{"title":"A Cursed Circle: Confronting Patriarchal and Colonizing Legacies in Silvia Moreno-Garcia's Mexican Gothic","authors":"Alejandra Ortega","doi":"10.1353/sdn.2024.a935474","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>In Silvia Moreno-Garcia's <i>Mexican Gothic</i> (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.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":54138,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN THE NOVEL","volume":"39 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5000,"publicationDate":"2024-08-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"STUDIES IN THE NOVEL","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sdn.2024.a935474","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LITERATURE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
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.
期刊介绍:
From its inception, Studies in the Novel has been dedicated to building a scholarly community around the world-making potentialities of the novel. Studies in the Novel started as an idea among several members of the English Department of the University of North Texas during the summer of 1965. They determined that there was a need for a journal “devoted to publishing critical and scholarly articles on the novel with no restrictions on either chronology or nationality of the novelists studied.” The founding editor, University of North Texas professor of contemporary literature James W. Lee, envisioned a journal of international scope and influence. Since then, Studies in the Novel has staked its reputation upon publishing incisive scholarship on the canon-forming and cutting-edge novelists that have shaped the genre’s rich history. The journal continues to break new ground by promoting new theoretical approaches, a broader international scope, and an engagement with the contemporary novel as a form of social critique.