Los empeños de una casa

The latter half of the twentieth-century ushered in a critical appraisal of Sor Juana’s Los empeños de una casa (Pawns of a House) after centuries of practical oblivion, beginning in the mid-1700s. ¹ This fate was tied to evaluations of the Baroque in general. Neoclassical critics such as Benito Feijoo had censured the highly metaphorical and syntactically inventive poetic style created by Luis de Góngora (1561–1627), whose influence had prevailed through most of the seventeenth century, notably in theater. Indeed, in New Spain, Góngora’s style was all-pervasive (Buxó, Góngora). Although admiration for Sor Juana’s intellectual accomplishments never waned, rejection of gongorismo through the end of the nineteenth century meant that the Spanish poet’s influence on Sor Juana’s poetic language was deemed if not nefarious, certainly regrettable (Alatorre, Introducción 12–22). The re-evaluation of Góngora in Fitzmaurice-Kelly’s History of Spanish Literature (1898), translated into Spanish in 1901, signaled a renewed appreciation of the Baroque among critics and poets. The modernist Nicaraguan poet, Rubén Darío (1867–1916) – highly acclaimed throughout the Spanish-speaking world – paid tribute to and revived Góngora’s poetic style in his 1905 Cantos de vida y esperanza (Songs of Life and Hope). In 1910, for the first centenary of Mexican independence and on the eve of the Mexican Revolution, Amado Nervo, one of Darío’s best-known followers, published Juana de Asbaje in Madrid, dedicated to “all the women” of Mexico (29). ² After initially exalting Góngora, the Mexican poet set out to rescue Sor Juana’s work from two centuries of neglect (Alatorre, Introducción 11). This included her dramatic texts, such as Los empeños de una casa. Nervo’s brief chapter on Sor Juana’s theatre praised her autos sacramentales (one-act Eucharistic allegories) and her mythological play, thus counteracting neoclassical censure of these genres, as well as opposition by nineteenth-century realism’s major advocate, Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo (1856–1912). For Los empeños, Nervo cited this critic’s favorable comments on Sor Juana’s “interesting and exceptional imitation of Calderón’s comedias” as well as Mesonero Romanos’s (1803–1882) earlier praise of her talent for the capa y espada (cloak and dagger) genre, tempered by his distaste for her Gongoristic style: “si no fuera por aquella fascinación propria de la época en que escribía” (114) [were it not for that fascination [with Góngora], characteristic of the time when she wrote]. ³ Against more severe critics of Sor Juana’s theatre, the Mexican poet reacted with derisive sarcasm, while reaffirming the autobiographical dimension of Los empeños in Leonor’s lengthy exposition (114, 116–20). Los empeños thus entered the twentieth century with two specific critical observations – Calderón’s influence and Sor Juana’s supposedly autobiographical portrayal – that have 239persisted to the present, often impeding a theatrical and dramatic analysis of the play in its own right.