The Return of the Repressed: Post-Colonial Gothic in the stories of Edgar Allan Poe and Silvia Moreno-Garcia

By Issy Bowyer

What place does the gothic genre have in our day and age? To many, the gothic genre is a form of escapism, a means of accessing the sublime. Its terror and the grotesque enable transcendence from our everyday lives. For others, this 17th century, dark romantic genre seems far removed from 21st century life; a genre that was and remains purely a form of entertainment. But there is more to the gothic genre with its hauntings, curses, and horror than meets the eye. While it can tell us much about the past, it can also warn us about our present.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s 2020 novel Mexican Gothic, a post-colonial gothic work, does exactly this. The tale is Rebecca-esque, centring around its female protagonist Noemí, a socialite and aspiring anthropology student in Mexico City, who is sent to investigate the worrying behaviour of her cousin Catalina. Catalina had recently married into the English Doyle family, who live in the mountains of rural Mexico and view themselves as superior in ‘breeding’ to use the term of Howard, the family’s unsettling eugenics-obsessed patriarch. The novel follows Noemí as she stays in the High Place, the Doyle family home, and attempts to uncover the house’s secrets and its role in her cousin’s rapidly declining mental health. Mexican Gothic is darkly thrilling in its evocation of the grotesque, with particularly compelling use of body horror – so chilling you cannot look away, pushing the boundaries between reality and fantasy, science and horror. The High Place is true to the gothic form, like a character itself, an alive thing, decaying because of its dark secret.

The High Place in Mexican Gothic recalls the house in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher (1839). In Poe’s gothic short story, a series of physical and mental hauntings lead to the bodily decline of the Usher descendants, the fall of the Usher family, and the falling of the house itself. The story takes place during the narrator’s visit to the family home of his friend Roderick Usher, where both he and his twin sister fall under a sickness following a series of hauntings, ultimately leading to the death of both Ushers. Though Usher is not widely regarded as part of the Southern Gothic subgenre, typically dealing with the violent, exploitative history of the ‘American South,’ the story’s engagement with the question of inheritance, and the warnings that it gives, regardless of Poe’s own authorial intentions, are extremely pertinent to the history of the South. In particular, the crimes committed when the South was first colonised by the English, and during the time of enslavement, are conveyed through the problems of inheritance and white supremacy told through the story’s gothic elements.

Decay is a symptom of the fall of the Usher and Doyle homes and the fall of both families. In the final part of Poe’s story, the House of Usher is struck by lightning, widening an existing crack in its façade. This creates a ‘fissure’ “extending from the roof of the building, in a zig-zag direction, to the base” (Poe, 355) that destroys the structure of the house, causing it to crumble into the tarn below. The fissure is a physical manifestation of an existing fault that will cause the fall of both house and family. Looking at the house as a metaphor for the South, we can view the fissure as a direct representation of the racist ideology of white supremacy and nationalism that was prominent during the time of enslavement in the Southern states, passed on through generations and inherited throughout the history of the South and where remnants of this ideology can still be found today. Like the fall of the house, this ideology is destructive and violent, and acts like a decay spreading through the South and through generations of people; the story is therefore a warning against such an ideology.

Roderick believes he and his sister have inherited a curse caused by a past crime the family has committed. The curse will end the Usher line, as neither Roderick nor Madeline are married. The crime, which has been covered up and repressed by the family through the generations is now coming back to haunt the twins. This curse manifests itself in Roderick’s sickness - an internal corruption causing his mind and body to slowly deteriorate. He claims that the cause of his illness is a ‘constitutional and family evil” (Poe, 332). His mental and physical decline manifests this repressed moral corruption.

Similarly in Mexican Gothic, the local healer, Marta Duval tells Noemí “That family is cursed […] everything they touch turns to rot” (Moreno-Garcia, 60) This curse manifests itself in the rapidly deteriorating condition of both Doyle patriarch Howard’s health, and Noemi’s cousin Catalina’s mental state. Catalina tells Noemí “The walls speak to me. They tell me secrets. Don’t listen to them, press your hands against your ears, Noemí. There are ghosts. They’re real. You’ll see them eventually” (Moreno-Garcia, 5). This haunting, the ghosts within the walls of the Doyle home is, Catalina suggests, a ‘family evil’ that perpetuated by the Doyles. Similar to the lightning strike’s fissure in Usher house the moral decay of the Doyle family is reflected in Mexican Gothic by the mould or fungus growing upon the walls of the High Palace. When Catalina first writes to Noemí and her father for help, she says “this house is sick with rot, stinks of decay, brims with every single evil and cruel sentiment.” Something “evil” related to the house itself, as a physical manifestation of the Doyle family, suggests a family secret, a repressed disturbing past that has returned to fester.

The repression of the Usher family secret comes to a head after Roderick’s sister Madeline dies and he and the narrator bury her in a coffin. Roderick’s sickness worsens and on one night his anxieties become extreme, telling the narrator Madeline has been buried alive. The narrator doesn’t believe this until her corpse bursts through the door: “there did stand the lofty and enshrouded figure of the lady Madeline of Usher. There was blood on her white robes” (Poe, 335). The untimely burial of Madeline symbolises the buried secrets and crimes of the Usher family, while the terror of her return from the dead reflects the family’s crimes coming back to haunt, the curse ultimately causing the death of the siblings and therefore the death of the family line. If there is a moral to this haunting it is that ultimately there is no escape from the consequences of our actions. We must own up to them and make amends rather than repressing them until they come back to haunt us. The story remains pertinent to the South. The Usher family can be viewed as one of the rich white landowning families that prospered on the back of others’ misery during the period of enslavement, the story suggesting that the crimes committed during this period in the history of the South have been prematurely buried – that history has been repressed and too early forgotten, but that it will return. The story encourages action, to acknowledge the crimes of the past and to make reparations.

I will not reveal the secret that lies behind the ‘curse’ upon the Doyles but suggest that this story of a white land-owning family again reflects a history of white supremacy grounded in repressed violence and exploitation. The Doyles’ use of the land for mining and the cultivation of certain high value plants, where they grow rich and leave the locals poor, reflects the history of colonialism in Mexico as much as Usher reflects that of the American South. Mexican Gothic, a story of a patriarch obsessed with eugenics, of a class divide between the English family of High Palace and the Mexican townspeople, and of a repressed family secret, uses the gothic elements of hauntings, curses, and decay to encourage us to question the past and the way it is viewed and addressed today. Moreno-Garcia’s novel deals with racism, colonialism and class in a way that makes her readers understand that the true horror of the novel lies not in these familiar generic conventions but within past and present reality. The horror that Noemí encounters is not ghosts nor monsters, but the legacy of white supremacy and racism, challenging the reader to look critically at how they understand both the past and their current moment. In this way, the gothic form asks us: what in our collective past haunts us, and what is the price we pay for its repression?

Works Cited:

Moreno-Garcia, Sylvia. Mexican Gothic. Del Rey Books, 2020.

Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry and Tales, by P. Quinn, The Library Of America, 1982, pp. 317–336.

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