Kiss Of The Spider Woman Analysis

Written during the Dirty War in Argentina, a time of political and societal unrest, Kiss of the Spider Woman is a novel placed in a category of its own. Developing a connection between the hearts and minds of a revolutionary and a romantic, this text challenges the machismo culture and accentuates the volatile nature of morality. Incorporating an array of art forms, this work by Argentinian author Manuel Puig, has managed to obscure the lines of genre, gender, and wrongdoing. Through the use of a variety of writing styles, such as nested stories and footnotes, Puig develops a number of culturally relevant themes that reinforce the idea of social roles. As Puig implements these devices throughout the text, gender roles and moral guidelines are construed as fickle emphasizing humanity’s erratic character.
The text introduces gender roles with a nested story. This first film, a tale of a panther woman who falls in love with a man, inspires the novel’s ongoing argument about unsound gender classifications. The film is shrouded in folklore which creates doubt towards its credibility. This skepticism creates a newfound disparity between the stereotype of a woman and the reality that although this archetype exists it is not the single true representation of a female. Intertwining fantasy and realism produces an image of make-believe which serves to negate long-held conventions of social positions. This also emphasizes gender roles, a mix …show more content…
Valentin and Molina both encompass and refute the social norms of their civilizations discrediting their validity and questioning societal influences on perspective. A revolutionary and a romantic bind the disparity between fantasy and reality and create a society of interchangeable roles and ambiguous standards that can only exist away from the pressures of