Mexican Gothic

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-5

Chapters 6-10

Chapters 11-17

Chapters 18-20

Chapters 21-27

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Important Quotes

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Themes

The Feminist Gothic

Content Warning: This section of the guide references sexual assault and rape.

Moreno-Garcia announces the genre of her novel with its title, Mexican Gothic. The general setting, characters, use of terror to entertain readers, and focus on the supernatural are all elements that place the novel firmly in the Gothic genre. On the other hand, Moreno-Garcia’s decision to write a Mexican Gothic signals her intention to renovate the genre. She departs from conventions of the English Gothic by playing with expectations related to gender.

While the traditional English Gothic got its start with 18th-century novelist Horace Walpole, Mexican Gothic is more clearly connected to the work of writers like 19th-century novelist Ann Radcliffe. Radcliffe used terror to entertain her readers, but she also framed seemingly supernatural effects as ultimately rooted in the natural world and included determined female protagonists who challenged traditional notions of femininity.

Another of Moreno-Garcia’s Gothic conventions is the inclusion of dreams, visions, and portrayals of inexplicable compulsions within Noemí. These elements add suspense and terror, and her approach to inspiring terror is not unusual for the genre. These terrors are primarily psychological ones because Noemí cannot fit them into the rational order in which she lives. Moreno-Garcia sticks closely to genre conventions when, even in the early chapters, there is some indication that there is a natural explanation for what is happening to Noemí.

The early scene in which a buzzing and a mist, a natural sound and an atmospheric phenomenon, overtake Noemí in the graveyard is the first sign that there is something other than the supernatural at work in the novel. The revelation that the mushrooms, which Noemí ingests through the air and food at High Place, act on the mind provides a natural explanation for these supernatural effects.

Moreno-Garcia’s approach to gender is one of the main ways she departs from genre expectations. It is worth noting that Noemí enters High Place as a confident, modern Mexican woman, but under the debilitating effects of the mushrooms, she becomes subject to compulsions that erode her self-belief and make her psychologically vulnerable to the Doyles’ manipulations, especially from Virgil. With her knowledge that the mushrooms are warping her sense of reality and perception, Noemí recovers her autonomy and becomes capable of rescuing others rather than waiting on rescue from her father or from Francis, whose rescue attempt turns out to be a dead end orchestrated by Virgil. Noemí’s role as the hero of her own story underscores that Mexican Gothic is a feminist Gothic.

The novel’s feminist themes are particularly vivid because Moreno-Garcia intervenes in the Gothic genre with her representation of sexual violence and misogyny. While the threat of sexual violence is also convention of the Gothic, the direct presentation of the rape of the female protagonist is unusual. In 18th- and 19th-century Gothic literature, rape usually happens off stage, almost never involves the central female character, and is never allowed to muddy any romantic subplots. Virgil’s gloom-mediated and real-time assaults on Noemí are directly presented in the novel, and Moreno-Garcia takes care to represent the psychological reality of sexual assault while under the influence and Noemí’s efforts to defend herself through acts of defiance. These more nuanced and direct representations of sexual assault show how 20th-century feminism influenced how writers represent rape and sexual violence.

Finally, Virgil’s use of rape and the threat of sexual violence reflect the Doyles’ explicit misogyny, as they use women’s bodies and ability to reproduce to objectify and dehumanize women. The gloom is a monument to their misogyny, in fact, and Moreno-Garcia’s decision to make this the true horror of the novel further indicates the influence of feminism on this Gothic. Unlike the Doyles, even Francis (who tells Noemí that he was told never to look at Agnes), Noemí can recognize and name Agnes’s never-ending trauma and pain, as the gloom took root in her body. Noemí recognizes that “the woman was still there” (284) in the center of the gloom and thus discovers how to destroy the gloom. It takes a Gothic heroine who perceives that misogyny and objectification form the basis of the Doyles’ power to destroy the Doyles.

Colonialism and Imperialism in Mexico

In addition to revising the representation of women in the Gothic genre, Moreno-Garcia intervenes in the Gothic genre through her use of a Mexican setting over a traditional English setting. To understand the Doyles, it is important to understand the history of colonialism and imperialism in Mexico.

The oddity of having English silver barons set up shop in Northern Mexico is the result of Mexico’s colonial and post-revolutionary history. During the 16th century, Spain, like many other world powers, came to the Americas as a part of the European land and resource grab that bankrolled the creation of modernity in the Western world. In Mexico the Spanish extracted silver that flowed into Spain’s economy but also transformed the physical environment with the poisonous byproducts of mining and the infrastructure needed to extract ore efficiently.

Mexico was incorporated into the global economy as a colony whose resources were used to enrich Europeans rather than Mexicans. The other byproduct of this extraction economy was irrevocable change to the economic and social organization of Indigenous Mexicans, who made up a large part of the work force, first as forced laborers and then as wage laborers. The 16th-century destruction of the mushroom keepers reflects the larger destructive impact of the forces of colonization on Indigenous people.

