Manuel Puig's novel Kiss of the Spider Woman

In Manuel Puig's novel Kiss of the Spider Woman, two men share a cell in a Buenos Aires prison. One is Molina, a homosexual sentenced to eight years in prison for the corruption of minors, and the other is Valentfn, a young Marxist imprisoned for revolutionary activities. Molina tries to pass the time by telling the younger man about films he has seen, recreating the stories with words. It is in the course of these retellings of the different films that the reader gets to know these characters an sees how they develop as they interact with one another and with the images recalled from films by Molina. In the course of the novel, the two men become much closer, developing a friendship they would be unlikely to have in the "real" world outside of prison. The setting is artificial in that it brings together two people from different class backgrounds and with very different views of the world, holds them together over a long period of time, and leads to a rapprochement that might never take place in the outside world.

Most of the novel is presented as a dialogue between the two men, and they reveal themselves in their own words. The true nature of their being cell mates is revealed in the middle of the novel. Until that point, the reader sees the two men as precisely what they say they are--two men imprisoned for quite different crimes and merely happening to be in the same cell and trying to make the best of it. In Chapter 8, the reader learns that this is not true an

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Mexico. Though I'd rather be Christina of Sweden, since I'll end up a queen, no matter what (78). As the relationship develops, Molina is drawn more and more into the revolutionary sphere of Valentfn. He has had no political leanings at all before this, except to protect his own prerogatives as a homosexual in a society that looks down on such people. As he interacts with Valentfn, however, he begins to take the side of the young man. After Valentfn is tortured, he nurtures him even more directly and reveals that he has been commissioned to seek answers about the revolutionary group but that he has not given any information to the other side and will not do so. Molina is truly a man who has not been able to fit into society in any meaningful way. He reveals to Valentfn in fact that he is not even drawn especially to his homosexual friends, for he seeks a real man rather than another homosexual and could not fall in love with a homosexual. Even as a revolutionary dedicated to overthrowing society, Valentfn is more a member of that society than is Molina. The shift in Molina's thinking takes place gradually. He would have betrayed Valentfn in order to get out of prison, and yet he ultimately refuses to do so and even expr

Category: Literature - M