So how did Emily Dickinson critique conventional views of reality? (See previous blog post.) Numerous examples could be given of her challenges to the dominant religious world view and prevailing attitudes toward marriage, domesticity, gender, sexuality, and human psychology. However, her most influential challenge was perhaps to the poetic conventions of the 19th century.
For all of her poems she used a very standard four-line ballad stanza (4 beats, 3 beats, 4 beats, 3 beats), with second and fourth lines rhyming). This is also known as common meter, folk meter, and hymn meter. Most of her poems can be sung to the tune of almost any church hymn or folk song. Try it!
However, Dickinson experimented with multiple variations on this stanza, such that it is not always recognizable until you scan its meter and compare it to the standard form. She used a popular, conventional form and adapted it to some highly esoteric uses, thus inviting general readers in and then stretching them beyond their familiar expectations. Instead of relying on standard rhymes, she experimented with what is called slant rhyme, approximate rhyme, or off rhyme, to the point where, again, it is not always immediately recognizable. As one critic said, “For Emily Dickinson, the world didn’t rhyme.” Her variations on the ballad stanza and experimentation with rhyme served to reinforce in a formal way the questioning of conventional views that can be found in the content of the poems.
Dickinson is also known for her unconventional punctuation (liberal use of dashes) and capitalization. She did not use titles or standard grammar. Her use of ellipsis and grammatical truncation again reinforces the unconventional content, but also contributes to obscurity. These technical idiosyncrasies and her use of highly unusual imagery and metaphors often create a cryptic opaqueness, which almost defies interpretation. Her riddle poems (“I like to see it lap the miles,” “A narrow fellow in the Grass,” “A route of Evanescence”) are playful versions of her penchant for seeing the world as a cryptic mystery.
Her experimentation with persona, sometimes speaking as a child (“I’m Nobody!”), a male (“A narrow Fellow”), a wife (“I’m ‘wife’—I’ve finished that”), a male lover (“Wild nights--wild nights!”), a voice from the dead (“I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—“) further disrupts our conventional expectations of identity and social role-playing.
Along with Walt Whitman, Dickinson was the most experimental and technically innovative American poet of the 19th century.
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Emily Dickinson's Poetry I
I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that Emily Dickinson introduced psychological realism into poetry. Earlier poetry elegized, lyricized, sentimentalized, gothicized, and romanticized psychological states. Dickinson unflinchingly confronted psychological suffering, exploring in depth the emotional experiences most of us seek to avoid: grief, sadness, fear, doubt, loss, instability, and psychic pain. The only negative emotion that she rarely expresses would be anger, though that too can be detected in some of her biting satire.
Yes, she wrote "happy," playful poems, but even they were tinged with negative notes: "I'm nobody!" She rejoiced in nature but was always alone. Her love poems were painful expressions of unrequited feelings, loss, or unsatisfied longing.
General readers and critics have pathologized her as suffering from some kind of mental illness: seasonal affective disorder, depression, agoraphobia, bipolar disorder, suicidal tendencies. Certainly she was eccentric; her fellow townspeople in Amherst (MA) referred to her as "the Myth." She was known for her solitary ways and for wearing white.
Truthfully, we don't know if she was mentally ill or not. We do know that our cultural environment stigmatizes mental illness, making it possible to dismiss her poems as "symptoms" of mental illness or neurosis and therefore less credible.
If she was mentally ill, perhaps that condition was a gift, an alternative consciousness which made possible her brilliant critique of conventional views of reality. On the other hand, perhaps she was a perfectly sane, if eccentric, pioneer of the psychic frontier, able to confront directly the mental states that we all experience but prefer to deny.
Poems like "There's a certain slant of light" (about seasonal sadness); "I felt a Funeral, in my brain" (about mental instability); "After great pain a formal feeling comes" (about grieving); "One need not be a Chamber to be Haunted" (about the frightening hidden self) all courageously explore the darkest recesses of the human psyche. The gothic poems of Edgar Allen Poe exaggerated this terrain in an appeal to popular sensationalism, but Dickinson showed realistic restraint, representing our psychic world in terms that we can all recognize as a part of our common human experience. Who has not felt "zero at the bone"?
