The Gothic in Cristina García’s <i>The Agüero Sisters</i>

Abstract

American Gothic tradition includes literature the United States that exhibits fantastic or otherworldly qualities. More often than not, however, when these traits appear US Latina/o fiction, the literary market categorizes it as magical realism. (1) Latin American fiction of the 1960s, including that written by Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa, popularized magical realism. Authors associated with The Boom, as it was called due to the explosion of Latin American literature of this era, incorporated supernatural elements and postmodern time their work and made magical realism synonymous with Latin American fiction. Publishers and critics attempted to associate US Latina/o fiction with Boom literature order to secure entrance and acceptance for US Latina/o literature the 1970s and 1980s. Nevertheless, as Karen Christian notes, in an attempt to identify the 'essence' of US Latina/o fiction, critics may fail to note the differences the ways Boom aesthetics are deployed, or even the fact that by no means all Latina/o writing has a magical realist bent (128). Magical realism implies an exoticism within the text as readers and other characters within the tale accept moments that evoke the marvelous or supernatural as part of the characters' cultural belief systems. For example, Cristina Garcia's first novel, Dreaming Cuban (1992), presents ghosts as a natural part of the characters' worlds. On the other hand, Garcia's second novel, Aguero Sisters (1997), contains characters who experience magical events that produce disbelief, fear, and distress. In addition to the magical realism Garcia's texts, we must also pay attention to the Gothic, the genre dedicated to fear. Gothic literature often relies on an element of fear or terror associated with uncanny repetition or a return of the repressed. In Aguero Sisters, Constancia Aguero wakes one morning to see her murdered mother's face the mirror instead of her own. Given that she has spent her life repressing the truth about her mother's death, Constancia is horrified. Convinced she is not dreaming or hallucinating, she spends the rest of the novel worried that she will disappear completely. Garcia's novel also alludes to classic British and American gothic tales. For instance, Reina Aguero, who accepts strange events more easily than her sister Constancia does, exhibits many parallels to the monster Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818): her body must be repaired using skin grafts from a variety of people alive and dead, and throughout the novel, she longs for a maternal relationship. characterization of the murdered mother, Blanca, resembles that of the protagonist Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper (1892). Examples include Blanca's thwarted desire for a career and a post-partum depression that her husband, Ignacio, treats with electric-shock therapy. Finally, Aguero Sisters' femicidal plot links it to the central concerns of contemporary female Gothic tales. (2) Garcia incorporates the Gothic into her story by evoking fear, the uncanny, and these gothic tales. Magical realist moments exist this text, but identifying the gothic modes alongside them attends to the fluid and transcultural nature of Aguero Sisters. Reading this text as an amalgam of magical realism and the Gothic also expands the identification and discussion of American gothic texts, especially when engaging multi-ethnic literature the US. To introduce Aguero Sisters as part of an American gothic literary tradition, it is necessary to clarify the nuanced definitions of the Gothic and magical realism. term magical realism originated Germany to classify an art form that lay somewhere between expressionism and realism. Writers Latin America and the Caribbean applied the term to evoke the essentially magical within American culture? Since then, the generic classification produces the expectation that strange things will occur, but that these are somehow natural to the characters and/or the community to which the novel pertains. …