Although the trendy cover of Josefina’s Sin implies straightforward popular historical fiction and nothing in the publisher’s synopsis (or the reviews I read before purchasing the book) revises that impression, Claudia H. Long’s debut novel sweeps known history aside in favour of a flight of fictional fancy spun around the situation of upper class women in colonial New Spain (Virreinato de Nueva España, a much larger territory than the focal location of the story, Mexico). Long dismisses the actual viceregal court of late 17th century New Spain and replaces it with a fictitious one (this includes the identities of the Viceregal couple and the Bishop of Puebla). Into this setting the author brings the iconic historical personage of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz whom the story promptly proceeds to strip of authenticity (including making her reside at court long after her claustration and usurping the authorship of one of her defining pieces of writing). Animated by the twin themes of sexual and intellectual lust, this earnest tale of a Mexican woman’s education at a misogynistic, manipulative court has literary aspirations that falter on formulaic characterisations and the limitations of too confined a scope.
1689. Mexico City is but a day’s ride from the hacienda where Doña Josefina María del Carmen Asturias de Castillo leads a quiet life with her cattle rancher husband, Don Manuel, and their two young sons, yet the viceregal court might as well be as far away as Spain. Visitors sometimes bring news of the larger world, describing marvels and temptations that make Josefina dream of culture and learning amid her duties. When Doña Angélica, the young widow of a business associate, unexpectedly invites Josefina to join her at court where she is a lady-in-waiting to the Marquesa de Condera, Josefina is surprised but pleased when Manuel urges her to accept the opportunity for a little enjoyment.
The brilliance of the court dazzles Josefina, but her provincial ways and lack of cultural polish are also a source of embarrassment. Anxious to improve but lonely, she is thrilled to finally discover a familiar, friendly face, a priest who long ago knew her parents and secretly introduced her to the delights of poetry. While Josefina finds old feelings reawakening between them, Father Alonso has come up in the world and their acquaintance does not go unnoticed in a court steeped in malicious rivalry. Soon, Josefina is shocked to learn just how dangerous the court can be for the innocent and the virtuous. Can even the advice of her mentor, the illustrious but secretive court poet, Sor Juana, be trusted? As the desires of Josefina’s heart and mind lure her into forbidden territory, catastrophe begins to loom.
Perhaps the first thing an historical fiction enthusiast should note is that Josefina’s Sin is a novel of ideas, of thoughts and feelings, and that a great deal of factual realism has been swept aside in the novel’s investigation of desire and self-expression in the lives of seventeenth-century Mexican women. Research into physical and practical aspects of the period appears to have received at best grudging attention, with any sense of period or place deriving mainly from attitudes, literature, food, and clothing. Where historical realities, whether political, social, chronological, or ecclesiastical, might interfere with the story vision these are either ignored or replaced by fictitious counterparts.
An unexpected discovery as I began to read, the ahistorical setting was at first a strong personal irritant. But when in frustration I glanced at the author biography I was persuaded to adjust my reading direction in hopes of a thought-provoking literary re-imagination: according to information provided among the bonus material at the back of my edition of the book (discussion questions, suggested book club activities, an interview with the author, and a brief author biography), Claudia H. Long “wrote her senior thesis at Harvard University on the feminism of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz”. Since the one and only book I own on the subject of classic Mexican literature happens to be an anthology of Sor Juana’s works, this biographical detail revived my interest, making me curious to discover whether Long’s choice of a literary rather than a historical interpretation might deliver a unique dramatic point about the subject. (The aforementioned anthology is Poems, Protest, And A Dream: Selected Writings, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden, with the original Spanish text side-by-side, and with a context-setting biographical introduction by Ilan Stavans, Penguin Classics paperback, 1997.)
Presumption has been one of the most controversial traits of women throughout history; it is one of many words used to condemn women who dare to transgress the boundaries set for them. Literature forms an exciting playing field for exploring the relationship between presumption and pioneering women. A presumptuous female historical character can make for strong conflict and compelling story. A presumptuous author can shake reader complacency and open eyes with a bold premise. When Josefina says “I am not a heretic” and Sor Juana replies “You read” (page 81), the characters articulate the conflict at the heart of Claudia H. Long’s novel: society’s perception of appropriate female behaviour versus the heroine’s desire for enlightenment. The encounter between these two rule-breaking women in an autocratic court where powerful men and their desires rank above everything and everyone else seems to spell narrative fireworks. Sadly, most remain unlit.
