Content area
Full text
AS PRISCILLA WALTON EXPLAINS IN OUR CANNIBALS, OURSELVES (2004), at the heart of the representation of cannibals in literary and cultural texts of both the nineteenth and twentieth century is the Western world's fear of the unknown or the Other. While the fear of being invaded or consumed in the nineteenth century was conjured up through the image of the exotic "savage" who hunted other humans in far off lands, texts of the twentieth century have portrayed cannibalism (be it through flesh-eating beings, such as vampires or serial killers, or self-consuming maladies, such as mad-cow disease or anorexia) as a more direct threat to the Western way of life. Writes Walton, "twentieth-century constructions of cannibals not only reflect a continued fear of the Other, but, as the Other concomitantly moves within, occupying the former 'safe' environment of the home, re-spatializes that home as the locus of threat" (5). Within this home environment, the bedroom represents the most intimate, and therefore most vulnerable, space. It follows, then, that the threat of being devoured should find its representation there as well in the recurring motif of the vagina dentata, or toothed vagina. Found in folk myths and legends around the world (including Egyptian, Indo-European, Greek, Native American, and African stories), the vagina dentata expresses the masculine fear of the "mysteries" of women and sexual relations by evoking castration anxiety through the image of a vagina that could potentially bite off and consume a man's penis during intercourse (Raitt 415). In Latin American letters, while the myth of the vagina dentata is directly present in such texts as Carlos Fuentes's Cristobal Nonato [Christopher Unborn] (1987) and Mario Vargas Llosa's El paraíso en la otra esquina [The Way to Paradise] (2003),1 it also manifests itself symbolically in stories about women who magically transform themselves into savage cats. These stories of the feline fatale serve to reaffirm man's primal fear of the Other, a fear brought on by physical difference and by potential loss of power, both evoked by the fanged "pussy" or vagina. The present study will first analyze this image as it is portrayed or retold by Manuel Puig in El beso de la mujer araña [Kiss of the Spider Woman] (1976) and Julio Cortázar in "Cuello de...