Review: Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
happy hallowen! let's talk about ghosts and colonization
'Tis the time to be spooky, so I used this month to finally read a couple horror novels that had been sitting on my TBR for too long. One of these was Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, a book that I didn’t know much about besides the title, but it was precisely the title that got my attention. Gothic fiction has become a new interest of mine since last year, so I was excited to see how this author brought the Gothic tradition to a Latin-American setting. I think it was a good idea to keep this book on hold while I became familiar with the genre, because now I was able to recognize many of the references that the author makes, but more importantly, reading Gothic literature before reading this book helped me see how this is not, in fact, a Gothic story. And that’s on purpose.
Summary: Noemí Taboada is a rich socialite from Mexico City, with a strong, no-nonsense personality. After receiving a strange letter from her newly married cousin, the frail and sensitive Catalina, Noemí is sent by her family to investigate what’s happening in High Place, Catalina’s new home. There she encounters the dreary and vaguely sinister members of the Doyle family, Catalina’s in laws who came to Mexico from England and have fallen into hard times.
Rejecting the Gothic.
While this book has many elements associated with the Gothic, the way in which these elements are presented separates it from “true” Gothic fiction. I argue that this is not a failure on the part of the author, but a conscious choice. Mexican Gothic is not “a Gothic novel set in Latin America”. Instead, the author takes tropes and themes present in Gothic literature and subverts them with a clear goal in mind.
One of the biggest themes of the novel is the way in which the characters utilize scientific knowledge—whose knowledge is respected? What theories are being defended? How does knowledge give some people power over others? Our main character is a woman with a vast knowledge of many topics, from how paint is made to biological science and anthropology. In fact, Noemí’s motivation is her father’s promise to allow her to get a Master’s Degree. She’s shown to be educated and up-to-date with scientific theories. On the opposite end, we have Howard Doyle, an Englishman that introduces himself by bringing up eugenics and phrenology. He uses pseudo-science to back up his views of “better” and “inferior” races.
Scientific progress is also an important theme in Frankenstein, one of the biggest names in Gothic (and considered the foundation for modern science-fiction). Another novel that Silvia Moreno-Garcia is drawing from is likely The Island of Dr. Moreau, where a man misuses scientific knowledge to create monsters. In Moreau, we are shown Black and Brown people who are subjected to the doctor’s monstrous experiments, just like in Mexican Gothic we are shown how Howard Doyle used a Native American woman as the first victim of his quest for immortality, and he plans to do the same with Noemí.
In Gothic fiction, there’s a general sense of ambiguity and uncertainty. Even though science is present in these novels, it’s often shown as weak in the face of supernatural and mysterious forces. Scientific solutions are discarded, and the characters are forced to play by the rules of the monsters, and folk knowledge is the more powerful tool that the characters have.
However, in Mexican Gothic, the monster is operating by the rules of “science” that has been perverted. Noemí wins by using real science, in specific, thanks to the scientific knowledge of the people of El Triunfo: Dr. Camarillo and Marta Duval.
Usually, characters in Gothic fiction are trapped within a specific location. There may be a city or town nearby, but for some or other reason the characters are not able to visit or communicate with civilization. This is why it struck me as odd how often Noemí was allowed to visit El Triunfo, but this ties into how Mexican Gothic rejects Gothic trappings. For Noemí to win, she needs allies, and she finds them in the town. The Doyles try to gaslight Noemí into thinking her knowledge is wrong, but she can rely on Dr. Camarillo and Marta Duval to remind her that the Doyle’s “science” is not real. Marta Duval is particularly interesting due to being a “witch”, someone whose knowledge of nature would be dismissed by the supposedly civilized Doyles, but it is her “potion” that helps Noemí and Catalina to escape.
If Noemí had behaved like a Gothic heroine and accepted to remain enclosed within High Place, if she hadn’t reached out to people in town, if she wasn’t an educated woman, she would be easily entrapped by the Doyles. It’s her refusal to play by the rules of Gothic fiction that saves her. It’s not a coincidence that we are told multiple times that Noemí is intimately familiar with Gothic literature thanks to Catalina. She’s genre-aware.
It was the kind of thing she could imagine impressing her cousin: an old house atop a hill, with mist and moonlight, like an etching out of a Gothic novel. Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, those were Catalina’s sort of books. […] Noemí preferred to jump from party to party on a weekend and drive a convertible.
The threat of sexual violence has been a staple of the Gothic genre ever since it’s birth in The Castle of Otranto, and there are many parallels between Noemí and the main character of that classic novel. In Otranto, the pure and noble Isabella was set to marry Conrad, Manfred’s son, but Conrad dies right before the wedding. The evil Manfred then tries to dispose of his wife so he can marry (read: rape) Isabella, because he needs to get a new heir. Manfred’s attempts to assault Isabella have an incestuous undertone, since she was supposed to be his daughter-in-law, and incest (or the insinuation of it) is another common theme in Gothic fiction. In Mexican Gothic, we learn that the Doyle family has been practicing incest to keep their bloodline pure, and our main character, Noemí, has a similar situation to Isabella. She has become part of the Doyle family through Catalina’s marriage, making Virgil’s desire for her incestuous, and Howard’s push to have children through Noemí is reminiscent of Manfred’s desperate need of an heir.