Yes, she wrote "happy," playful poems, but even they were tinged with negative notes: "I'm nobody!" She rejoiced in nature but was always alone. Her love poems were painful expressions of unrequited feelings, loss, or unsatisfied longing.
General readers and critics have pathologized her as suffering from some kind of mental illness: seasonal affective disorder, depression, agoraphobia, bipolar disorder, suicidal tendencies. Certainly she was eccentric; her fellow townspeople in Amherst (MA) referred to her as "the Myth." She was known for her solitary ways and for wearing white.
Truthfully, we don't know if she was mentally ill or not. We do know that our cultural environment stigmatizes mental illness, making it possible to dismiss her poems as "symptoms" of mental illness or neurosis and therefore less credible.
If she was mentally ill, perhaps that condition was a gift, an alternative consciousness which made possible her brilliant critique of conventional views of reality. On the other hand, perhaps she was a perfectly sane, if eccentric, pioneer of the psychic frontier, able to confront directly the mental states that we all experience but prefer to deny.
Poems like "There's a certain slant of light" (about seasonal sadness); "I felt a Funeral, in my brain" (about mental instability); "After great pain a formal feeling comes" (about grieving); "One need not be a Chamber to be Haunted" (about the frightening hidden self) all courageously explore the darkest recesses of the human psyche. The gothic poems of Edgar Allen Poe exaggerated this terrain in an appeal to popular sensationalism, but Dickinson showed realistic restraint, representing our psychic world in terms that we can all recognize as a part of our common human experience. Who has not felt "zero at the bone"?
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
Waiting for the Barbarians
Published in 1980, Waiting for the Barbarians by South African author J. M. Coetzee, could be read in the context of apartheid as a strong critique of white supremacy, racism, colonialism, and cultural imperialism. However, it is written as an allegory and could just as well be read in light of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the history of the British Empire, the current superpower status of the United States, or, perhaps, of any ruling political power. As an allegory of political oppression, it is no simple narrative of "boo Empire, yay Barbarians." I was not left with the impression that the arrival of the barbarians would usher in a new age of equality and justice. On the contrary, I was left with the impression of a Hobbesian world of perpetual power struggle, in which oppressor and oppressed just keep changing places--a dark, rather hopeless image of human destiny.
Embedded in the narrative is a psychological study of the protagonist, a magistrate in the Empire, and his relationship with a "barbarian" woman who has been taken prisoner. This relationship mirrors the whole "master-slave" parasitical dynamic in which oppressor and oppressed feed off each other. The woman exercises sexual and psychological power over her "master," to the point where he eventually risks his life to return her to her people. The power dynamic is represented as a complex interaction of social, psychological, and physical forces, in which the "master" becomes as much a prisoner of the system as the "slave."
The setting of the story is an imperial outpost in the midst of a desert wasteland, where lonely humans engage in a continuous struggle for survival, self-gratification, and dominance--an apocalyptic vision with no hope of renewal and rebirth.
The only hope this dystopic novel offers is the possibility that it will raise awareness of our desperate condition to the point we might take action to break the cycle of the power dynamic. If Coetzee's outlook is indeed entirely hopeless, why would he write the novel in the first place? Is he a modern Sisyphus engaged in a never-ending effort to push the boulder of awareness up a hill of futility, or does he hold out hope for us to redeem ourselves through an evolution of consciousness?
Embedded in the narrative is a psychological study of the protagonist, a magistrate in the Empire, and his relationship with a "barbarian" woman who has been taken prisoner. This relationship mirrors the whole "master-slave" parasitical dynamic in which oppressor and oppressed feed off each other. The woman exercises sexual and psychological power over her "master," to the point where he eventually risks his life to return her to her people. The power dynamic is represented as a complex interaction of social, psychological, and physical forces, in which the "master" becomes as much a prisoner of the system as the "slave."
The setting of the story is an imperial outpost in the midst of a desert wasteland, where lonely humans engage in a continuous struggle for survival, self-gratification, and dominance--an apocalyptic vision with no hope of renewal and rebirth.
The only hope this dystopic novel offers is the possibility that it will raise awareness of our desperate condition to the point we might take action to break the cycle of the power dynamic. If Coetzee's outlook is indeed entirely hopeless, why would he write the novel in the first place? Is he a modern Sisyphus engaged in a never-ending effort to push the boulder of awareness up a hill of futility, or does he hold out hope for us to redeem ourselves through an evolution of consciousness?
