Kiss Of The Spider Woman

In analyzing portrayals of women, it is appropriate to begin with the character of Margarita. For, within the text, she embodies the traditionally masculine traits of bravery, resilience, and violence as a means of liberating herself from an existence of abuse and victimhood. Even more, the woman plays upon stereotypes of femininity in order to mask her true nature. The reader witnesses this clever deception in a scene where the character endures a “wholesome thrashing” from her huge, violent, and grizzly bear-like husband, Guerra (81). Although Margarita “[submits] to the infliction with great apparent humility,” her husband is found “stone-dead” the next morning (81). Here, diction such as “submits” and “humility” relate to the traits of weakness, subservience and inferiority that are so commonly expected of women, especially in their relationships with men. Yet, when one

In this essay, female oppression in La Casa de Bernarda Alba will be discussed and analyzed. However, in order to be able to understand the importance of this theme and the impact it has had on the play, one must first understand the role of female oppression in the Spanish society in the 1930s.

The plot of the novel is based on the murder of Santiago Nasar, and is rooted in Machismo. The two antagonists of the book Pablo and Pedro Vicario, murder Nasar after finding out he allegedly had sex with their sister,

Within Valenzuela’s “The Censors,” the satirical theme of this story mocks Juan, his thoughtless actions and his letter are symbols for innocence and secrecy. Juan’s actions symbolize the innocence of childhood and those who haven’t experienced hardship, of those who are impressionable and naïve. Juan’s actions when he receives Mariana’s address and immediately “without thinking twice, he [… writes] her a letter” and sends it show his lack of

Junot Diaz a bilingual writer plays with language and culture to develop a story that he believes represents Dominican Republic. Oscar Wao an opponent of everything that we can find in a typical Dominican Macho finds love and death in the country where everything started. Amor is a word that is used only a couple of times in the novel but has a great meaning behind that develops to the curse itself and a series of unfortunate events.

In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the reader gets a sense of what the expectations are of Dominican men and women. Junot Díaz uses Oscar in contrast to the other male characters to present the expectations of the Dominican male. On the other hand, Díaz presents the women in the text, especially Belicia, La Inca, Lola, and Jenni, as strong characters in their own rights, but the male characters, with the exception of Oscar, have a desire to display their masculinity to maintain power over these women. It would be unfair to say that the women bring the abuse unto themselves, but rather it is their culture that makes the abuse acceptable and almost to a certain extent—expected.

The Other is configured in the two writers’ works as victims of power play, their unjust mistreatment subsequently exposing underlying social inequalities. Through adopting the Gothic medium characteristic of Romanticism, the texts induce within the reader emotions of terror and pity towards the marginalised, leaving a profound effect which impactfully conveys the intended social criticism.

The novel, Imagining Argentina, makes use of several rhetorical devices in order to express the themes it presents. The image of the Holocaust, for example, is repeated several times throughout the novel in order to express the themes, such as during the experiences of the main character, Carlos Rueda, and the thoughts of the narrator, Martin Benn. It is through the repetition of the image of the Holocaust that the author, Lawrence Thornton, conveys the predominant theme of Imagining Argentina that, without hope, life is meaningless.

Continuing in the theme of conformity; if the boys are united by their heteronomy, Cuellar’s castration, in contrast, is the source of his ostracism. His unfortunate accident is a wound that ‘time opens instead of closes’, and as the story progresses, Vargas Llosa juxtaposes the boys socially inclusive youthful pastimes of football and studying mentioned earlier in the novel with his comparatively solitary penchant for the ocean and surfing “a puro pecho o con colchón” (94) in chapter five. In this passage, his distance from the others is symbolised by the isolation of the sea; the narrator says the water “se lo tragó” (95) and later, the boys state that “se perdió” (96). Clearly, Cuellar’s failure to partake in the testosterone fuelled rituals of sexual maturity in the city has seen him shunned from the rest of the boys and resigned to hanging out with “rosquetes, cafichos y pichicateros” (96) instead – the modern, metropolitan outcasts. Evidently, Cuellar is incapacitated by this highly heteronormative lifestyle, as the inherent masculinity of the city is a fixed identity that will perpetually exclude him, or anyone else who cannot fulfil Peruvian societies idea of gender appropriate behaviour.