Noemí’s own sexual desires differentiate her from Isabella and the usual Gothic heroine archetype, but it brings to mind another classic of the Gothic: Dracula. Bram Stoker’s novel explores feminine sexuality and the danger that women’s sexual liberation represents to Victorian society, exemplified by the vampire wives and by Lucy Westenra. Noemí’s desire and freedom is not framed as negative by the narrative, but it makes her clash with the Doyles, that look down on her as depraved and lustful. There’s a racist, fetishistic angle to this as well—Noemí’s dark skin and her native heritage makes her exotic and tantalizing to these White men, and they see her as naturally less pure. Just like Latin men have been characterized as rapists, Latin women have been turned into sex objects.
Ultimately, Noemí turns this around. She’s not a pure and fragile heroine, and even though the Doyles try to make her ashamed and turn her sexuality against her, Noemí doesn’t have to reject her own desires to win. She gets the man she wants, and she also gets to pursue her academic career. Noemí therefore represents a new kind of modern woman, that doesn’t fit int the maiden/vamp system of classic Gothic female characters.
At the core of this book is the conflict between the colonizer (the Doyle family) and the colonized (the Taboada women, the people of El Triunfo, the unnamed natives of Howard’s past). The Doyle’s try to enforce a Gothic narrative upon the Latin American characters, but they rebel against the roles imposed on them. The author’s clear understanding of the Gothic genre is obvious in the way that she thoroughly dismantles it.
Colonizers as parasites.
It was necessary, always is. The fungus would erupt up, from her body, up through the soil, weaving itself into the walls, extending itself into the foundations of the building. And the gloom needed a mind. It needed her. The gloom was alive. It was alive in more than one way; at its rotten core there was the corpse of a woman, her limbs twisted, her hair brittle against the skull. And the corpse stretched its jaws open, screaming inside the earth, and from her dried lips emerged the pale mushroom.
The message of the novel is quite clear. The author paints the English Doyle family as parasites whose power relies on the exploitation of native bodies. Howard’s magic mushroom, which he claims to control and understand, is something sacred that existed before him and that he corrupted for his evil deeds. To do so, he had to literally use the body of a Native American woman as fuel, because he could never give birth to anything by himself.
The Doyles imagine themselves as the owners of the world, but they are poor and pathetic without people to work the mines for them. They need the Taboadas' money to sustain themselves, and yet they will never see the Taboadas as anything more than inferior to them.
I think towards the end, the message gets slightly lost by focusing so much on Agnes, one of Howard’s wives. I was expecting the “ghost” to be the Native American woman that Howard killed long ago, and I think that would have made the ending a bit stronger.
The Francis Dilemma.
While I understand that Noemí getting together with Francis ties into the theme of female liberation, I think it undermines the novel to some extent. I thought the romance story line was played too straight and it felt really out of place. It was jarring to switch from Noemí and the Gothic horrors she has to confront to her and Francis flirting.
I’m very conflicted about Francis as a character. He’s a man that is complicit in his family’s atrocities, even if not willingly. However, he’s somewhat female-coded. Francis is a “failed” man in the eyes of the Doyle patriarch—he’s sensitive and frail, weak, he doesn’t see himself as superior to women or the local people. He has the constitution of a classic Gothic heroine, and even though he helps Noemí escape, he’s as much a damsel in distress as she is, and in the end she saves him. I can see what the author may have been trying to do with Francis, but I’m not sure if it was done correctly.
I also find it odd that Florence, Francis’ mother, was not more developed. As the only living female Doyle, I expected the story to focus more on her and explore her feelings regarding her circumstances. She’s a victim of the system, while also being complicit in it. It’s weird that Francis is allowed to be humanized and sympathized with, while his mother remains a secondary character that gets killed off with little thought. I wonder if perhaps the feminist message would have been stronger if, instead of Francis, it had been Florence who became Noemí’s ally. Regardless, even if Florence could never be “saved” from the Doyle curse, the author could have done more with her.
Mexican Gothic is a great horror novel that deals with complex themes like colonialism and feminism. The characters are, for the most part, very well developed, and the way everything ties together in the end was extremely satisfying, even if I thought certain angles could have been better explored. I highly recommend it to people interested in Gothic fiction, but it may be better enjoyed after becoming familiar with the genre, to fully appreciate how the author includes and subverts Gothic elements.
The future, she thought, could not be predicted, and the shape of things could not be divined. To think otherwise was absurd. But they were young that morning, and they could cling to hope. Hope that the world could be remade, kinder and sweeter.
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YAS I'm glad you finished and wrote about it! Definetley gave me haunting on bly manor vibes but with colonialism thrown in lol. It's still my fave book by her.