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Their Eyes Were Watching God III
So, 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? (See previous posts and Kiss of the Spider Woman 8/16/09.)
Is Molina's universal sense of human tragedy and the possibilities for redemption, of a quest myth that all humans can participate in (regardless of race, gender, class, age, ethnicity, sexual orientation, ability, time or place), of an enduring human conflict between individual fulfillment and the need for love and belonging--is her reading of Their Eyes Were Watching God based on a sentimental fantasy of transcendent human experience, a fantasy that denies the reality of our socially constructed identities? Is the dream of shared humanity a sweet kiss filled with the poison of "false consciousness"? Or, are our socially constructed identities merely individual microcosms of a larger human truth?
Is Valentin's tough-minded analysis of historically specific sociopolitical power systems and the way they produce situated subjectivities; of racist, sexist, and classist struggles for social and economic dominance; of human differences rather than human similarities--is his reading of Their Eyes Were Watching God based on a a myopic, materialist view of human experience, a view that denies the authenticity of transcendent human identity? Is his focus on material power struggles a painful sting that shocks us out of false consciousness? Or, is the social power struggle itself an example of shared human experience that transcends time and place?
Is Janie both (1) a poor African-American woman struggling with power and longing for love in a post-slavery age of racial aspiration, feminism, and economic desperation, and (2) a 20th century African-American female avatar of a universal human hero seeking power, freedom, love, and community? Is this the story of an individual "subject identity"; of a representative African-American woman of her time and place; and is it also an enduring story of the human spirit seeking to fulfill its potential, asserting itself against the obstacles that stand in its way, suffering its trials and tragedies, and ultimately achieving some form of redemption?
Are the kiss and the sting both necessary to the wholeness of life? Of the literary experience? Is Their Eyes Were Watching God a novel embedded in the political struggles of its day AND a retelling of the universal human quest myth? Is it greater for being both? Or less?
Is Molina's universal sense of human tragedy and the possibilities for redemption, of a quest myth that all humans can participate in (regardless of race, gender, class, age, ethnicity, sexual orientation, ability, time or place), of an enduring human conflict between individual fulfillment and the need for love and belonging--is her reading of Their Eyes Were Watching God based on a sentimental fantasy of transcendent human experience, a fantasy that denies the reality of our socially constructed identities? Is the dream of shared humanity a sweet kiss filled with the poison of "false consciousness"? Or, are our socially constructed identities merely individual microcosms of a larger human truth?
Is Valentin's tough-minded analysis of historically specific sociopolitical power systems and the way they produce situated subjectivities; of racist, sexist, and classist struggles for social and economic dominance; of human differences rather than human similarities--is his reading of Their Eyes Were Watching God based on a a myopic, materialist view of human experience, a view that denies the authenticity of transcendent human identity? Is his focus on material power struggles a painful sting that shocks us out of false consciousness? Or, is the social power struggle itself an example of shared human experience that transcends time and place?
Is Janie both (1) a poor African-American woman struggling with power and longing for love in a post-slavery age of racial aspiration, feminism, and economic desperation, and (2) a 20th century African-American female avatar of a universal human hero seeking power, freedom, love, and community? Is this the story of an individual "subject identity"; of a representative African-American woman of her time and place; and is it also an enduring story of the human spirit seeking to fulfill its potential, asserting itself against the obstacles that stand in its way, suffering its trials and tragedies, and ultimately achieving some form of redemption?
Are the kiss and the sting both necessary to the wholeness of life? Of the literary experience? Is Their Eyes Were Watching God a novel embedded in the political struggles of its day AND a retelling of the universal human quest myth? Is it greater for being both? Or less?
Monday, August 24, 2009
Their Eyes Were Watching God II
How would Valentin read Hurston's novel? (See previous post and Kiss of the Spider Woman 8/16/09.)
He would be rolling his eyes at mythic themes and human universals, irony and contradictions notwithstanding. This is an African-American novel that represents the oppression of African-American women who are the victims of a racist, sexist, classist social system. It challenges that oppression and the psychology of victimhood through a heroine who refuses to accept a subordinate role, asserts her independence, struggles with power, and achieves a sense of relative self-sufficiency. In doing so, however, the novel reinforces the well-established American tradition of individualism and self-reliance. While community is valued, it is primarily by her own efforts that Janie resists oppression and achieves an African-American version of the American dream: economic independence, freedom, and power in a specific social context.
