This research compares and contrasts the narrative strategies of novelists Isabel Allende and Manuel Puig in The House of the Spirits and Kiss of the Spider Woman, and discusses the means by which each author develops a theme of sharp social criticism in a narrative context of strong dramatic action.
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 fundamental human rights, and so morally entitled did the actors feel to suppressing political opposition, that compromise seemed impossible. These political dynamics not only inform but are central to both Kiss of the Spider Woman and The House of the Spirits, even though the emphases of each novel in developing narrative action are quite distinct.
In Kiss of the Spider Woman, set in Argentina, the politics emerge out of the conversation between Molina, a homos...