Kiss of the Spider Woman Manuel Puig

1. Kiss of the Spider WomanManuel Puig Raquel O'byrne Nancy Fisher Jazmin Bess

2. Juan Manuel Puigwas born on December 28, 1932 in General Villegas, Argentina. • His parents were Maria Elena Delledonne and BaldomeroPuig. His father strived to achieve middle-class status. • Puig watched many films and used them as an escape from his environment. • As a young boy, he started to dress like a girl and was assaulted by the students at his school. • In 1946, Puig attended a US boarding school in Buenos Aires.

3. He then attended the University of Buenos Aires where he studied architecture but then switched to philosophy. • In 1955, he went to Rome to study film on a scholarship. • He was a lecturer at Columbia University in New York. • From 1973- 1975, Puig lived in Brazil, then lived in New York from 1976-1980. • He did not want to live in Argentina because he felt his country was oppressing. • He also did not agree with the Latino tradition of the machismo, which is the a strong or exaggerated sense of manliness; an assumptive attitude that virility, courage, strength, and entitlement to dominate are attributes of masculinity.

4. Kiss of the Spider Woman is Manuel Puig’s fourth and most well known novel. • It was published in Spanish in 1976, and was later translated to English in 1979. • Puig became famous to the English-speaking public when his book was made into a movie in 1985, Kiss of the Spider Woman. • At first, the one country that would publish this book was Spain, and after a couple of years the book was not able to be sold in Buenos Aires. • Puig feared that this book would affect his family in a negative manner. • Puig also felt that the translation from Spanish to English would be difficult with Molina’s speech which he felt he could not get the right words to say, in other words he was scared the voice would not come through correctly. • In 1981, Kiss of the Spider Woman won the best Latin American novel of the year from IstitutoItalolatino Americano in Italy.

5. La Guerra Sucia(The Dirty War)   • La Guerra Sucia(The Dirty War) • -1976-1983. Period of state-sponsored violence under military dictatorship under Jorge Rafael Videla. • -Thousands were imprisoned, disappeared and were subject to repression, torture and assassination. • -Videla's dictatorship referred to its systematized persecution of the Argentine citizenry as the "National Reorganization Process". (Argentine security forces and death squads worked hand in hand with other South American dictatorships in the frame of Operation Condor.) • -Operation Condor was a campaign of political repression involving assassination and intelligence operations officially implemented in 1975 by the right-wing dictatorships of the Southern Cone of South America. The program aimed to eradicate alleged socialist and communist influence and ideas and to control active or potential opposition movements against the participating governments. • -The democratic government of Raul Alfonsín that took office in 1983 investigated these crimes through the National Commission of Disappeared Persons and prosecuted the responsible parties through the Trial of the Juntas. (This was unprecedented in Latin America.)  

6. Truth Commission (CONADEP)   • -December 1983 National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons is created to collect evidence on Dirty War crimes. • -The gruesome details (including documentation of about 9,000 disappearances) in the report Argentina, NuncaMás shocked the world. • -In the Prologue to the NuncaMás report ("Never Again"), Ernesto Sábato wrote: • “From the moment of their abduction, the victims lost all rights. Deprived of all communication with the outside world, held in unknown places, subjected to barbaric tortures, kept ignorant of their immediate or ultimate fate, they risked being either thrown into a river or the sea, weighted down with blocks of cement, or burned to ashes. They were not mere objects, however, and still possessed all the human attributes: they could feel pain, could remember a mother, child or spouse, could feel infinite shame at being raped in public...” • -On 5 October 1989 as part of a sweeping reform, the newly elected president, Carlos Menem, pardoned those convicted in the human right trials and the rebel leaders imprisoned for taking part in the military uprisings. • -However, at the end of 2005, during the presidency of Néstor Kirchner the Ley de Punto Final and Ley de ObedenciaDebida were declared void by Congress, and in 2007 the Supreme Court decided that the pardons were null.

7. ANALYSIS/THEMES • Feminization: Freud’s theories of oral/anal fixation relate to Valentin’s illness: he can’t resist eating, which leads him to have unbearable diarrhea. Is the description of Freud’s theories foreshadowing? Will the next stage be genital?

8. ANALYSIS/THEMES • “Castrating Mothers”: Valentin mentions several times the phrase “castrating mother” in reference to women that undermine a man’s autonomy, such as an overbearing mother, or his concerned girlfriend. However, Molina becomes the mother figure when he cares for Valentin during his illness. Has Molina become the “castrating mother”? • Valentin: “If only she hadn’t started acting that way, like some castrating mother.” “She never let herself get manipulated, like the typical female.” P. 139

9. ANALYSIS/THEMES • Escapism: Molina uses his memories of films in order to forget his situation, and is even able to share them with Valentin, even though Valentin warns Molina not to reject reality. Molina seems to live in his own world of romance, even to the point of ignoring the propaganda of the Nazi film, and focusing on the romantic nature of the relationship between the French girl and the Nazi general. Unlike Valentin, he clearly has no interest in politics, or taking sides. • Molina’s romantic fantasies center around the perfect man. When Valentin asks him to concretely describe this figure, Molina answers, “to be marvelous-looking, and strong, but without making any fuss about it, and also walking very tall. Walking absolutely straight…” (p. 61) What do we make of the use of the word “straight” in this quote?  

10. Questions • What do mothers represent to Molina and Valentin, respectively? • What did we learn from Valentin’s dream about the native? • What is the significance of Valentin’s illness and how Molina treats him? • How is the relationship between the two characters changing? • What do you think the nature of Molina’s relationship with the minor was? Did he ever have a relationship with a minor? • Molina seems to idolize the perfect mother, both in his own life and in the stories he tells. Why is he so focused on this?

11. Quotes • p. 29, Molina- “And what’s so bad about being soft like a woman?” “But if men acted like women there wouldn’t be any more torturers.”

12. p. 112 “I’m certainly not going to tell him another word of what I like, so he can’t laugh anymore about how soft I am, we’ll see if ever he weakens or not, but I won’t tell him any more of the films I like the most, they’re just for me, in my mind’s eye, so no filthy words can touch them, this son of a bitch and his pissass of a revolution”

13. P 76 “One of these days they’ll realize who’s the fag around here.” What are your thoughts on this quote?

14. Works Cited • http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/mpuig.htm • http://www.enotes.com/kiss-spider • http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/machismo