In Repuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz, Sor Juana shows a lot of strength and confidence; “Que solo con la confianza de favorecida y con los valimientos de honrada me puedo atrever a hablar con vuestra grandeza.” Her strength is evident in her rhetoric and her fearlessness to make powerful references. Footnote 14 reads “Get away from me! Take care that you do not see my face again, for on the day you see my face you shall die.” I found this reference to be a direct yet underlying sarcastic mockery of the bishop. She also shows strength in her thirst for knowledge. Her “deseo” was so strong that she even planned to attend university dressed as a boy. Sor Juana believed that you cannot understand something without the knowledge of many other things. She saw tremendous importance in being well rounded intellectually. This meant studying vigorously in many different fields and taking them all seriously. She sought to live a divine life and took knowledge and intelligence to a higher level beyond any scholastic teaching. On page 8 she writes, it is necessary to purge your mind before you can have a true understanding of higher intelligence, but to know everything “que ya se ve que no es fácil, ni aun posible.”
Sor Juana uses heavy religious rhetoric with many references to the bible. She believes that the bible and god are the center of the universe, they see no boundaries and everything else revolves around this center. I found it really interesting that she often repeated the same words. The ones I found she repeated the most were: disgust, temptation, sacred/holy and connect/connection. I am not sure if anyone else noticed this or if it is even worth mentioning but it is just something I observed.