The first stumbling block comes in the form of unsubtle, black and white characterisations and predictable character interactions. Exaggeration can be an effective literary device and contrasts between the fantastical and the ordinary has fuelled many a great dramatic work. However, one key to their successful application is complexity or depth that allows for multiple interpretations. The majority of characters in Josefina’s Sin are stereotypes without a surprising thought or action to their name – the conniving rival woman, the lecherous man in power, the selfless best friend, the loyal servant, the false lover. The few who are more ambiguously portrayed – Sor Juana, the Marquesa, and perhaps Josefina’s feckless husband – come in for critical treatment at the hands of the narrative and are consequently tricky to connect with objectively.
A couple of features feel particularly underdeveloped. The narrative takes a dim view of the male sex, and the traits of individual male characters seem to grow more interchangeable as the story progresses and narrative nuance is lost in the main character’s feelings of bitterness, rage, and disappointment. The closest the story seems to come to sympathetic treatment of a male character is an attitude that registers a sort of overbearing pity. In the later parts of novel, plot temporarily derails into a species of artlessly handled revenge fantasy of a graphicness that seems to far exceed any story requirements. (More about the novel’s handling of relations between the sexes in a moment.) In fairness, it is not only male characters who fare harshly. The almost complete absence of female friendships in the novel is symptomatic of how little genuine affection and mutual goodwill Josefina observes at the viceregal court. The author shows how competition for admittance to the Marquesa’s inner circles creates female rivalry. What is implied rather than examined is the most destructive aspect of this environment: how the need to please men in order to remain relevant affects the women’s self-image and poisons their relationships with each other.
Happily, the title character is rounded. Josefina’s story arc paints a portrait of an ingenue brought up, married, and becoming a mother in a provincial, conservative environment where virtuous women are naturally passive and subservient to men. She has never travelled because a female’s place is in the home, and her intellectual education has been severely restricted since book learning is deemed suspect and female curiosity condemned as sinful. Content for the most part with her lot and evincing scant interest in broadening her mind, any intellectual ambition she evinces is confined to swooning over a young priest, keeping her father’s and her husband’s accounts, and pausing in the country market to listen to a storyteller. Her arrival at court is therefore accompanied by confusion and feeling overwhelmed by the alienness of other values and modes of behaviour. While tradition and circumstances soon conspire against her, she fights her own ignorance and learns to refuse to accept the role of victim. The intimacy of the first-person narrative enhances these experiences, making Josefina’s reactions feel vividly relatable. At times I cynically questioned her common sense, but her gradual transformation from naïve complaisance into a questioning woman who takes her fate into her own hands is sympathetically described. Far from perfect, however, she is as judgmental and occasionally as hypocritical as those around her; that and her frankness and stoicism combine into a textured, authentically voiced character. Still, compared to how nearly every other chararacter is held up to unflattering scrutiny, Josefina’s own flaws and mistakes are treated with notable leniency. It is a bias that in the long run caused me to feel that the outcome to Josefina’s problems owed less to her own efforts than to generous pinches of wishful thinking on the part of the author.
For example, so ignorant of alternative ways of viewing the world is Josefina at the beginning of the story that she is unable to imagine any other reason than scandal for why a beautiful woman would become a nun. Yet in her single year at court she acquires the capacity to (re)write a learned manifesto that successfully imitates Sor Juana’s voice and style; in other words, of someone whose famous, highly cultured writing is the result of, among other things, decades of dedicated study and meditation on spiritual matters. Yet the fact that Josefina’s level of maturity and intellectual education would hardly measure up to the challenge is not the only problem here. From Cambridge University’s Sor Juana pages: “The Court, in which Sor Juana spent four years of her adolescence, was the point of contact with Europe and European aristocratic culture; the Church was the controller and censor of knowledge and culture as ideological instruments, and was at times in conflict with the more liberal atmosphere of the Court. Sor Juana's work negotiates a precarious feminine space between these competing institutions. For the culture they controlled was almost entirely a masculine culture. Its writers were men and its readers were men. The doors of the educational institutions were entirely locked for women. This is why it is so extraordinary that the greatest writer to emerge from Nueva España, the first great poet of Spanish America, should have been a woman” [article author’s emphasis]. Josefina’s ability to substitute her own composition for Sor Juana’s negates the uniqueness of this historical woman’s achievement. Instead Long’s own creation, Josefina, emerges as the triumphant one. Their differences are shown through points of pride to Josefina: unlike Juana, she is a mother of sons, unlike Juana, she is a cherished wife, unlike Juana, she is a passionate lover. Perhaps most crucially, unlike Juana Josefina gets to eat her cake and have it, too: she takes up poetry and garners acclaim, then secretly pens the Respuesta De La Poetisa A La Muy Ilustre Sor Filotea De La Cruz (Response to Sor Filotea, likened by Stavans to a j’accuse), the letter, sometimes described as a feminist manifesto, that to this day stands as Sor Juana’s most famous testimony to posterity. Thus the imaginary character of Josefina gets to wear the crown belonging to a real-life, impassioned and martyred author.
