Mexican Gothic

“Many formerly thriving mining sites that had extracted silver and gold during the Colonia interrupted their operations once the War of Independence broke out. Later on, the English and the French were welcomed during the tranquil Porfiriato, their pockets growing fat with mineral riches. But the Revolution had ended this second boom.” 

The Porfiriato is the long period between Mexican independence and the start of the Mexican Revolution. This passage provides important historical and political context for situating the Doyles as European interlopers who use the cover of their privilege to exploit Mexicans and Mexican culture. This context is an important part of Moreno-Garcia’s critique of Europeans’ influence in Mexico.

“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. 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 into beasts. Noemí preferred to jump from party to party on a weekend and drive a convertible.” 

The explicit allusions to Romantic and Gothic novels allow the reader to situate High Place as being among those English wrecks and foreshadows the kinds of challenges Noemí is likely to encounter in the chapters ahead. In addition, Noemí’s rejection of these kinds of novels and settings signals Noemí’s more modern perspective on romance and her own life as a modern woman.

“The idea that the half-breed mestizo of Mexico inherits the worst traits of their progenitors is incorrect. If the stamp of an inferior race afflicts them, it is due to a lack of proper social models. Their impulsive temperament requires early restraint. Nevertheless, the mestizo possesses many inherent splendid attributes, including a robustness of body.” 

Noemí comes across this passage in one of the many racist eugenicist texts in the Doyle library. This treatise echoes Howard’s conversation over dinner the previous night and underscores the Doyles’ deeply objectifying ideas about Mexicans and women. This kind of retrograde scientific racism is actually the playbook and justification the Doyles use for securing wombs to help them propagate themselves and the mushrooms. The passage is thus another example of foreshadowing.

“She thought of those green wallpapers so beloved by the Victorians that contained arsenic. The so-called Paris and Scheele greens. And wasn’t there something in a book she’d read once about how microscopic fungi could act upon the dyes in the paper and form arsine gas, sickening the people in the room? She was certain she’d heard about how these most civilized Victorians had been killing themselves in this way.” 

This scientific explanation for effects generally assumed to be paranormal or supernatural shows Noemí’s initial commitment to rationality before High Place and the gloom get a grip on her. This use of science to explain the supernatural is also an allusion that connects Mexican Gothic to 19th-century Gothic novels by authors like Ann Radcliff.

“She wanted to be liked. Perhaps this explained the parties, the crystalline laughter, the well-coiffed hair, the rehearsed smile. She thought that men such as her father could be stern and men could be cold like Virgil, but women needed to be liked or they’d be in trouble. A woman who is not liked is a bitch, and a bitch can hardly do anything: all avenues are closed to her.” 

Noemí is keenly aware of how gender roles limit the range of women’s being. This passage also shows that Noemí has learned to use these expectations strategically to get what she wants, despite men’s assumption of her inferiority. Her strategic use and subversion of expectations of women here and throughout the novel underscore the book’s feminist themes.

“Noemí thought of her odd dream, the golden glow. It had been a rather hideous nightmare, but she had not had time to analyze it. She had a friend who swore by Jung, but Noemí had never understood the whole ‘the dream is the dreamer’ bit, nor had she cared to interpret her dreams. Now she recalled one particular thing Jung wrote: everyone carries a shadow. And like a shadow the woman’s words hung over Noemí as she drove back to High Place.” 

Psychiatrist Carl Jung holds that dreams reveal truths about the person who has the dreams; he also embraces the idea of a shadow self that encompasses all the dark parts of the self that one mostly attempts to repress. The mushroom’s influence on Noemí is such that it calls forth aspects of herself that she has repressed—the desire to be dominated, free rein of sexual desire, and enclosure. During her daylight hours, Noemí fights for her autonomy, insists that the Doyles respect consent, and ranges freely in terms of geography and control over her body. The dreams are a motif at this point in the novel, but they are also elements that Moreno-Garcia uses to create suspense and terror since the reason why the dreams would liberate this shadow Noemí is not yet clear.

“And she felt such sweet, sickening desire flowing through her body, making her roll her hips, sinuous, a serpent. But it was he who coiled himself around her, swallowed her shuddering sigh with his lips, and she didn’t quite want this, not like that, not those fingers digging too firmly into her flesh, and yet it was hard to remember why she hadn’t wanted it. She must want this. To be taken, in the dirt, in the dark, without preamble or apology.” 

In this particular dream/vision Noemí fully embraces her shadow, but it is one that requires she debase herself and enjoy what is essentially an act of rape or sexual assault. Her responses in this state are so opposite to who she usually is that the passage indicates that the house and mushroom have made inroads on Noemí’s autonomy and rationality.