While Valentin would celebrate the novel's resistance to racism, sexism, and classism, he would disapprove of its failure to lift up the power of collective action in the battle against oppression. As a male reader, he might not take note of how the novel captures the dilemma of African-American women whose feminist aspirations are in conflict with their loyalty to African-American men, with whom they share the experience of oppression by a white supremacist American culture. As a Marxist, he would undoubtedly approve of the way the novel realistically depicts marriage as the primary means to social advancement for women and exposes the economic base of the institution of marriage. The role that Janie plays in the death of Joe and Tea Cake merely symbolizes the power struggle at the heart of even the most loving of marriage relationships.
As an anthropologist, Zora Neale Hurston would be well-versed in this kind of structural social analysis. Valentin would admire the way she was able to dramatize the functioning of systemic power in fictional form. For another portrayal of both the romance and the hard economic reality of marriage see her short story "The Gilded Six-Bits."
Ah, Valentin, Molina might say, what a political puritan you are to admire the social analysis at the expense of beauty, romance, and the sheer transport of art. And Valentin might reply with the Argentinian version of "Bah, humbug!" (See next post.)
He would be rolling his eyes at mythic themes and human universals, irony and contradictions notwithstanding. This is an African-American novel that represents the oppression of African-American women who are the victims of a racist, sexist, classist social system. It challenges that oppression and the psychology of victimhood through a heroine who refuses to accept a subordinate role, asserts her independence, struggles with power, and achieves a sense of relative self-sufficiency. In doing so, however, the novel reinforces the well-established American tradition of individualism and self-reliance. While community is valued, it is primarily by her own efforts that Janie resists oppression and achieves an African-American version of the American dream: economic independence, freedom, and power in a specific social context.
While Valentin would celebrate the novel's resistance to racism, sexism, and classism, he would disapprove of its failure to lift up the power of collective action in the battle against oppression. As a male reader, he might not take note of how the novel captures the dilemma of African-American women whose feminist aspirations are in conflict with their loyalty to African-American men, with whom they share the experience of oppression by a white supremacist American culture. As a Marxist, he would undoubtedly approve of the way the novel realistically depicts marriage as the primary means to social advancement for women and exposes the economic base of the institution of marriage. The role that Janie plays in the death of Joe and Tea Cake merely symbolizes the power struggle at the heart of even the most loving of marriage relationships.
As an anthropologist, Zora Neale Hurston would be well-versed in this kind of structural social analysis. Valentin would admire the way she was able to dramatize the functioning of systemic power in fictional form. For another portrayal of both the romance and the hard economic reality of marriage see her short story "The Gilded Six-Bits."
Ah, Valentin, Molina might say, what a political puritan you are to admire the social analysis at the expense of beauty, romance, and the sheer transport of art. And Valentin might reply with the Argentinian version of "Bah, humbug!" (See next post.)
Saturday, August 22, 2009
Their Eyes Were Watching God
How would Molina read this Depression era novel by Zora Neale Hurston? (See previous post.) Well, she would be captivated by the poetic style and the mythic themes of fertility; the quest for love, power, and identity; the flood; death; transformation; and redemption. She would grieve over Janie's tragic love stories and joyfully celebrate her personal odyssey to freedom and restoration to community.
Perhaps, too, she would note the ironies and contradictions embedded in Janie's mythic quest, asking whether they are universal to the human condition. Is the human yearning for love and belonging always in conflict with the desire for power and freedom, as they seem to be in Janie's case?
As a child of rape whose mother has disappeared, Janie is raised by her grandmother, symbolically orphaned, as the mythic hero often is. Nanny instills Janie with a sense of special destiny, again following the pattern of the traditional quest hero. Janie's special destiny is to redeem her grandmother's (and all her African-American fore-mothers') tragic past in slavery. Unlike the typical male hero, who would set off as an individual in search of his boon, Janie pursues her quest through marriage, inheriting Joe's money and property when he dies. With her new found independence, Janie is free to fall in love and marry the much younger Tea Cake, with whom she finds happiness until he asserts his own independence and control over her. Her life with Tea Cake becomes a struggle between love and power, from which Janie is finally released when Tea Cake dies. In the end she is restored to freedom and community, as she returns to her home place, alone but spiritually connected to Tea Cake's memory, serving as a model for other women who seek both love and freedom.