It would take an exceptional narrative supported by convincing literary and historical arguments to persuade me of the value of sacrificing the achievements of such an iconic historical woman in order to exalt an imaginary one. Since considerable liberties are taken with history the story’s major themes rely heavily on the author’s treatment of language and literature and their place in gender politics. Unfortunately, Josefina’s Sin possesses neither the judgment nor the originality nor the emotional or intellectual power to be that book. While the mentality of the Mexican/Spanish Baroque comes clearly and compellingly through in Long's voice, the experiment fails on precisely the points that the premise demands it must avoid, namely shallowness and lack of vision.
That is not to say there is nothing worthwhile here, but the execution does miss several opportunities to excavate the deeper story. The narrow scope limits the effectiveness of the arguments the narrative tries to make about oppression and inequality. For example, despite the narrative emphasis on women as chattel it does not occur to Josefina to consider the similarities and differences between her situation and those of women of other social classes, women such as her indigenous servant (Cayetana is described as an “Indian”, p.21), those of mixed castes, or slaves (note on relevance: for at least fifteen years Sor Juana, too, like her fellow nuns, had a slave as her servant). In the late seventeenth century, Spaniards/criollos formed only a fifth of the population of Mexico City, the town where the majority of Josefina’s Sin takes place. Not surprising, then, that topics such as racial identity and Spanish encounters with indigenous populations influenced Sor Juana’s writings. According to Stavans, “Sor Juana was among the first to juxtapose Christianity and [Aztec] mythology and to reflect on the encounter between the two civilisations” (above, p. xxviii). (See for example The Divine Narcissus.) This awareness is absent from Josefina’s Sin, where the court’s gender politics exist in a vacuum. Despite early indications to the contrary (in the form of anti-Semitism), the novel seems wholly unconcerned with social factors outside the innermost castle walls (in fact the story never ventures out into the streets among the inhabitants of Mexico City), and while such confinement has a certain symbolic use, surely those social factors are relevant in any discussion of oppression and gender inequality in a colony? In the absence of a broader social context, the novel’s themes are reduced to fiddling with the fictitious court setting. Since the handling of that setting largely preoccupies itself with archetypal court intrigue, pretty dresses, and good food, with occasional forays into subversive poetry, the perspectives that set Josefina’s Sin apart from a generic, growing-up-at-perilous-court novel squander much of their power.
At the beginning of the book things look different. Josefina marries at nineteen (1683), considered an “advanced age”. When her prospective husband inquires whether she is a virgin, her father simply replies, “look at her”. Josefina assumes that she is plain and attributes her complexion to her southern Spanish heritage. Considering the racial obsession in New Spain and the caste system implemented there, as well as the centrality of appearances in Sor Juana’s texts, I assumed Josefina is deceived when she prides herself on being “of the purest Spanish blood”, one of the prized criollos (creoles - descendants, born in New Spain, of Spanish settlers). I speculated that her image of self as a criolla, after the repeated emphasis on racial purity, was paving the way for a plot thread exploring social patterns and models of womanhood in the newly conquered colony, finding the absence of any mention of Josefina’s mother a potential marker of revelations to come. But nothing that complex is cooked up in the pages of Josefina’s Sin. If something is not laid out in tediously plain view in the novel’s pages it is not likely to be sprung as a “twist” later on. Arriving at court a few years later, Josefina is considered beautiful, and that is that: the fuss about Josefina’s looks and blood is simply that she is a well-born woman who “becomes beautiful with age”.
