Abstract:

During the Renaissance, various Italian authors penned works in which they defended the claim that if a man falls madly in love with a woman and showers her accordingly with affection, loyal service and presents, the woman is obligated to correspond to the man. Specifically, one can find this conception of love, which might be characterized as a kind of moral economy wherein the male tokens of love (e.g., affection, loyal service, presents, etc.) create a demand on the woman who is the object of them to reciprocate, in Boccaccio’s Corbaccio (1975) and in Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier (1976). This conception of love as a moral economy where a man’s love must be automatically corresponded by the woman who elicits it regardless of the reasons or motivations that the man has also influenced later works in the Early Modern period such as Don Quixote. In this paper, I consider a poem titled ‘It defends that love by choice of the will is the only love worthy of correspondence’ and penned by the 17th century Novohispanic philosopher Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz where she offers a female response to the moral economy of love imposed on women by men. I show that this response consists first in making a series of distinctions between different types of love, which allows Sor Juana to establish two different types of love: “amor afectivo” (“affective love”) and “amor racional” (“rational love”). Subsequently, I show how, based on this distinction, Sor Juana crafts a very ingenious argument that establishes the proper conditions under which a man’s request for love can be reciprocated by a woman who is the object of this request. The crux of Sor Juana’s argument hinges on one central claim: since love consists in gifting one’s whole soul (or self) away to the object of one’s affections, only the rational love of a man (and not his affective love) is fit to be reciprocated by a woman.