Between 1810 and 1821, Mexico engaged in a drawn-out struggle for its independence from Spain. During this struggle for independence, the complicated and expensive mining works and machinery suffered damage due to lack of maintenance. After the Spanish lost control, foreign investment from other countries, including England, allowed for the restoration of much of Mexico’s mining capacity. The Doyles likely came as a part of this European influx, meaning that they have potentially been in Mexico since the early 18th century.

As this history makes clear, silver mining in Mexico is part of a long pattern of European political and economic exploitation of Mexico. Even after Mexican independence, European investors had an outsized role in the country, so much so that the prioritization of foreign investors over the needs of the Mexican working class became one the flashpoints that led to the Mexican Revolution (1910-1924).

As the stories Francis tells of the downturn in the Doyles’ fortunes during the revolutionary period make clear, the workers in the Doyle mines were no longer willing to be taken advantage of by people with foreign origins. Moreno-Garcia uses multiple symbols to highlight the larger political and social context of the Doyles as foreign interlopers exploiting Mexican land and Mexican people. High Place is an on-the-nose name that shows the Doyles have come to Mexico to secure a superior life no longer available to them in England. The tarnished silver and silver surfaces throughout the house point to the corruption and disregard for Mexican life that underwrites the house of Doyle.

When Noemí destroys the Doyles, she is excising the remains of European colonialism and imperialism from modern Mexico. Her efforts to prevent the resurgence of Europeans like the Doyles reflects efforts to counter how modern European capitalism in the form of European domination of Mexican industry existed long after the official end of colonialism. By framing this struggle within the conventions of a Gothic novel, Moreno-Garcia makes salient the horrors of Western exploitation of other cultures.

Death, Corruption, and Objectification in the House of Doyle

Francis and Virgil both admit that the Doyles moved to Mexico to continue their unholy activities far away from the others’ eyes. Once in Mexico, the Doyles used their privilege as English interlopers to exploit the local community. One of the terror-inspiring elements of the novel is Moreno-Garcia’s presentation of this exploitation. She uses images of death and corruption to characterize the Doyles as evil exploiters of Mexican people and culture.

The most potent indicator of how exploitative the relationship is between the Doyles and their adoptive country is the golden fungus, which the Doyles discovered somewhere outside of Europe and brought with them to Mexico, along with English soil designed to give it a proper footing in Mexican land. Using the mushrooms, the Doyles consume many lives, including that of their imported English workers and that of countless Mexican workers whose deaths do not even merit a marker in the High Place graveyard.

This carelessness with Mexican lives, coupled with the fact that it is some special property of the Doyles’ pure, Anglo-Saxon blood that allows them to transform into virtually immortal parasites, makes for an obvious political critique: The Doyles’ shabby empire is built on a foundation of racism and imperialism in which Mexican people and Mexican land are merely there for English consumption. Moreno-Garcia’s insistent presentation of Howard’s body as disgusting and corrupt is a moral judgment about the role Europeans have played in Mexico. The Doyles are evil, just as the persistent effects of Western colonialism and imperialism in Mexico are evil.

Even worse is that the Doyles have corrupted key aspects of Mexican culture. Death, especially ritual death and sacrifice, appears in many Columbian cultures in the Americas. In most of these cultures, sacrifice was generally in service to some greater good, such as maintaining the fertility of the people or the land. The well-being of people and land comes about only through acknowledging that there is a continuous cycle of life, death, and rebirth, one that requires blood sacrifice to continue. These deaths may have been violent, but they served some purpose beyond self-interest and material gain.

Howard attempts to subvert this cycle by sacrificing others—even his own descendants—for the sake of his own immortality. The image of the ouroboros, a mystical symbol for infinity, is appropriate for the Doyles because they believe they can escape this cycle by cheating death. This corruption of the role of death and sacrifice is just one of many ways that the Doyles damage the place where they live.

If the Doyles’ moral corruption wasn’t clear enough, Moreno-Garcia casts them as practitioners of a very modern evil—eugenics—that we now associate with some of the worst death-dealing atrocities of Western modernity, such as the Holocaust. Howard and Florence’s talk about lesser races and their English superiority is textbook scientific racism, which has served as justification for colonialism, imperialism, and more modern forms of Western domination of other cultures and economies.

Noemí’s destruction of Howard and the gloom is an act of self-rescue, of course, but she is also striking a blow for herself, her culture, and her Mazatec ancestors. By burning Howard’s corrupt body and High Place, she is reestablishing an old order that respects the cycle of death and rebirth. The novel’s resolution—Noemí’s creation of a new narrative built on acceptance of uncertainty and the possibility of love with Francis—is a fitting and life-affirming end to a very dark story.