From the title on, Mexican Gothic, the latest from Mexican Canadian novelist Silvia Moreno-Garcia, leaves no doubt about its genre or its self-awareness. Fans of the Gothic will find all its greatest hits lined up and ready for savoring – the crumbling house, the family with a secret, fraught sexual dynamics, ghosts of a restless past. Moreno-Garcia delivers it all with gusto. But more than mere homage, the novel’s pulpy plot invites a closer read to its treatment of race, colonialism, patriarchy – and some very scary ecology.
Moreno-Garcia locates her Gothic in 1950s Mexico; her heroine is Noemí Taboada, a high society beauty sent to check in on her beloved cousin, Catalina. Recently married to English expat Virgil Doyle, proud owner of a defunct silver mine, Catalina’s rambling letters home have aroused her family’s concern. No swooning damsel, Noemí is vibrant, cunning, and sharp-tongued. She’ll needs all that and more to escape the machinations of the Doyle family, who decide to make the most of Noemí’s intrusion.
The Doyle home is a quintessential Gothic locale, “sick with rot,” surrounded by ravines and mist, and adorned with the Doyles’ consistent design sensibility. The family favor two motifs, the mushroom and the ouroboros, both of which offer clues to the dark secrets of the family’s past. Moreno-Garcia tells the story in economical, cinematic prose, dramatic dialogue interspersed with efficient and evocative description. Her real strength is the grotesque; her body horror is visceral and memorable. You may be meeting some of her monsters in your dreams.
No Gothic is complete without a villain, and Mexican Gothic has some juicy ones. Brave Noemí must face a conniving patriarch, a cruel female enforcer of the house’s rules and, of course, her cousin’s husband, violent and sexually charismatic. There’s little nuance in the characterization. The villains are bad, the heroes are good: the lines of contention are clear. The most interesting of the bunch is Francis, Virgil’s cousin, a pallid discontent who is sympathetic to Noemí’s plight. Half unlikely ally and half gender-swapped damsel in distress, Francis subversively takes the role of the romantic lead that might, in a more traditional Gothic novel, be filled by the bellowing anti-hero from whom Virgil is descended. The other characters keep to their types. Distressed Catalina is ineffectual for much of the book. The other Doyles never waver in their villainy.
Whatever subtlety is missing from the characterization can be found in the themes and symbolism, which reward reader attention. The Doyles made their fortune in silver, extracting Mexican resources and labor and hoarding the wealth for themselves. The secrets of the Gothic family not only offer up an extreme depiction of the evils of exploitation but reveal how the structure of the family itself, and its obsession with inheritance, suitable heirs, and purity, enables the replication of colonial violence. The novel also takes care to consider how these systems require patriarchy to assert themselves, as Doyle women are domesticated into mothers and stewards for the next generation. In Mexican Gothic, colonialism dehumanizes even those who materially benefit from it.
With its scheming patriarch, obsessed with reproduction in the most literals sense, and its ghostly discarded women, Mexican Gothic ought to be read alongside Gloria Naylor’s Linden Hills, a literary Gothic set in a prosperous Black suburb. Both novels insist that the Gothic need not be white, and indeed the Gothic’s preoccupations with family, property, and inheritances of all sorts make it an especially well-suited genre for pointed critiques of capitalism, colonialism, and racism. Mixed-race and brown-skinned, Noemí is exoticized by the Doyles, while her high-class status and proximity to whiteness insulate her from the utter disregard they show the working-class Mexicans of the surrounding town. The eugenics-minded family expect Noemí to be flattered that they admire her bloodline, while the novel is eager to display the terror of the Doyles’ racial obsessions as well as the ironic futility in creating a “pure” and ideal family. The Doyles are drawn as a quintessential Gothic colonizer, utilizing eugenics, labor exploitation, and patriarchy for their own gain, while devouring themselves in the process.
Mexican Gothic’s most unexpected twist is its attention to the ecogothic, applying the Gothic’s usual ambivalence to the natural environment. Noemí’s arrival in the Gothic world of the novel is marked by her traversal of a forest, which transforms from “bucolic landscape” to a gloomy and barren environment, just as the Gothic forest is a dark mirror to the Romantics’ idealized notion of nature.[1] But I don’t just mean the foreboding scenery around the Doyle house; the real interest lies with the nonhuman life within. I don’t want to give too much away, so let’s just say Moreno-Garcia has conjured up a particularly nasty example of symbiosis, reminiscent of the sinister mushrooms and poem-writing fungi that pepper the oeuvre of Jeff VanderMeer. The novel invites questions of nonhuman intelligence and intent, and suggests that a close relationship to nature may not always be a good thing. The Doyles are intent on taking advantage of their environment and surrounding natural resources at all costs, which leads them to make a deal with a very unique devil.
Even with all these weighty themes, Mexican Gothic is at heart a brisk and entertaining read. I’d even tell you to bring it to the beach if going to the beach was at all advisable. Instead, wait for one of those dramatic summer thunderstorms, crack it open, and sink into its pages of mildewy opulence. You’ll come away with broadened horizons of what a Gothic novel can be.
Check out Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s website.
Notes
[1] Smith, Andrew and William Hughes. “Introduction: Defining the EcoGothic.” EcoGothic, Manchester University Press, 2013: p. 5.
For more on the Gothic, check out Pet Sematary as folk gothic; and the gothic of Crimson Peak.
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