52 pages • 1 hour read
Manuel PuigKiss of the Spider Woman
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1976A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Fluidity of Gender and Orientation
Content Warning: The source material and study guide contain discussion of murder, torture, political persecution, anti-LGBTQ+ bias (including anti-gay slurs), racism, addiction, suicidal ideation, and child sexual abuse.
A major theme in Kiss of the Spider Woman, LGBTQ+ identity wasn’t culturally accepted in Argentina at the time of the book’s publication. In fact, it is implied to be the reason for Molina’s incarceration on charges of the “corruption of minors” (17). It is unclear whether Molina actually engaged in any sort of sexual activity with a minor or if the charge simply reflects long-standing stereotypes of LGBTQ+ people as predators. Even if she was guilty, Puig implies that the charge would have been lesser or nonexistent for a straight man; anti-gay bias pervades Molina’s memories of her trial, with the judge calling her “a revolting fag” (106).
Though Molina elsewhere uses the same slur to describe herself, its implication—that she is a gay man—is far from a settled matter. Molina not only behaves in ways that are coded feminine but also considers himself to be a woman, often calling himself “a girl.” Her fascination with “masculine” men is of a piece with this. Talking about herself and her friends, Molina explains to Valentin, “[W]e’re a hundred percent female [...] We’re normal women; we sleep with men” (203). Such remarks imply that Molina is a (straight) trans woman, yet she does not entirely renounce her identity as a gay man. Rather, she exists on the margins of different genders and orientations, revealing the extent to which these are social constructions.
As a Marxist, Valentin approaches the question from a different angle but arrives at a similar conclusion. He believes that gender roles are learned and associated with capitalist oppression. He therefore espouses gender equality, saying, “[T]he man of the house and the woman of the house have to be equal with one another. If not, their relation becomes a form of exploitation” (244). He is also quite at ease in the aftermath of having sex with Molina—an act that could be construed as indicating he is bi. However, there are limits to Valentin’s egalitarianism. He himself embodies conventional masculinity, and though he does not devalue women, he does disparage traditional femininity, both in Molina and in his current girlfriend. In other words, he is not accepting of any and all gender performance.
Valentin’s rationale for this is that traditionally feminine behaviors are innately tied to subservience, and the novel does not entirely refute this point. Rather, it shows Molina to be as much the victim of her feminine performance as its orchestrator. In one of their final conversations, Valentin attempts to convince Molina that she does not have to sacrifice or “submit” in order to be a woman. Molina rejects this, however, saying, “[I]f a man is…my husband, he has to give the orders” (243). Pressed further, she says that there would be “no kick” to relationships between men and women if “when a man embraces [a woman]…[she doesn’t] feel a little bit frightened” (244). The novel implies that this romanticization and sexualization of men’s domination/women’s submission ends in erasure for the woman. This dynamic underpins Molina and Valentin’s first sexual encounter, after which Molina confides, “For just a second, it seemed like I wasn’t here […] like it was you all alone” (219). It also becomes literal when Molina sacrifices herself on Valentin’s behalf. As much as Molina resists binary categorization as either a man or a woman, straight or gay, she ultimately dies because of her adherence to traditional gender norms.
The Meaning and Value of Liberation
The Kiss of the Spider Woman’s setting, a prison cell, places questions of confinement, oppression, and escape front and center. Indeed, Molina’s desire for release generates much of the novel’s conflict by inducing her to collaborate with the warden. However, literal freedom from incarceration is not the only kind of liberation at play. Rather, the novel’s setting renders literal the various forces that confine the characters. By examining their responses to these forces as well as to their immediate situation, the novel considers what liberation looks like and what its purpose is.
Broadly speaking, Valentin and Molina embody two different attitudes toward liberation. Valentin is a Marxist who is committed to the revolution; he talks about liberation mostly in terms of social class, and his emphasis is on the collective rather than the individual. The political revolution is ongoing, even as Valentin is in a cell, so he devotes himself to remaining involved with it, exchanging letters with his girlfriend, a member of his revolutionary group, and reading political materials. By contrast, the oppression Molina feels most acutely involves her society’s heterosexism, and even then, she rarely discusses that oppression in political terms. Rather, her longing for liberation becomes evident in the way she uses movies to escape into a world of fantasy. Though these movies themselves rely on heterosexist assumptions, identifying with their romantic heroines allows her to vicariously experience a kind of relationship that anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment has denied her: As she tells Valentin, “I’d like to marry a man for the rest of my life” (44). For her, liberation is intensely individual, even to the point of manifesting as a wish to escape herself, as when she talks about wanting to die.
