A Cursed Circle: Confronting Patriarchal and Colonizing Legacies in Silvia Moreno-Garcia's Mexican Gothic

Abstract:

In Silvia Moreno-Garcia's Mexican Gothic (2020), the Doyle family home of High Place is a living, breathing structure. The home indelibly retains memories of dead women within its walls that it uses to communicate with the novel's protagonist, Noemí Taboada. Moreno-Garcia uses this supernatural home to address legacies of violence against women and minorities by staging the colonizer-colonized relationship for Noemí in areas of the home that are typically viewed as feminine or private, intimate spaces. She furthers this discussion by reshaping a typically European genre for a new audience while critically examining a contentious period of Mexico's history. Through an intersection of spatial theory, postcolonial theory, and ecocriticism, this essay analyzes the way Moreno-Garcia constructs a haunting domestic space to confront patriarchal and colonizing legacies that are often suppressed in cultural and literary memory.