Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
If you ask most Americans about books or films set in Mexico, they’ll probably call to mind images of dusty, tumbleweed-riddled landscapes or migrants fleeing narco wars. Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic offers a refreshing departure from those well-worn images and a scathing critique of the colonial point-of-view that makes them so ubiquitous.
The New York Times bestseller begins in 1950 Mexico City where 22-year-old debutante Noemí Taboada aspires to study for a master’s degree in anthropology at the National Autonomous University. Like many middle-class American parents of the 1950s, Noemí’s parents believe graduate study is a waste of time for women.
Girls were supposed to follow a simple life cycle, from debutante to wife. To study further would mean to delay this cycle, to remain a chrysalis inside a cocoon. They’d clashed over the matter a half dozen times, and her mother had cunningly stated it was up to Noemí’s father to hand down a decree, while her father never seemed poised to do so.
She finally gets her opportunity one night when she’s called home from a swanky party to find a disturbing letter from her cousin Catalina, who claims she’s being poisoned by her husband, Virgil Doyle, a British silver-mining heir. Catalina is sick, desperate, and hearing voices in the wall, so Noemí’s father cuts a deal. If she will journey to the Doyle’s remote mountain estate and rescue Catalina, she can go back to school.
Noemí ventures deep into the mountains, a day’s train ride from Mexico City. The trip up the mountaintop is chilly and misty and reminds her of the fairy tales Catalina loved when they were children.
Like many fairytales, this one has a dark side.
With business at a standstill and their wealth depleted, the Doyles and their family estate, High Point, have seen better days. Crumbling and lit only by candles and oil lamps, the house seems to represent the moral decay of the Doyle family itself. Still, its eerie grandeur “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. Moors and spiderwebs. Castles too, and wicked stepmothers who force princesses to eat poisoned apples, dark fairies cursing maidens and wizards who turn handsome lords to beasts.
The Doyle family isn’t just holding onto their moneyed past but onto the colonial and patriarchal society that enabled it. Virgil’s father imports English soil, English servants, serves English food, and insists those at High Place speak only English. Virgil was only allowed to marry Catalina because, thanks to her French mother, she was the closest thing they could find to a wealthy white woman. Naturally, they don’t approve of Noemí, whom they see as Catalina’s lesser, darker-skinned, relative. From the moment she arrives, her every move is challenged. She is repulsed by their elitism but also seduced, with unexpected desires surfacing in a series of disturbing dreams.
While the issues of racism and sexism play out in concrete, realistic ways, Moreno-Garcia also draws on the gothic novels of yore and modern magical realism to emphasize the infectious nature of colonial legacies. A mysterious fungus is overtaking the estate and the bodies and minds of anyone who enters, poisoning them into submission.
Disoriented and weakened, the easiest choice is to give in to those in power and to accept the material and social benefits they can offer. Moreno-Garcia reminds us that risking the comforts of today for the unknown potential of a better world can take heroic effort.
Unlike in Catalina’s fairy tales, the women will not be saved by a prince. It will be up to them to save themselves. The question is: Will they choose to?
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