Sor Juana’s Ovillejos: Burlesque Intertextualities and the Cat in the Bag

Abstract

In this article I explore alternate poetic prototypes of Juana Inés de la Cruz’ Ovillejos, usually compared to Salvador Jacinto Polo de Medina’s and Luis de Góngora’s burlesque mythological fables. In the intertextuality of Ovillejos, there are three burlesque self-portraits: one by Góngora, another by Francisco de Trillo y Figueroa, and a third one by Agustín de Salazar y Torres. Thereby, my examination of Ovillejos shifts from the fabulistic genre to the burlesque poetic portrait and its characteristic developement, which Sor Juana elaborates in her poem resorting, as her models do, to antimetaphoric tautologies, to a constant mocking of the person portrayed (themselves), to echoes of riffraff poetry, and—regarding the distinct example of Sor Juana—to an anti-Petrarchan subtopic. As a result, the poem replaces the eluded Lisarda (the poetic object) not only with Sor Juana as a poet—something already observed by Frederick Luciani—but also with Sor Juana as a person. Ovillejos is, as we can see, a burlesque self-portrait.