ABSTRACT
As experts on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz know, it is increasingly difficult to keep up with the numerous studies on the works of one of the few women who in the seventeenth century wrote plays and poetry displaying formal skills and an intellectual brilliance that equal or surpass those of her male contemporaries. This chapter provides a review of the literature on the Loa to the auto sacramental (mystery play) El divino Narciso (The Divine Narcissus, 1691) which, along with the Respuesta (Answer) and Primero sueño (Dream), is considered one of Sor Juana’s most significant works, not only intellectually but politically (Sabat de Rivers, “Divino” 852). This is not, however, an exhaustive appraisal; it provides a summary of two of the main interpretative frameworks around the loa and the reasons for their differing positions. These contrasting approaches debate, on the one hand, the politics behind Sor Juana’s use of religious myths and ancient cultures, and on the other, the relationship between the loa and the auto. With the support of existing scholarship, I offer a reading of the loa and the auto that pushes one of the available interpretations to its limits.