Would Molina note that Janie's achievement of power and freedom is dependent upon the death of her husbands? Must love be sacrificed in order to achieve one's fulfillment as an individual? Must power and freedom be sacrificed to achieve love and belonging? Does Janie's redemption of slave history require the death of love? Is this struggle between power and freedom as an individual on the one hand and love and belonging on the other an inescapable condition of human experience?
The contradiction is somewhat reconciled by Janie's return to her community of Eatonville. However, though she is welcomed by her friend Phoeby, it is an open question as to how she will be received by the rest of the townspeople.
Perhaps, too, Molina would be mortified by the fact that Janie plays a role in the death of both Joe and Tea Cake. While on his deathbed, Joe actually breathes his last in the midst of a nasty verbal fight with Janie. Later, Janie kills Tea Cake in self-defense when he is attacking her in a maddened state after contracting rabies from a dog bite. Is Janie a determined but innocent victim who overcomes adversity through her own self-assertion, or is she a symbolic murderer who must kill her lovers in order to free herself?
The title of the novel comes from a description of the monster storm that floods out a community in the Everglades and leads to Tea Cake's fatal dog bite. It refers to those who are at the mercy of the elements during the storm, suggesting a kind of fatalism, as humans succumb to the power of nature. However, the novel is also about the human quest for freedom, love, power, and community--self-determination, not fatalism. We are left, though, with a strong sense of what self-determination costs in lives and loves. (See next post.)
Perhaps, too, she would note the ironies and contradictions embedded in Janie's mythic quest, asking whether they are universal to the human condition. Is the human yearning for love and belonging always in conflict with the desire for power and freedom, as they seem to be in Janie's case?
As a child of rape whose mother has disappeared, Janie is raised by her grandmother, symbolically orphaned, as the mythic hero often is. Nanny instills Janie with a sense of special destiny, again following the pattern of the traditional quest hero. Janie's special destiny is to redeem her grandmother's (and all her African-American fore-mothers') tragic past in slavery. Unlike the typical male hero, who would set off as an individual in search of his boon, Janie pursues her quest through marriage, inheriting Joe's money and property when he dies. With her new found independence, Janie is free to fall in love and marry the much younger Tea Cake, with whom she finds happiness until he asserts his own independence and control over her. Her life with Tea Cake becomes a struggle between love and power, from which Janie is finally released when Tea Cake dies. In the end she is restored to freedom and community, as she returns to her home place, alone but spiritually connected to Tea Cake's memory, serving as a model for other women who seek both love and freedom.
Would Molina note that Janie's achievement of power and freedom is dependent upon the death of her husbands? Must love be sacrificed in order to achieve one's fulfillment as an individual? Must power and freedom be sacrificed to achieve love and belonging? Does Janie's redemption of slave history require the death of love? Is this struggle between power and freedom as an individual on the one hand and love and belonging on the other an inescapable condition of human experience?
The contradiction is somewhat reconciled by Janie's return to her community of Eatonville. However, though she is welcomed by her friend Phoeby, it is an open question as to how she will be received by the rest of the townspeople.
Perhaps, too, Molina would be mortified by the fact that Janie plays a role in the death of both Joe and Tea Cake. While on his deathbed, Joe actually breathes his last in the midst of a nasty verbal fight with Janie. Later, Janie kills Tea Cake in self-defense when he is attacking her in a maddened state after contracting rabies from a dog bite. Is Janie a determined but innocent victim who overcomes adversity through her own self-assertion, or is she a symbolic murderer who must kill her lovers in order to free herself?
The title of the novel comes from a description of the monster storm that floods out a community in the Everglades and leads to Tea Cake's fatal dog bite. It refers to those who are at the mercy of the elements during the storm, suggesting a kind of fatalism, as humans succumb to the power of nature. However, the novel is also about the human quest for freedom, love, power, and community--self-determination, not fatalism. We are left, though, with a strong sense of what self-determination costs in lives and loves. (See next post.)
Sunday, August 16, 2009
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?"
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?"
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