“She recalled, rather grimly, that certain fairy tales end in blood. In Cinderella, the sisters cut off their feet, and Sleeping Beauty’s stepmother was pushed into a barrel full of snakes. That particular illustration on the last page of one of the books Catalina used to read to them suddenly came back to her, in all its vivid colors. Green and yellow serpents, the tails poking out of a barrel as the stepmother was stuffed into it.” 

The snake is a Doyle symbol. Noemí connects its image to the fairytales she and Catalina read as girls; although Catalina (and to a lesser extent Noemí) have always seen these tales as narratives about idealized love, Noemí’s experiences in the house and recognition of her cousin’s misery cause her to revise her reading of the stories, which are violent and frequently have bad outcomes for women.

“And afterward someone had scrubbed the blood away, someone had burned the dirty linens or replaced the rugs with the ugly scarlet splotches on them, and life had gone on. But how could it have gone on? Such misery, such ugliness, surely it could not be erased.” 

Noemí is formulating a theory about the psychic trace that violence leaves on places (something akin to what writer Toni Morrison calls “rememory”). The point here is that what ails High Place need not even be an actual supernatural being—the trauma of Ruth’s murder of the Doyles and her suicide are enough to create the feeling of haunting in the house. Once again, Noemí is reaching for rational explanations for the uncomfortable aura in the house.

“It’s not about lust, it’s communion. They say the mushroom speaks to you.” 

Noemí is explaining to Francis how Indigenous Mexicans like her Mazatec ancestors use mushrooms, which contrasts with Francis’s naturalist apprehension of the mushroom by categorizing them on spore prints. It contrasts even more so with the Doyles’ use of the mushrooms as a means of exploiting the community. This scene emphasizes how important Noemí’s Mexican and Indigenous heritage is to her identity.

“She pictured him talking to his mother, whispering, the word filth on his lips and both of them nodding, agreeing. Superior and inferior types, and Noemí did not belong in the first category, did not belong in High Place, did not deserve anything but scorn.”

Noemí’s sense that she is out of place is a result of the Doyles’ misogyny and racism, which they express using their talk of superior and inferior races. Noemí’s naming of this ideology reinforces Moreno-Garcia’s feminist themes and her resituating of the Gothic genre to critique colonialism and imperialism.

“Once upon a time there was a princess in a tower, once upon a time a prince saved the girl from the tower. Noemí sat on the bed and contemplated the notion of enchantments that are never broken.” 

At this point Noemí has begun to lose her mobility (Florence forbids further trips with Francis into town in this scene), and she is coming to understand that even she had some idealized notion of what life would be like for Catalina in an English manor on a Mexican mountaintop. This realization is couched as a comparison between fairytales and the ugly reality of lack of freedom.

“And now Noemí was afraid, now she knew terror.” 

Despite the centrality of terror in the Gothic genre, the word “terror” only appears in the novel three times, and this the first instance, which comes as Noemí has a gloom-induced vision of Agnes, the tortured golden woman in whose flesh the mushroom took root. When Noemí wakes up, she has been apprehended by Virgil, who moves from making passes to sexually harassing Noemí. That Noemí feels terror at this point makes sense, since this is the moment when she increasingly loses her ability to distinguish reality from unreality and to escape the Doyles’ domination.

“This house, she was sure, was haunted. She wasn’t one for believing in things that go bump in the night either, but right that second she firmly felt every spook and demon and evil thing might be crawling about the Earth, like in Catalina’s stories.” 

With this admission, Noemí completely surrenders her usual commitment to science and rationality. She has been consumed by the supernatural effects in the house.

“‘There’re heavy places. Places where the air itself is heavy because an evil weighs it down. Sometimes it’s a death, could be it’s something else, but the bad air, it’ll get into your body and it’ll nestle there and weigh you down. That’s what’s wrong with the Doyles of High Place,’ the woman said, concluding her tale.” 

Healer Marta Duval uses the language of Mexican folk beliefs to explain that something is wrong at High Place. By the light of day, Noemí scoffs at this explanation. The irony is that Marta’s apprehension is not far from accurate: High Place is overcome by bad air, only the bad air is a hallucinogenic mushroom weaponized by corrupt Europeans.

“In a sense all dreams foretell events, but some more clearly than others. […] and dreams about ghosts, not recorded in this book, inform people about happenings among the dead.”

This a quote from E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s anthropological text on the role of magic, visions, and dreams among an African tribe. Noemí attempts to read the text because she usually finds the language of science comforting, especially in light of the ways that the house has begun to act on her unconscious. From this point on, however, Noemí is overwhelmed by the ways the mushroom nudges her through dreams and drives to bypass her rationality. This sentence perfectly encapsulates the idea that Noemí’s dreams offer more insight into the reality of what is happening at High Place than Noemí’s ability to reason.

