Summary
A novel dating from late in Puig’s career, Pubis angelical continues his exploration of the politics of power and subjugation. In this case the power is held exclusively by males; those subjected to male power and desires are women. Puig dramatizes his concerns by focusing on three women from different cultures and times.
The novel’s structure reinforces the interrelatedness of the three women’s experiences. Instead of telling the women’s stories consecutively, Puig alternates sections of the three stories so that the novel forms a braid of narrative, a single thematic statement composed of three individual strands.
The first plot line concerns The Mistress, a beautiful Austrian actress recently married to a wealthy German munitions manufacturer (The Master). The Master keeps her a virtual prisoner until eventually she discovers that he has acquired her (she is little more than a possession) because he wants to learn about experiments in mind reading supposedly conducted by her late father. Eventually she escapes, falling in love with the man who aids her. She comes to believe that this man’s motives are no purer than The Master’s, murders her new love, falls in love again, suspects the motives of this third love, and finally is killed trying to escape.
The second plot line concerns Ana, an Argentine who has fled an unhappy marriage and the political problems in her homeland only to be hospitalized with cancer in Mexico. Over the course of her conversations with her friend Beatriz the reader learns that Ana’s relationships with men have been no happier than the actress’s, although certainly less dramatic. The final blow comes when she realizes that her latest love, Pozzi, wants to manipulate her for his own political ends.
The last plot line is set sometime in a grim future totally dominated by men. The principal character is W218. The plight of women has reached the point that W218 does not even realize, at first, how degraded her life is. She is a prostitute in a government-run health clinic. Like the other two women, W218 is nearly redeemed, but ultimately betrayed, by love; and at the end she is dying of venereal disease, still working as a prostitute, in a camp for criminals and misfits.
The most common interpretation of Pubis angelical is that the actress and W218 are fantasies of Ana. Whether this is true or not is less important than the common elements of the three narrative lines. All three women are manipulated by men. All three seek escape and redemption through love of a man who at first seems to be sensitive. All three are failed by their new loves and in the end are either dead or dying. Pubis angelical is a grim parable of the fate of women in a male-dominated society.
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