Why is Spiderman a cool superhero when spider women are calculating villains or seductresses?
I’ve been reading Lady Brenda Hale’s memoir Spider Woman: A Life – by the former President of the Supreme Court. The reference to spider woman is a marketing ploy to remind the public that Lady Hale, wearing a spider brooch, was the president of the supreme court who ruled that PM Boris Johnson’s Prorogation of Parliament, effectively seizing debate on the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement, was unlawful. That is, the Supreme Court caught Johnson out, saying that his political manoeuvrings were illegal and that he had misinformed (or lied) to the Queen when he told her it was legal. The metaphor was obvious. Lady Hale was the spider woman whose legal web ensnared Johnson, who was the fly or other small annoying insect.
Hale’s memoir doesn’t portray her as a perfect human being, but nor is she a villainous or calculating character. Seduction never enters the narrative. Quite the opposite – like so many women in the professions, she worked hard and under the haze of imposture syndrome. Being fascinated with history and the role of constitutional law in forming of the British government, she knew she wanted to study law. Hale gained a place at Cambridge when male students outnumbered females six to one.
Noticing the lack of women attorneys and barristers in the Family Court, this spider woman went into family law early in her career. She makes this observation:
“… it seemed to me that I had spent most of my time oppressing women, specifically mothers: sending them back around the world to the country from which they had escaped, bringing their children with them without permission; or taking their children away from them and into the care of the local authority, often to be adopted later; or making them encourage and facilitate their reluctant children’s visits to their fathers. Justified oppression, maybe, but oppression certainly.”
Some spider qualities perhaps, but too cerebral and reflexive to be a superhero.
Other spider women have emerged from performance art (often of the cabaret variety), fantasy erotica and literature. ‘The Tale of the Spiderwoman’ comes to mind. This poem by Merlie M. Alunan anthropomorphises the spider and seems to turn her into a woman:
…I myself daily grow smaller and smaller until
almost invisible. Fuzz on my skin, my eyes
multiply a hundredfold in this darkness
and split the light in thousand prisms—
and now I can see what’s before and after.
I become light as air, my sweetness distils
to fatal potency. I practice a patience
vaster than ten worlds. I wait…
When your shadow crosses my door,
please enter without fear.
But remember not to ask where I’d been
or what had fed me in this empty room
curtained with fine webs of silk.
Ignore the seethe of all my memories.
Come, take my hand.
I am human at your touch.
(Full poem at http://poieinkaiprattein.org/poetry/merlie-m-alunan/tale-of-the-spiderwoman—poems-by-merlie-m-alunan/)
Of course, I cannot think about spider women without mentioning one of my favourite novels of all time, Manuel Puig’s The Kiss of the Spider Woman. Molina, in prison for corrupting a minor, asks Valentin, the political prisoner, for a kiss before he is paroled. Valentin in turn asks Molina if he’s afraid that he’ll turn into a panther woman – we know that the panther woman kills when she is kissed. But Valentin explains he isn’t the panther woman, but he is the spider woman. The meaning of the spider woman is left metaphorical, ambiguous and multi-layered.
So too is the answer to the question I started with.
Paola Trimarco 