Fungal Colonialism in Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic

March 13, 2024

by Autumn Finley,
Southwest Baptist University

A panoramic view of the surrounding area as seen from the Monte Albán site near Hidalgo, Mexico.
Figure 1: A panoramic view of Mountains near Hidalgo, Mexico.1

Silvia Moreno-Garcia roots her 2020 novel, Mexican Gothic, in the tropes of early British Gothic novels. Like Ann Radcliffe, Moreno-Garcia describes the desolate scenery leading up to High Place, a traditionally English-style manor perched on a mountain in Hidalgo, Mexico. A former wife also resides in the home, but unlike Jane Eyre’s Bertha, the Doyle matriarch is an ecological horror; her decaying body feeds a massive organism of mushrooms, thereby invoking a distinctly ecoGothic (myco-)modality. Moreno-Garcia hence manages to disrupt the quintessential Britishness of the genre with colonial fears of infestation of ‘the Mexican’ familiar, and with the invasion by the uncanny imperialist ‘other’, represented by the Spanish colonists and the later British opportunists. The references to Mexican history notably shed light on the British industrialists who acquired Mexico’s silver mines after the Spanish colonists had fled following the War of Independence of 1810. Moreno-Garcia writes that ‘El Triunfo’ was like ‘many formerly thriving mining sites that had extracted silver and gold during the Colonia [that] interrupted their operations once the War of Independence broke out. Later on, the English and the French were welcomed […], their pockets growing fat with mineral riches’ (pp. 17). While not officially part of the British or French empires, opportunists from those countries took on imperial roles, mining the ground for riches and abandoning the villages supported by those mines whenever it suited them.

Engraved illustration of a cross-section of a silver mine with miners digging
Figure 2: 19th-century illustration of a British silver mine in Belize.2

Throughout the novel, Moreno-Garcia knowingly challenges what has been deemed the traditional Western, white point-of view of other ecoGothic narratives. As Jessica George (2020) explains, the works of Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machon, and HP Lovecraft deal with ‘anxieties concerning the status of the human, particularly those generated by evolutionary theory during the later part of the nineteenth century’ which ‘are endemic to Euro-American imperialism’ (p.12). Questioning the validity of a vastly white understanding of ecoGothic fears of vegetation, George further notes that ‘the weird tale […] foregrounds anxieties concerning the nature and status of the […] white, educated, European or Anglo-American human’ and ‘it is usually a very particular, very Western point of view that is disoriented by the weirdness of plant alterity.’ (p. 13). Moreno-Garcia’s novel thus repurposes these anxieties, attributing them to the colonised Mexicans instead of the colonisers.

Moreno-Garcia grounds her novel in a Mexican perspective, that of Noemí. A young socialite from Mexico City, Noemí is sent to check on her cousin, Catalina, who had been quickly romanced by Virgil Doyle. While visiting her cousin, Noemí confronts childhood fears of ‘fairy tales’ and ‘“the forest”’ along with the eugenicist theories that the family patriarch, Howard Doyle, espouses on marriage, genetics, and strengthening the bloodline with the ‘proper’ sort of Mexican brides for his son Virgil and nephew Francis (p. 15). The Doyle patriarch tells Noemí that ‘“Gamio believes natural selection has pressed indigenous people of this continent forward, allowing them to adapt to biological and geographical factors that foreigners cannot withstand. When you transplant a flower, you must consider the soil, mustn’t you”’ (p. 77). Howard references Mexican anthropologist Manuel Gamio as he explains the biological benefit of mixed-race marriages. His flower metaphor makes the conversation about breeding with the ‘right sort’ of mixed-race woman more palatable for the unmarried Noemí, but it also hints to his own purpose of using the fungus to breed his consciousness into his offspring.

Photograph of traditional English manor house taken from Belvoir Castle
Figure 3: Traditional English Manor house overlooking the countryside.3

In addition to disrupting the Anglo-American point-of-view of the narrative, Moreno-Garcia also rebuilds the haunted mansion from British Gothic fiction on postcolonial soil. The ground of High Place is a hybrid of the mountainous region of Hidalgo and the ‘boxes filled with earth from Europe to make sure the flowers would take’ (p. 126). This hybrid ecology represents the interconnectedness of the people, both British and indigenous, who live and work at High Place, breathing in the same spores from the fungi which connect them to a shared consciousness controlled by Howard. In An Interview with Silvia Moreno-Garcia (2021), the author describes how the ‘mother-tree’ of the ‘fungi communication system’ yokes them to the home, making it impossible to leave once they are sufficiently infected (p. 314). Moreno-Garcia develops the horror around the mycorrhizal network controlled by Howard Doyle. This ecoGothic representation of the house reveals how Howard can monitor the family, and how the infection controls how far they can roam beyond the ideal myco-ecology of High Place.

Howard has used his sister-bride’s remains as the life-source that allows the fungi to grow. Agnes’s tombstone reads ‘Mother,’ despite never having children (p. 150). Noemí explains that, ‘What had once been Agnes had become the gloom […] It was possession and not even that, but something she could not even begin to describe. The creation of an afterlife, furnished with the marrow and the bones and the neurons of a woman, made of stems and spores’ (p. 284). The mushrooms’ consciousness through Agnes spreads from the catacombs throughout the walls of High Place.

Watercolor interpretation of interconnected mushroom Sulphur tuft fungus (Hypholoma fasciculare).
Figure 4: Watercolor interpretation of interconnected mushroom4

To better understand this liminal space, both Mexican and English, familiar and unfamiliar, Christy Tidwell (2022) illuminates that the ‘1866 coinage of the term Oekologie […] builds on the Greek oikos, which means house or dwelling [and] in the context of the ecogothic, it’s hard not to connect ecology’s emphasis on the home to Freud’s later introduction of the uncanny’ (p. 294). The ecology of High Place depends upon imported British soil to grow the fungi, yet the inbred mother-tree requires the intermarriage of the British and Mexican soil to thrive, keeping the home strangely damp and decomposing while entrenched in the family’s imperialist past.