The novel seems pessimistic about whether, in a gender climate such as the story describes, honest love can exist between a man and a woman. Long does not appear to suggest an antidote for or a strategy for combatting misogyny; the solution, or rather the defense, implied by the narrative seems to be that women arm themselves with knowledge and insight that enables them to counter-manipulate and assume the upper hand in their relationships with men. Men are ultimately shown as too weak and foolish to be capable of changing on their own. The tension between women and men around issues of sex illustrates the context in which the relations occur and the challenges faced by the women. In Josefina’s Sin sex is divided into before and after motherhood. Going from mutual enthusiasm to illicit, one-sided, exploitative, and sadomasochistic, sex becomes identified with violence and crudeness, or at the very least with submissive discomfort; even between lovers there are no sexual encounters that might be described as love scenes or romantic. Sexuality, body, and looks define the characterisation of every character including nuns (one harbours sexual lusts that she appeases by voyeurism, e.g. watching the ecclesiastic she loves copulate with a laywoman; another is violently stripped nude). With lust as one of the novel’s focal themes, a major problem is how awkwardly the sexual aspect of the theme is treated. The examination of body politics mainly consists of descriptions of men inflicting their sexual will on women, and of women taking what pleasure they can from the act, usually clandestinely. While presumably intended to serve as a denunciation of the abuses of misogyny, the handling of sex in Josefina’s Sin actually reads as smut because the subject is so clumsily developed and lacking in subtext that the effect is gratuitously pornographic.
In the end, beneath the glossy veneer of articulate prose the narrative is too threadbare to succeed in living up to its heavy-weight subjects. Offering neither a trenchant literary re-imagination of the female condition in this period nor a meaningful, alternative historical interpretation, Josefina’s Sin probes the obvious and comes up with clichés. It is an atmospheric but ultimately unsubstantial story of the type “mistreated but heroic woman triumphs over all odds”, distinguishable from the generic run of similar fiction only by its focus on sexuality from the angle of misogyny. Also, overtness is a common debut mistake and one with which Josefina’s Sin struggles throughout: too much is spelled out for the reader, including telegraphic plot hints, leaving little play for the imagination. Moreover, unfulfilled plot teasers, for example concerning the Inquisition, weaken the storyline throughout. The emotional drama promised in the prologue turns out have minimal relevance to the actual plot and functions mainly as a device to artificially inject suspense and intrigue into an ensuing story that is low on these elements. If there is any genuine surprise, it is how very little the story achieves with its rich period material.
I read several fiction debuts in 2011, ranging from wonderful to quite painfully flawed. Josefina’s Sin falls into the middle of that range, with the note “fizzled”. Its great selling point is that it fills a market gap for commercial historical fiction set in Central America; this is partly why I snapped it up without a moment’s hesitation soon after its release last August. Unfortunately, in my case the novel failed to live up to its packaging, which promised historical fiction, gave me an imaginary setting when I had expected an introduction to a historical place neglected in English-language fiction, and fell short on an advertised strong point involving a seminal literary figure. Unsubtle and melodramatic when evaluated from the perspective of literary fiction, and too bitterly abrasive in its handling of feminist themes for an easy fit within popular genre fiction, the book may have some difficulty finding its ideal reader particularly since the cover, title notwithstanding, exudes “romantic costume drama” rather than mainstream fiction, which is where I suspect the story would be best received. While these disappointments and problems affected my reaction to the story they do not make Josefina’s Sin a poorly written novel; on the other hand, neither does the pedestrian execution of significant women’s history themes lift it above the ordinary. My final impression is that Josefina’s Sin was a project of the heart that started out as an ambitious concept and was intended to make the reader think but lost its way in the woods of inexperience.
Excerpt
(Atria trade paperback 2011, p. 32):
"Sor Juana took a piece of foolscap from the table and held it so she could see it without bending her neck forward against the brooch.
'If love be its source
And the stream is divided
Will the river rush faster
To flow once more together?
What could be more natural
than the jelous heart?
How without that pain
can love be perfected?
What greater sign of love
Can there be but jealousy?
Like the wetness of water.
Fire's smoke.
For love's children are not bastards
but true heirs to their empire,
for only they can unite
both their cause and their effect.'
There was silence. I could not imagine such daring. I never dreamed that anyone, especially a nun, would write, never mind read, such dangerous poesy. I looked cautiously at the Marquesa. Her pale skin had blotched red on her cheekbones. Her wheeze had intensified. The other ladies looked at the ground, studied their fingernails intently, were suddenly obsessed by a thread on their sleeve.
Sor Juana looked around the room, expressionless. Had she achieved her desired effect? I did not know. She rose, and took a pastry from the tray. She bit into it and licked the lemon cream that flowed from its center. The Marquesa continued to stare stonily at her. 'Would you like another verse?' asked the sister."
This post is one of several I drafted last year for the 2011 Historical Fiction Reading Challenge but was unable to edit and upload at the time.
