What Is Eating Latin American Women Writers: Food, Weight, and Eating Disorders
Powered By Xquantum

What Is Eating Latin American Women Writers: Food, Weight, and Ea ...

Chapter 1:  Intellectual Appetites
Read
image Next

her to study), Sor Juana again arms herself with food as a useful trope to explore both physical and metaphysical themes:

Two little girls were playing with a top in my presence. The moment I saw its movement and form, I began, in my crazy way, to consider the easy motion of the spherical form, and how the impulse once given, it continued independently of its cause, since at a distance from the girl’s hand, which originated the motion, the top went on dancing. Nor was this enough for me. I had flour brought and sifted, so as to tell, when the top danced over it, whether the circles its motion described were perfect or not.…(225)

The episode of the spinning top leads the nun to reflect on the physical laws that constrict the movement of the toy, and it attests to her constant intellectual curiosity. As Octavio Paz observes in Sor Juana: Or, the Traps of Faith (1988), “everything she saw and touched served as an excuse for her to pose questions and to attempt to answer them. The kitchen was also her laboratory.”2 Furthermore, as we see in the aforementioned anecdote, Sor Juana uses certain phrases to advance her ideas. By asserting her “crazy way,” she suggests to the Archbishop that her intellectual vocation is inherent and thus beyond her control, but at the same time, she cleverly portrays herself as weak, perhaps rendering him more receptive to her arguments. Additionally, “[n]or was this enough for me” attests again to Sor Juana’s insatiable hunger for learning, even as she finds herself in a precarious situation with her superiors.

The last occasion when food becomes her weapon alludes to her activities in the convent’s kitchen:

What could I tell you, my lady, of the secrets of nature which I have discovered in cooking? That an egg hangs together and fries in fat or oil, and that, on the contrary, it