take care not to read this as an isolated case. Sor Juana's predicament is simply a recorded case of the complex ways women's voices, thinking, and efforts at educating themselves, were essentially treated as sinful. Remnants of that religio-patriarchal thinking remain today and can be seen in instances from the limited number of religious leaders who are women to the subservience women are taught in countless social situations and reinstitutionalized in most religious and many judicial marriage ceremonies every day.

Task 1: Select a passage from Sor Juana's letters to examine carefully and critically for not only what she says on the surface but for what it reveals about her education, her knowledge, and her intelligence. Consider ways that religious and patriarchal views are at work to oppress her voice and intelligence. What forces is she writing against?

Task 2: Select one of the three poems of Sor Juana's in your text to look at closely and critically, to analyze as literature, that is, by looking for ways the author's actual writing does or does not do what your text's introduction to the writing, and perhaps other academic resources, say that her writing does with regards to reason, art, gender, the intellectual pursuits of women, etc.

A note of caution. Please do not write about the religious messages you read in Sor Juana's writing. Yes, they are there, they're obvious, and one might study Sor Juana's religious messages for what they say about God in a Sunday school class. This is not such a class! The prompts, as with the introductions to the readings throughout this and most literature anthologies, examine issues of gender, class, and other institutionalized views that work beneath the surface to shape the writing and writers.

I hope you're ready for satire! Swift and Voltaire (in week four's forum) use the literary tool of satire to legendary effect. Satire is a "formal term, usually applied to written literature rather than speech and ordinarily implying a higher motive: it is ridicule (either bitter or gentle) of human folly or vice, with the purpose of bringing about reform or at least of keeping other people from falling into similar folly or vice" (Arp & Johnson 121). Alexander Pope's ideas in his poetic essay on man is partly, albeit less directly than Leibniz, an object of Voltaire's satire.

The first time I read "A Modest Proposal," my head spun. How could someone suggest what Swift does? Shocking! Appalling! I thought something akin to: "that's just going too far." Such an indignant, outrageous response is exactly what Swift wanted as the economic and political situation he was commenting on was beyond dignity, demanded outrage, and was meant to jar readers out of the complacency that allowed the economic and political policies in place to continue to exacerbate the lives of so many poor people. Spacks explains that the proposal's "satire indicts the English for inhumanity, the Irish for passivity, and the economically oriented proposer of remedies for moral blindness" (291). Wow! Economically oriented proposals/remedies that were morally blind: Think about what Wall Street banks and venture capitalists did to the pensions and retirement funds of working people that led to the economic meltdown of 2008, and what stripping collective bargaining rights of police officers, fire fighters and teachers to pay for tax breaks for corporations and venture capitalists. It was these kinds of unjust economic and political policies that Swift's satire was directed toward. Spacks wrote that Swift's essay "fantasizes the horrifying consequences of venture capitalism in the processing of infants for food" (291). If ever there was a reason to wonder why regulations of venture capitalists are necessary, Swift provides it in "A Modest Proposal."

TASK 3: After reading about Swift and his infamous essay, select one of the seven or so specifically enumerated proposals from the essay, then examine and discuss the reasoning (rational arguments, remember your reading on The Enlightenment--revisit) provided in the earlier pages of the essay that helps justify that particular proposal.

"Whatever is, is Right!" So Pope concludes his first (of four) epistles in "An Essay on Man." Considered "an enterprise of ambition almost comparable to Milton's Paradise Lost," Pope's essay continues to reverberate in modern Western thinking. Oh, the irony in such an ambitious endeavor! Although certainly not all, many Christians take it for granted that man has dominion over all other animals. While that dominion is granted to Judeo-Christian man in "The Book of Genesis": "And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth" (KJB, Gen. 1:26), it was Pope who provided the rational argument which today ministers and venture capitalists utilize and assume, because of, in part, the rational strength of Pope's argument in "An Essay on Man," which they take to mean gives them nearly unlimited power. "Whatever is, is Right!" to them.

TASK 4: After reading the first epistle of Pope's poetic essay and about the author, consider and discuss the implications, related to gender (e.g., on women) and related to other species, of these two main points AND one other of your choosing:

1. "The bliss of Man (could Pride that blessing find)/Is not to act or think beyond mankind" (lines 189-190) and

2. "Vast chain of Being! which from God began,/Natures ethereal, human, angel, man,/Beast, bird, fish, insect...Where, one step broken, the great scale's destroyed (lines 237-244).

3. One other of your choosing from "An Essay on Man.