However, the dichotomy that the novel establishes between Valentin and Molina proves more complicated than it first appears. Valentin may spend most of his time studying, but he also at times daydreams of his prior love, Marta. Moreover, the way he talks about his studies echoes Molina’s description of how recalling movies allows her to forget her imprisonment; he believes that “if you study something, you transcend any cell you’re inside of” (78). In other words, he does not wholly reject the kind of mental escapism Molina practices. It is also worth noting that Valentin too seeks escape from himself, as his Marxism is intertwined with deep guilt over his relatively privileged upbringing. On the flip side, the kind of liberation Molina embodies has radical societal implications. When Valentin argues that traditional femininity is ill-suited to political struggle, Molina retorts, “[I]f men acted like women there wouldn’t be any more torturers” (29), and Valentin concedes the point.
Ultimately, the novel does not privilege one kind of liberation over the other: Each has its strengths as well as its weaknesses. For instance, Molina’s insistence that the Nazi propaganda film can be appreciated purely as a romantic fantasy, divorced from its political context, tests the limits of her highly personal outlook on liberation. At the same time, Valentin’s systemic critiques of things like gender roles leave little room for human emotion; he calls Molina’s attraction to dominant men “absolutely wrong,” to which she responds, “But that’s the way I feel” (243). By placing the two characters in dialogue with one another, Puig implies that any successful movement for liberation must strike a balance between the two positions they espouse.
The Power of Language
The experimental form of The Kiss of the Spider Woman—its incorporation of official reports and scholarly sources alongside its heavy reliance on dialogue—highlights its interest in language. In particular, it indicates the novel’s interest in the relationship between language and power. That power is often negative: Language is used to deceive, manipulate, and oppress throughout the novel. Nevertheless, Puig refuses to entirely write off language’s power to do good.
The exercise of power through language is clearest in the government documents that Puig intersperses at key moments. The report detailing Molina and Valentin’s history of incarceration contains several examples of how an oppressive regime can wield language to persecute vulnerable populations and silence dissent. It designates Molina a “sexual offender”—a particularly pejorative label that has material consequences in terms of where and how she is imprisoned—and describes Valentin as “reprehensible” and “rebellious,” thus framing his political actions as totally outside the bounds of acceptable behavior. It also references Molina’s sentencing: an event in which a judge’s pronouncement can strip someone of their freedom or even their life.
The footnotes scattered throughout the novel represent a similar but more complex use of language. These footnotes often involve studies of gender and sexuality and in some cases are in line with their ostensible purpose of elucidating the novel’s action. One, for example, suggests that “men feel their masculinity depends upon a capacity to conquer women, and women feel that fulfillment can only come about through being coupled with a man” (196), which anticipates Molina’s claims about masculinity and femininity. Elsewhere, however, the footnotes are at odds with the characters’ understanding of themselves. One, for example, cites the psychoanalyst Otto Feinchel’s claim that gay identity arises in families where girls do not have mothers to model and boys do not have fathers: “The more the child identifies with the progenitor of the opposite sex […] [the more] prone to homosexuality” (206). Molina is quite close with her mother, but she categorically denies that this has anything to do with her orientation: “You [Valentin] tell me the same old thing everybody tells me […] how I was tied to my mother’s apron strings and now I’m this way, and how a person can always straighten out though” (19). Her impatience points to the way ostensibly objective academic language can contribute to oppression and marginalization, whether by erasing the lived experiences of its subjects or by facilitating an oppressive goal (e.g., conversion therapy).
These formal uses of written language contrast with the dialogue that constitutes the bulk of the novel. It would be an oversimplification to say that Puig frames language as liberating when two people are in conversation and oppressive when a single voice is speaking about or on behalf of someone else: The conversations between Molina and Valentin, as well as those between Valentin and the warden, are full of coercion. Molina is working on behalf of the warden to manipulate Valentin into confessing secrets of the political revolution, and much of what she says, including the long stories she entertains him with, is informed by this ulterior motive. Nevertheless, the two do grow close to one another and even arrive at a better understanding of one another despite the deceit that permeates their conversations. Dialogue may be an imperfect tool for overcoming oppression, but the novel suggests that it is the only one available.