Howard’s patriarchal dominance extends beyond the forced marriages and births to continue the bloodline. Through the collective consciousness of the mushroom, Howard shares a vision with Noemí of a ‘previous time’ in a cave with a primitive tribe, where he narrates that he ‘needed to be with these rough folk’ in order to ‘know all their secrets. Eternal life! It was there for the taking […] They used the fungus to heal their wounds and preserve their health, but it could be so much more.’ (p. 205-206). Doyle steals and perverts their ritual, taking the mushroom used to heal a community for his selfish aims towards immortality. Not content to stay with the tribe and the bride he had taken, he acknowledges that he ‘had two sisters, back in his great home awaiting his return, and that was the trick. It was in the blood […] And if it could be in his blood it could be in their blood’ (p. 206). When speaking to Francis in the English cemetery, Noemí notes that her ‘grandmother was Mazatec, and the Mazatec ingest similar mushrooms during certain ceremonies’ for ‘communion’ (p. 99). Howard’s use of the fungi for immortality at the cost of his community reflects his colonial dominance. Like the ouroboros family crest, Howard is the snake constantly devouring his offspring. With each reincarnation, Howard becomes less human and more fungal.

Figure 5: Spreading fungus on decaying tree.
Figure 5: Spreading fungus on decaying tree.5

The ecological horror developed by Moreno-Garcia throughout Mexican Gothic is inherently postcolonial. She binds the setting of High Place, the quintessential British Gothic manor, to the colonial Mexican landscape to show the horrors of colonial inheritance and invasive species on both the colonisers and the colonised. The imported English soil and ancient tribal fungus invade the landscape, creating a hybrid ecology, part English and part Mexican, familiar and unfamiliar to each of the family members inhabiting the home. Their home is their haven, where the Doyles may thrive, but it is also a constant connection to the gloom. The horrors are only able to end when Noemí ‘tossed the lamp against the corpse’s face […] instantly ignit[ing] the mushrooms around Agnes’s head, creating a halo of fire’ (p. 290). Finally absolved of her soiled motherhood, the fungus dries and burns as Noemí, Catalina, and Francis Doyle attempt to escape.

The end of the novel does not tidy up the loose ends and present Noemi, Catalina, and Francis as victors over their imperialist oppressors. Instead, they worry if they can survive beyond the gloom of High Place. In this way, Moreno-Garcia invites the reader to question their own complacence in past horrors and begin to understand the woven and mixed ecologies many of us have inherited on postcolonial soil. While impossible to ignore or forget the horrors of the past, the characters encourage each other with hope of a better future in the city, beyond the mountains and mist of High Place.

Works Cited

George, J. (2020). Weird Flora: Plant Life in the Classic Weird Tale. In: Bishop, K. E., Higgins, D., and Määttä, J. Cardiff (eds.) Plants in Science Fiction: Speculative Vegetation. Cardiff, University of Wales Press.
Moreno-Garcia, S. (2021). A Letter from the Author. In Mexican Gothic. New York, Del Rey. pp. 307-308.
Moreno-Garcia, S. (2021). An Interview with Silvia Moreno-Garcia. In Mexican Gothic. New York, Del Rey. pp. 310-314
Tidwell, C. (2022). Big Bad Wolves and Angry Sharks: The Ecogothic and a Century of Environmental Change. In: Fhlain, S. N. and Murphy, B. M. (eds.) Twentieth-Century Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press.

Author Biography

Autumn Finley is an Associate Professor at Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar, Missouri. Finley teaches a wide variety of courses in British and American literature, composition, and linguistics. She has recently presented at the Southern Plains Humanities Conference and the Chawton House programme Quills and Characters. Finley has an article on Bernard Mandeville forthcoming in volume 62 issue 3 of SEL (1500-1900) and is the academic advisor for volume 321 on Samuel Richardson in Literature Criticism 1400-1800. During her PhD, she studied eighteenth and nineteenth century British gothic novels, and she still enjoys reading gothic fiction in her spare time.

  1. Wheeler, M. B. (1982) A panoramic view of the surrounding area as seen from the Monte Albán site. In: Mary Binney Wheeler Image Collection https://library.artstor.org/asset/SS37691_37691_41111164 ↩︎
  2. [between 1800 and 1899]. A silver mine: cross-section and miners digging.. Engravings.. In: Wellcome Collection. https://library.artstor.org/asset/24855135. ↩︎
  3. Wyatt, James (English architect, 1746-1813); Thoroton, John (British amateur architect, died 1820); Wyatt, Benjamin Dean (English architect, 1775-ca. 1850); Wyatt, Matthew Cotes (British sculptor and painter, 1777-1862). Work: 1528-1830, Era: CE, Image Date: 1981. Belvoir Castle, general view, View from Belvoir Castle. mansions. https://library.artstor.org/asset/SS7732236_7732236_12907021. ↩︎
  4. Sulphur tuft fungus (Hypholoma fasciculare). Watercolour, 1892.. Watercolors. Place: Wellcome Collection. https://library.artstor.org/asset/24889599. ↩︎
  5. K.E. Loeffler, Photographer. 1998-19-08. Dacrymyces sp.. Place: Cornell University. Plant Pathology Herbarium (CUP), Biodiversity Preserve Collection. https://library.artstor.org/asset/SS33668_33668_3578500. ↩︎