52 pages • 1 hour read
Manuel PuigKiss of the Spider Woman
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1976A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary
Molina relates a new movie plot, which Valentin calls “a piece of Nazi junk” (56) but Molina believes is “a work of art” (55). Valentin claims to only be interested in it as a piece of propaganda.
In the movie, Leni, a singer in France during World War II, falls for a German officer, even though she is devoted to France and has seen the fatal outcome of a chorus girl’s relationship with a different German officer.
Interrupting her own explanation, Molina admits that he misses Gabriel, a waiter who is straight and married. As she explains how in love she is, Molina admits to Valentin, “[W]hen it comes to him, I can’t talk about myself like a man, because I don’t feel like one” (60). She wants to take care of Gabriel, finance his education, and give him a better life. She explains that Gabriel was a professional soccer player when he was young, but he quit when he married, as his wife insisted he give it up. He then began working at a factory but ultimately quit in protest of the exploitation of the laborers; this was how he became a waiter. Upon Molina’s continual insistence, Gabriel started meeting her for coffee. Molina wanted more than friendship but settled for it. Valentin suggests that Gabriel join the union and then jokes that he’s going to stay up thinking about Molina’s boyfriend.
Chapter 4 Summary
Molina returns to storytelling. Now in a relationship with the German officer, Leni is threatened by a member of the French resistance group the Maquis (a maquisard): He tells her she must find out crucial information that the German officer has about a weapons stash. If she doesn’t, her cousin will be killed. She finds the information, without the officer and his majordomo knowing, and meets her cousin and the maquisard at a public museum. Though Leni intends to relay the information, the maquisard insists that she will have to fulfill more missions. Seeing Leni’s distress, the cousin grabs the maquisard and forces him through a window; both he and the maquisard fall to their deaths, while Leni escapes.
Leni returns to the officer and one day overhears him ordering an execution over the phone. Disillusioned, Leni is about to turn over the information to the Maquis after all when she is invited to perform in Germany. She falls in love with the country and decides to help the Germans. Back in France, she meets the highest-ranking maquisard on the pretense of revealing information. This maquisard turns out to be the German officer’s majordomo, and she kills him. She believes the German officer is on his way to help her escape from the Maquis headquarters, but as she’s climbing out a window, another maquisard shoots and kills her. The German officer kisses her dead lips, and a statue of Leni is later built at the Pantheon in Berlin.
During the conversations interspersed throughout the story, Valentin tells Molina that fantasizing about these movies, “escaping from reality like that” (79), is a vice, but Molina doesn’t care because she enjoys the stories. Valentin believes that studying is the best way to “transcend any cell you’re inside of” (79). It’s also revealed that Molina at one point left the cell to speak to the warden, which she claims “was just to sign some papers with the new lawyer” (82). Shortly after this, Valentin and Molina receive two dinner plates of different sizes, and Valentin offers the larger portion to Molina, who ends up getting sick from it. She suffers through stabbing stomach pains as they discuss the movie.
Chapters 3-4 Analysis
These chapters introduce another key element of the novel’s style: Puig’s use of footnotes. Most of these notes concern studies (real or fabricated) on orientation, gender roles, and repression, making them key to the theme of The Fluidity of Gender and Orientation. The footnotes seem to be included at times of confusion or disagreement between Valentin and Molina; the first appears when Valentin remarks that he “know[s] very little about people with your type of inclination” (59), by which he means gay people. This footnote’s ostensible purpose is therefore to clarify gay identity, but in fact, it does the opposite, referring to a refutation of various theories concerning the “physical origins of homosexuality” but affirming very little (59). Moreover, the outdated, medicalized language contrasts ironically with Molina’s response to Valentin, which is highly personal in tone. Like Molina herself, the footnotes have inspired much critical debate, but one possible interpretation is that they satirize the forensic “study” of LGBTQ+ identity—if not also the broader attempt to systematize anything as intensely individual as gender and orientation.
Meanwhile, Molina continues to relay the plots of various movies, deepening the novel’s exploration of The Meaning and Value of Liberation. Valentin is interested in the second movie because it’s Nazi propaganda and therefore can offer insights into the mechanisms of political oppression, which interest him as a Marxist. However, he feels the need to remind Molina that the depiction of the war is not accurate and expresses disbelief that she could be so “transported” by the movie’s romance. Valentin prefers to read his political books every day with the hopes of continuing his fight for political change.
Once again, Molina defends her escapism, saying, “[T]he film was divine, and for me that’s what counts, because I’m locked in this cell and I’m better off thinking about nice things” (78). Part of what Valentin fails to recognize is that for Molina, romantic fantasy is subversive—and subversive in a way that is more immediately relevant to her life. Communism and political repression are relatively distant concerns for Molina. The kind of oppression and marginalization she experiences daily has everything to do with romance, as her discussion of Gabriel makes clear. Molina admits that she’s in love with the waiter, Gabriel, who is a “real man.” By contrast, Molina’s gay friends are all feminine in their gender presentation, so she considers them unsuitable as prospective partners. While this could indicate anti-gay bias, it also speaks to Molina’s understanding of her own gender. Molina considers herself a stereotypical woman: submissive and sensitive. As such, she wants to be with a stereotypical man. However, the stereotypical man is also straight and therefore unattainable. Gabriel, for instance, is both straight and married, so Molina can only fantasize about living with him and occupying a traditionally feminine, nurturing role.
Although Valentin fails to grasp the appeal of fantasy for Molina, he is not entirely wrong in viewing her stories as dangerous. “It can become a vice, always trying to escape from reality like that, it’s like taking drugs or something” (78), Valentin explains of storytelling. What he does not recognize is the danger Molina’s stories pose to him. Molina does her storytelling mostly before the two go to sleep, evoking Scheherazade of One Thousand and One Nights, who tells her husband, the king, half a story each night. By inciting his curiosity about the stories’ conclusions, Scheherazade continuously defers her own execution (the fate that awaits each woman the king marries). The allusion foreshadows Molina’s private motives for entertaining Molina with her stories. Like Scheherazade, she is acting largely out of self-preservation—in Molina’s case, the promise of release from prison. However, this does not mitigate the threat to Valentin, whom she is essentially trying to lure into revealing compromising political information, developing the theme of The Power of Language.
