Mexican Gothic

All bodies that enter the orbit of High Place and the Doyles are subject to corruption by the mushroom; corrupt bodies are thus important symbols of the Doyles’ subversion of the natural order.

There are two very specific corrupt bodies—those of Howard and Agnes—that highlight the impact of attempting to disrupt the natural order by evading death. Howard’s body is loathsome and smells of rot, two features that reinforce his moral corruption in exploiting people for hundreds of years. Moreno-Garcia uses detailed, visceral descriptions of Howard’s corrupt body to inject terror into the narrative.

Agnes’s body has been stripped of flesh by the corrupting influence of the golden mushrooms, which fed on her flesh to create the gloom. Corruption in this case is indistinguishable from transformation, highlighting the degree to which the changes the human body endures through aging and childbirth can at times be horrifying, especially for characters as rigid as the Doyles.

As is to be expected from a novel in the Gothic genre, the characters in Mexican Gothic go from assuming that the world and people function rationally to losing a grip on reality in a world ostensibly governed by the supernatural. To dream or to have visions is to be at the mercy of the supernatural effects of the mushroom, in other words.

On the other hand, Moreno-Garcia inserts several allusions to Carl Jung, who held that dreams can often reveal truths about real, waking life that the subconscious or shadow self would rather repress. Noemí’s dreams function in this way; they reveal that her intuitions about the Doyles are accurate, and they give her insight into the darker aspects of her own sexuality and the powerful lure Virgil Doyle has on her. Noemí’s willingness to recognize the world beyond the rational, scientific mode is one of her saving graces when it comes to surviving the Doyles.

The ouroboros—a snake eating its own tale—is a mystical symbol for infinity, and the Doyles adopt the ouroboros as their family symbol to represent their efforts to escape death through their creation of the gloom. The ouroboros images around High Place frequently show the snake (a phallic symbol representing the power of the Doyle men) piercing a mushroom or an egg, both of which represent fertility or women’s reproductive capacity. This variation is an explicit reference to the exploitation of women and women’s bodies at the heart of the Doyles’ enterprise.

In the Christian tradition the serpent is a symbol for Satan and unholy knowledge, making the presence of serpents all over High Place an overt foreshadowing of the Doyles’ use of death and murder to secure power. Within some Indigenous Mexican cultures, particularly Mesoamerican ones, the snake or the serpent is a symbol of power, fertility, creation, or protection. The Doyles’ abuse of the El Triunfo community, and their perversion of the cycle of life, death, and rebirth celebrated by the mushroom keepers from whom they stole the golden mushroom, symbolizes their misuse of and disrespect for Mexican culture.

Noemí and Ruth are both characters who open their eyes to see the truth behind the veneer of civility the Doyles show to the rest of the world. Ruth’s advice to Noemí to open her eyes allows Noemí to wake from the powerful dreams that undercut her sanity. Opening one’s eyes is the opposite of being asleep, which is the equivalent of surrendering control to the gloom and the Doyles. Opening one’s eyes is also an effort to fully extend the senses to look at the physical world—a key skill for scientists and rational thinkers like Noemí. Noemí’s ability to closely observe what is happening around her and to think critically are the strengths that allow her to survive High Place.

High Place is a symbol for the house of Doyle. It is an English manor that is out of place on a Mexican mountaintop, just as the Doyles are out of place in Mexico because they hold on to their pretensions of nobility. The house is decrepit and lacks modern conveniences, making it a perfect reflection of the Doyles’ retrograde racial and gender politics, a point Moreno-Garcia reinforces by putting “High” in the name of the house. The haunted house is a convention of Gothic novels, so the use of High Place as the setting is one of several ways that Moreno-Garcia pays homage to the genre.

The gloom is literally the marriage of Agnes’s mind and the mushroom; it is also the mechanism that allows Howard to evade the cycle of life and death, making the gloom the most important symbol of the Doyles’ disrespect for human life and objectification of the human body, especially those of women. Mushrooms are decomposers of organic material, which has led to their association with corruption and decay. High Place and the Doyles’ infection with mushrooms underscores their association with death and corruption.

In violation of the rules Florence hands down on Noemí’s first night at High Place, Noemí smokes a cigarette in her room, making the act of smoking a cigarette a little rebellion that reflects Noemí’s refusal to conform. Noemí also mentions that the way she holds her cigarette is a copy of a movie-star pose she uses to show off her beauty; smoking a cigarette is Noemí’s way of asserting a more liberated femininity than what is acceptable to her father and the Doyles. Finally, a cigarette is at its most basic a light in the darkness; Noemí’s smoking protects her from some of the mushroom’s effects by giving her hope that she can resist the dark forces surrounding her in High Place and by serving as an irritant to the mushroom and the gloom.