Isabel Allende and Manuel Puig

A critique of neither The House of the Spirits nor Kiss of the Spider Woman can reach meaning without reference to the political and cultural environment of 19th- and 20th-century Latin America. The sharp divisions between rich and poor, the exploitation by European colonial masters of the indigenous peoples, encounters between indigenous and invading cultures, the role of the Catholic Church in shaping attitudes and social mores, and the clash of ideology and life choices are all aspects of this. In the late 1970s, when Kiss of the Spider Woman was written, and indeed into the mid-1980s, when The House of the Spirits appeared, the political cleavages of Latin America either had posed or were posing leftist regimes against rightist rebels and leftist ideologues and revolutionaries against the one-party-rule regimes in such countries as Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Peru, Argentina, and Colombia. The late 1970s were well within the ambit of Cold War political polarization, with leftists and rightists characterizing each other as fascists and communists and politics as a zero-sum game. So egregiously did some politically motivated actions violate commonly accepted standards of fu

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lities in the service of capitalist/heterosexist and/or socially authoritarian goals. The effect of these passages is, on one hand, to highlight Molina's sociopolitical vulnerability owing to his sexual orientation, and on the other to explain the social disempowerment, or repression, that motivates him to align himself with power and betray Valentin. The clinical voice cites the view held by "radical Freudians" that "'human nature' is no more than what has become the result of centuries of [sexual, social] repression" (Puig 154). As well, it cites the view that societies are civilized and developed (uncivilized and underdeveloped) according as they have (have not) adopted sexual repression as a dominant norm. Thus the narrative is a commentary on the Argentine junta's preoccupation with economically/capitalistically "developing" Argentina while repressing deviance; the commentary is ironic inasmuch as the developmental method eschews such norms -- associated with the feminine (208)--as human decency and tolerance in favor of purely economic and authoritarian goals -- associated with the masculine. Reference is also made to evidence that, so strong are the normative social cues of Western civilization, socially marginalized homos
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1924
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)