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It is often said that a great work of art is like a dream, full of colours, greatness and splendour. The playful authors of Kiss of the Spider woman and Double Hook dont escape that definition, providing theirs readers with a writing that perpetually dance on the boundaries of fantasy, oscillating between realism, fairy- tale and dream. The resort to history and particularly to myth is a prerequisite for the entrance in this imaginary realm. In the two fictions, the mythical element w more used than the historical referent, introduces a balance between clarity and ambiguity in the sense that it breaks up with the coherent causality of the traditional plot.
Why both Puig and Watson have decided to ornament their fictions with fragments of myth and history while they could have been following a well- made linear plot? The first part will analyse the use of myth in the respective fictions of Watson and Puig the second part will examine the effects of including myth and history into their stories. Watsons extensive use of mythical referents informs almost every element of the narrative plot from the depiction of the physical landscape to the characters shaped after archetypal figures and united by the pattern of the quest, a reoccurring scheme omnipresent in several myths. The first telling argument for believing this assumption to be true is that, in Watson, the landscape displays traces of mythical roots emphasising the quintessential purity of earth and light. The setting presents itself as the closest reflection of the Shakespearean tale midsummer dream. According to Jung, when an artist uses his personal unconscious, he creates art with a strictly personal vision.
But Watson chooses to use her racial unconscious which is more apt to capture meaningful archetypes, myths and symbols. Through the process of writing, the author reaches the collective roots of the memory of human race. Similarly to a faithful director staging a theatrical play, the writer Watson transfers her own vision of a mythical world into the fictional realm of the novel. The landscape in The Double Hook offers to its readers the bareness of a setting on the borders of reality and dream. As in a theatrical play retracing the history of the world, the few scenic elements at work in The Double Hook remind the readers of all tales that had represented and still represent an ideal world inhabited by fairies and goblins. On the fictional stage of The Double Hook, the reader can imagine, for example, a yellow dot, the sun which rises very high in the sky.
On earth, the creek and the valley are the only traces of landmark. These scenic elements are presented as such, without reference to their possession by a given owner. These primordial images emphasise our connection to the sacred origin of the world and are a proof of the universality of human nature. The world is indeed portrayed as it was before the downfall of humanity. Watson deliberately stripped away all space markers so that to erase any mark of particularity. As a result, the universe of The Double Hook becomes an universal world.
It is the world of James, Greta and the Old Lady but it could virtually be the fantastic world of any fantastic tale. The valley and its emptiness indeed reminds the reader of the landscape at work in certain medieval novels where courageous knights have to cross remote and deserted lands in which they are faced with a number of ordeals. In The Double Hook, the dragonflies are reminiscent of these medieval tales inspired from ancestral myths while, in the meantime, darkness and light inform the reader perceptions of bad and good. Moreover, following this dream imagery, the characters in the novel are not individual entities but universal prototypes that find their deepest roots in archetypal figures. They dont play a role as traditional characters who serve the purpose to entertain the reader through the narration of their adventures. In the Double Hook, the characters embody that adventure in themselves since they are incarnations of the old fears and hopes of humanity.
These personages accomplish actions that are patterned rituals leading from a chaotic to a well ordered universe. At the centre of these archetypal characters is the Old Lady who embodies the fear and dark side of human experience. She is the Old Witch, a symbol of the negativity and the death haunting the valley and she exists to disturb the peace. Her character refers to the myth of the Terrible Mother, a negative elementary character who annihilates as well as creates all things.
She has given birth to James, a hero reminiscent of the knight Perceived who has committed itself with the salvation of the land. The matricide James commits is an obvious referent to prohibited actions (incest, parricide, matricide) that have nurtured myths since ancestral times. More than a crime in itself, the Old Ladys murder has its deepest roots in drives for self - preservation and is meant to be a rite of passage that permits to abolish the fear. It is, in any regards, a sacrifice necessary to the construction of the community, may has it been operated too early. Similarly, Greta has to died. She embodies the archetype of the innocent victim whose sacrifice permits to lead the battle for peace towards an end.
The author concern with community dictates the gigantic amount of time Watson devotes to the phases of death or rebirth in archetypal characters who utter the same heavily weighted world towards the end of the story; that is, the final liberation of the land seen as the redemption of a lost paradise. The fight of these archetypal characters acting in a mythical landscape is guided by the pattern of the quest, a reoccurring scheme giving meaning to several myths. Concerning the pattern of the quest, the theologian Carol Christ defines the social quest as a search for the self in which the protagonist begins in alienation and seeks an integration into a human community where he or she can develop more fully. The definition summarises James journey from the beginning of the novel to its end.
In the beginning of The Double Hook James alienates himself by killing his mother. All the rest of the book is the story of his redemption in which the building of the community is a process that represents the ultimate medium of his release and salvation. The progressive gathering of James and the other characters around the common purpose of living in peace, at a subsistence level, and without producing any surplus that could generated greed and envy, illustrates faith in human potential which is the message the myth aims to conveys. The basis are now thrown for the perpetration of an happy life in a good community where everyone lives in peace. This first human community of members bound together can now give birth to the rest of the humanity since all the negative elements has been abolished. The new house that James plans to build symbolizes this new renewal.
It will be further down the creek, far away from the shadow of the Old Lady. The evocation of romantic myths contained in the movies told by Molina has an undeniable power of visual appeal that strengthens the visual beauty of the stories and holds the reader attention up to the end of the Kiss of the Spider Woman. The cultural references at work in the six recounted films are deeply anchored in the consciousness of readers since they refer to longstanding romantic myths made familiar to people either through classic literature or cinema. Indeed, the cinema can be considered as a privileged means of communication exploring romantic premises and through them, myth of true and everlasting love.
According to Franck Mcconnell, romanticism and its child film represent a rupture in the ancient self- assurance of human intelligence, representing the necessity to return, if only in dreams to the rhythms of that world (the childlike world). In Puig, once that these particular rhythms referring to dream and fantasy are put in words, they give rise to moments of visual feast through a meticulous evocation of the details surrounding the romantic scenes. All these details flatter the readers mental schemes by offering a concentrate of an ideal situation. The plots render a reflection of perfect matches between people who live a perfect love in a perfect world. This idealist evocation is so powerful that even Molina, swept by the beauty of the films, forgets their political content and chooses instead to believe in the old myths they carry. For example, in Molina s retelling, the movie casting the German officer and Leni shift from a Nazi propaganda film- which is what it truly is- to a moving romance on the theme of impeded love.
For the romantic Molina, the great myth engendered by the tragic of war allows variations on the theme of irremediable fate and destiny. As well, the fatal death of Leni reproduces the traditional death of the classic Greek heroin. P. 92 he kisses her and when he takes his lips away from her mouth, shes already death () And the last scene takes place in this Pantheon, in Berlin, for heroes, and its an incredible beautiful monument, like a Greek temple, with huge statues of each hero. And shes there, too, like an enormous statue, of half size, I mean. The scenic elements surrounding the scene of the death fix Lenis beauty in a non temporal frame, linking her fate to that of her mythical sisters, the heroines of classical tragedies. Furthermore, in Kiss of the Spider Woman, the myth of the Terrible Mother explains the hegemony of men ombre superior as reaction against the subsequent fear of women.
The myth of the Machismo and the myth of the Great or Terrible Mother embody absolute archetypes that determine the vision of men and women in patriarchal societies as well as they structure the gender struggle between the two sexes within these so...
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Research essay sample on Spider Woman Human Community