“‘Any place is made for love,’ she protested. ‘Not this place and not us. You look back two, three generations, as far as you can. You won’t find love. We are incapable of such a thing.’”

Despite her deep belief in rationality and her increasing suspicion of fairytale narratives about love, Noemí still believes in the possibility of love in any place and for anyone. This is an optimistic perspective on love’s power to overcome darkness like that which exists among the Doyles. One could argue that it is Noemí’s ability to love and her sense that love implies duties to the beloved (Francis and Catalina in this case) are important parts of her resilience, a trait that allows her to survive and resist the mushroom’s influence.

“A fairy tale, yes. Snow White with the magical kiss and the beauty who transforms the beast. Catalina had read all those stories for the younger girls, and she had intoned each line with great dramatic conviction. It had been a performance. Here was the result of Catalina’s daydreams. Here was her fairy tale. It amounted to a stilted marriage that, coupled with her sickness and her mental tribulations, must place an exhausting burden on her shoulders.” 

Noemí’s understanding of Virgil and Catalina’s unhealthy marriage is the final nail in the coffin for any idealized notion of traditional, romantic love between a man and a woman. The case of Catalina and Virgil helps Moreno-Garcia reinforce the feminist themes at work in her Gothic and shows her commitment to renovating the genre to reject the centrality of the romance plot as a convention.

“It is important to maintain a sense of order in one’s house, in one’s life. It helps you determine your place in the world, where you belong. Taxonomical classifications help place each creature atop its right branch. It’s no good to forget yourself, nor your obligations. Francis has duties, he has chores. You pull him away from those chores. You make him forget his obligations.” 

Florence makes the connection between the racism and eugenicist ideologies that govern the Doyles’ values. She uses the language of taxonomy, duty, and hierarchy, just what one would expect from a person steeped in a sense of racial superiority. Moreno-Garcia has drawn Florence as an unsympathetic character, and this passage underscores that her complicity in the Doyles’ actions cement her ill-natured character. Moreno-Garcia’s point seems to be that not all love between women is sisterly, as without the aid of women like Florence, the Doyles could not have pulled off their transmigration scheme for centuries.

“If the three of them were not hysterical, then the three of them had truly come in contact with something inside this house. But must it be supernatural? Must it be a curse? A ghost? Could there be a more rational answer? Was she seeing a pattern where there wasn’t any? After all, that’s what humans did: look for patterns. She could be weaving three disparate stories into a narrative.” 

With the clue from Ruth’s journal, Noemí’s faith in her own ability to reason resurges. Her caveat—that she may well be engaging in a fallacy, looking for order where there is none—shows that her experiences in High Place have already changed her. Her ability to construct and reconstruct narratives, however, is a skill that allows her to survive the events that come next, so this is a welcome development.

“She did not expect him to be lying there, over the blankets, naked. His skin was terribly pale and his veins contrasted grotesquely against his whiteness, indigo lines running up and down his body. Yet that was not the worst of it. One of his legs was hideously bloated, crusted over with dozens of large, dark boils [….] It was horrid, horrid, and she thought he was a corpse, afflicted by the ravages of putrefaction, but he lived. His chest rose and dipped, and he breathed.” 

One of the central ways Moreno-Garcia introduces horror elements into her Gothic is through gruesome representations of the corrupt and damaged human body. Howard’s body is monstrous not just because of the boils but because he has lived long past his natural lifespan, a perversion of the life-death-rebirth cycle that is so central to the Mexican culture in which this perversion has managed to thrive.

“In the dream there had been a strange taste in his mouth, like ripe fruit, and he, with the pinstriped jacket, hovering above her, taking off his clothes, slipping into the tub and touching her, while Noemí wrapped her arms around him. The memory was tinged with arousal, but also with a terrible humiliation.” 

Noemí recognizes that the walls between reality and imagination, dreams and ordinary life, have collapsed. The detail about the jacket allows her to recognize that Virgil has sexually assaulted her, thus violating her consent. The refusal to acknowledge the importance of consent and respect for women’s bodily autonomy is part of what makes the Doyles monstrous.

“A body. That’s what they all were to them. The bodies of miners in the cemetery, the bodies of women who gave birth to their children, and the bodies of those children who were simply the fresh skin of the snake. And there on the bed lay the body that mattered. The father.” 

Noemí names the objectification at the heart of the Doyles’ enterprise in this passage, and it empowers her to destroy the Doyles. The common link between what the Doyles do to children, women, and their Mexican workers is a carelessness about life that directly stems from their colonizing ethos.