Kiss of the Spider Woman

Kiss of the Spider Woman by Manuel Puig (1978) is a novel about two cellmates in an Argentinian prison. Molina is a biological male who crossdresses and identifies as a woman, someone we could consider transgender today. She is in jail for sexual contact with a minor. Valentin is a macho Marxist political prisoner, who has a girlfriend in the "movement," but secretly pines for a woman from a "bourgeois" family. Molina entertains herself and Valentin by recounting her favorite movies, always identifying with the glamourous leading lady. I won't give away the plot, but it is fascinating to see how the two characters interact, develop, and influence each other.

What I will do is use the two characters to illustrate two different ways of reading literature. What Molina values in movies is the romance, the beauty, the emotional experience, and the way they satisfy her unfulfilled fantasies of love, passion, and womanhood. For example, she tells the story of a German film in which the Nazi occupiers of France are the misunderstood heroes, and the French resistance fighters are the villains. All Molina cares about is the romantic love story between the Nazi officer and the beautiful French nightclub singer. Valentin, however, is outraged that Molina would swoon over an anti-semitic "Nazi propaganda" film. All he can see is the political content.

Molina represents the traditional,and perhaps still popular, way of reading for an elevated aesthetic experience and/or a sense of transcendent insight into the universals of the human condition. Art and literature are valued for their ability to rise above time, place, history, and politics to capture what is most enduring in human experience.

Valentin, on the other hand, brooks no such nonsense. Art and literature are products of their time, place, history, and political situations. The pleasure and sense of transcendence they provide are merely ways of seducing us into identifying with particular political points of view. Molina, of course, protests that this kind of political analysis just ruins all her fun.

Let's take "Cinderella." Is it a beautiful, romantic fairy tale that expresses and affirms the universal human yearning for transcendent love? for elevation from the ashes of our lives to the heights of human experience? for transformation of suffering into joy? Or is it a form of propaganda that teaches such social lessons as (1) girls are fulfilled by finding "true love," (2) boys are supposed to rescue girls, (3) it is possible to rise from rags to riches, (4) step-mothers and step-sisters are evil, and (5) girls don't have to act for themselves because there's a fairy god-mother waiting in the wings to perform their magic? Can both ways of reading be valid? Are they completely contradictory or can they be reconciled?

In Kiss of the Spider Woman we might ask, "Who is right, Molina or Valentin? Is each of them missing something that the other has? Can they learn from each other? Is the kiss necessarily poisonous? Does the sting always kill? Are the kiss and the sting both necessary to the wholeness of life? of the literary experience?"