a woman before her time

Phew. Well, it's over, mostly. I just stumbled out of my second written comprehensive exam, groggy, drained, and in dire need of a piss. My right hand is so cramped it's hard to type, but I shall overcome.

After the first exam I felt as though nothing short of divine intervention would help me prepare for the second one. In a way I was right, but at least this time I got lucky. One of my questions was about something I decided to review at the last minute this morning, and the other was about one of my favorite people ever, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.

For those of you who don't know, Sor Juana was a Mexican nun from the 17th century. She learned to read when she was three years old and begged her mother to disguise her as a man so she could pursue university studies. She studied so fervently that, if she didn't learn all she'd set out to, she'd punish herself by cutting off all her hair. She was, by all accounts, exceptionally physically beautiful; she wrote extensively about love, but rejected the idea of marriage because it would undoubtedly interfere with her ability to study. As a woman living in the 1600's this left her with only one place to go: the convent, an environment in which the petty disputes and constant company of other women both appealed to her tenderness and frustrated her.

Sor Juana claimed she never wanted to be a writer, that if she wrote at all it was because others recognized her talent and wanted a taste of it. She wrote the kind of obscure baroque poems that confound and amaze, as well as others that make playful jabs at the relationships between men and women in all their contradictions and ironies. She possessed a knowledge so encyclopedic that contemporary readers need a legion of footnotes even to apprehend her meaning at times, and yet at others she expresses herself so succinctly and ingeniously that her ideas go down like a drink of water.

It was thinking of Sor Juana a while back that I got hung up on the expression "a woman before her time." I think there's something fundamentally wrong in identifying a person as before his or her time. I mean, here's a woman -- a woman -- who's writing in dark, dark times -- witch-hunting, enslaving, hanging kind of times -- in a distant colony of a backward country struggling to keep up with the rest of Europe. And did I mention she's a woman?

To say she was before her time suggests both that she was an ill fit in her day, and that today she'd be far less extraordinary. She wasn't ahead of her time, she was an incredible, anomalous, remarkable product of that time. And that time had a lot of catching up to do with the astounding talent it somehow brought forth. Come to think of it, I don't think we're equipped for her yet.