Lope de Vega’s play touches upon several key components and ideas that were brought up in many of the other stories read throughout the semester. This included the role of gender and how men and women are viewed differently in the Spaniard town of Fuenteovejuna. Another topic included the importance of family, love, and relationships and their connection on loyalty, trust, and personal beliefs. The last major influence found in other literature and in Fuenteovejuna, were the political and religious references made throughout the play. Even though Lope de Vega didn’t make these views obvious, the reader could still pick up on their connotation and the references made towards these specific ideas. With all of this in mind, each of these

The narrator states that “it was [Maria] who did away with my generation’s virginity” (65). Garcia Marquez uses a hyperbole to portray how crucial Maria Cervantes’s contradictory role is in the men’s lives. She embraces her sexuality and is very open. In addition she also “taught [the men] much more than [they] should have learned, but she taught us above all that there’s no place in life sadder than an empty bed” (65). She reinforces the idea that sexuality should not be repressed because that would only bring on loneliness and despair. She recognizes the “disorder of love” that the townspeople live with because of repressed sexuality. The narrator describes Santiago Nasar’s passionate relationship with Maria Cervantes. He describes their relationship like “a falcon who chases a warlike crane” and that the falcon can only “hope for a life of pain” (65). The author uses a metaphor to compare Maria to a warlike crane in order to show her power and grace. The crane is a bird that stands tall and may look elegant and enticing but because Maria is “a warlike crane” she is able to stand up and fight for herself while still maintaining her grace. Another aspect of her independence would be that she stands alone in her battle against society. Garcia Marquez gives her these headstrong qualities to show how she follows her own path and goes against the town’s beliefs without showing any signs of stopping and to show that

Miguel Cervantes’ Don Quixote is a masterpiece in many senses of the word: at the time of its conception, it was hailed as a revolutionary work of literature that defined a genre, in later centuries regarded as an acerbic social commentary, a slightly misshapen romantic tragedy, and even as a synthesis of existentialist and post-modernist features. At the centre of this Spanish satirical chronicle is the perplexing character Don Quixote. Don Quixote’s personality and perspective is rapidly established fromsince the beginning of the novel, revealing unabashedly to readers that he is mad. The source of his madness lies in the extent to which Don Quixote acts on his delusions and projections unto reality as he saunters through Cervantes’ Andalusia. Don Quixote’s delusions have two primary functions in the novel: demonstrating the reality and tragedy of Cervantes’ manifestation of idyllic themes of love and chivalry, and revealing certain characteristics about narration.

While Rodríguez del Padron achieved fame as a poet, many consider his prose work Siervo libre de amor, believed to be one of the first sentimental novels in Spain, to be his greatest contribution to Spanish literature (Gilderman 17). Cadira and Triunfo provide his perspective regarding nobility and lineage (Pampín Barral 85). The latter is one of three prevailing defenses of women during the gender debate.

fter watching director Jacques Tourneur’s 1943 film I Walked with a Zombie, I understood the parallels that existed between this story line and that of Molina and Valentin in The Kiss of the Spider Woman. First of all, much like Jessica, the zombie woman, the two prisoners, especially Molina, are seen as “freaks” in their oppressive society. Molina and Valentin are ostracized by their family members and their communities for being different rather it be due to their sexuality or political beliefs. Also, I saw Jessica’s situation of being trapped inside of her own body as similar to the experiences of Molina and Valentin while being imprisoned.

Molina chooses to escape the men’s shared harsh reality through stories and fantasies, and Valentin through his political vision and his studying, which he keeps up religiously, saying that he has to “keep up with [his] reading schedule, you know that”, as it has apparently become such a routine for him, known by Molina, that he feels unable to miss a day, perhaps worried that this will hinder his much-needed-for escape from reality.