Shelf Talk: Mexican Gothic

Shelf Talk

A curious thing about books: they come to life when they’re read, and they have a life of their own. They’re in conversation with each other, with you and me (the reader), and with everything we've ever read. That’s what Shelf Talk is all about: books I’ve read, how they fit into the web of my reading life, and how they influence my writing life. These aren’t traditional book reviews, but reflections from the bookshelf—part response, part personal take, part invitation to explore for yourself.

Shelf Talk: Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

There’s a moment in Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic that reminded me of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper. Our protagonist, Noemi Taboada is in her bedroom in the rundown and poorly lit High Place mansion tucked in a forest in the Mexican countryside, when she notices the wallpaper moving and shapeshifting. In the title alone, Moreno-Garcia sets us up for the experience of the book. However, I was unprepared for how deftly she drew on the tradition of Gothic novels and stories that center the confinement and gaslighting of women to develop a rich, dark tale of one family’s sinister manipulation and the spirited young woman who would take them down.

Noemi ends up at High Place after receiving a disturbing letter from her newlywed cousin, who now lives in the perpetually dark and dilapidated mansion. Noemi is a high-class debutante, interested in parties and fun, not amateur rescue missions. But she also wants to go to college. She strikes a deal with her uncle: get her cousin back home, and he’ll pay for her college education. Once at High Place and under the thumb of her cousin’s husband and his father, it’s clear something is very wrong with this family and the house. Noemi has one ally, the family’s youngest son, but even he’s not that helpful. The house, the family, and the history of the place wreaks of violence, murder, and madness. As Moreno-Garcia turns the screws on Noemi, the window of escape grows smaller and smaller.

The book held so many ‘ah-ha’ moments for me and echoed so many other books I’ve loved in the best ways. It started with Noemi and the wallpaper bringing back The Yellow Wallpaper, the classic story so many of us read in college about a woman hospitalized for postpartum depression and seeing the wallpaper move and transform on the walls. There we have a woman confined and losing her mind, and we don’t know if the cure is helping or hurting—but we know the woman cannot escape her physical or mental prison. And here, we have two women in a house that seems driven to be their prison, one of whom already seems to be losing her mind.

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins also came to mind, about a woman trying to save her sister from a sinister marriage. Jane Eyre flickers through these pages, as does Wuthering Heights. The use of fire in Mexican Gothic even parallels Jane Eyre. I’ve loved these books for a long time, for their settings on the windswept moors, for their stories of forbidden love, for the mysteries to be solved (I loved a good mystery—especially a murder).

Looking at these novels through the lens of Mexican Gothic, they also all include themes of women confined, controlled, gaslit, and stunted by men, and even other women who are ultimately controlled by men. It’s not surprising, given that how few rights women had when these novels were written. I can’t help but ruminate on the lessons the women in these pages are shouting out to us now about autonomy and liberty.

The themes Mareno-Garcia pulled forward for Mexican Gothic are not tropes or Easter eggs. Rather, she’s woven the tradition of the Gothic novel deep into the fabric of her story. I didn’t even realize it was there until I happened to catch it out of the corner of my eye, a dark shadow moving in the even dark hallways of High Place.

Mexican Gothic: In Conversation With:

• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

• Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

• The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

• The Yellow Wallpaper (short story) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

• Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys—on my shelf to be read, a book in conversation with Jane Eyre

• Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

Happy Reading!

Judy