A gothic fable that revisits Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein
in female liberation mode, the recently released film
Poor Creatures
,
by Yorgos Lanthimos, has become one of the phenomena of the season and an awards talisman for its protagonist, Emma Stone.
The new
True Detective
that has aroused so much misogynistic hatred on the networks is the new Gothic of the Arctic, or so has been stipulated by the master of the genre, the writer Joyce Carol Oates (“Alaska in its 'dark season' is ideal for hallucinatory visions” , he tweeted about the series in which Jodie Foster now stars under the direction and script of Issa López).
Critics have seen in Britney Spears' memoirs, a publishing phenomenon that sold more than a million copies in its week of release alone, "a descent into hell in the form of a gothic novel."
Even actress Kristen Stewart now defends that the
Twilight
saga in which she starred was nothing more than “a gay gothic narrative about oppression and desiring what destroys you.”
What is happening so that these “black mirrors of fiction”—as the writer Ana Llurba labeled these alternative narratives—have invaded the stories that reflect on the present?
Because it doesn't just happen in series, movies, autobiographies or reviews of cultural phenomena from the past decade.
A new Gothic era leads contemporary trauma fictions.
From Argentina (Mariana Enriquez, Samanta Schweblin, Ana Llurba, Fernanda García Lao) to Mexico (Fernanda Melchor) passing through Venezuela (Michelle Roche Rodríguez), Ecuador (Mónica Ojeda, Natalia García Freire) or the United States (Carmen María Machado, Sarah Manguso ) and reaching Spain (Layla Martínez, Purificació Mascarell), a legion of writers has taken a step beyond the traditional Gothic, the American Southern and the Latin American of the last century to explore, each in their own way, human fragility through of fear, alchemy and the spectral.
The majority uses the female body as a landscape for the violence and evils of the present.
They all draw on the terror and intimacy of our nightmares to seek answers to the cruelty that surrounds us.
Jodie Foster and Kali Reis, in an image from the fourth season of 'True Detective'.
To each territory, a different wound
“When we talk about violence, we are always talking about fear and desire.
Gothic has explored these emotions and has expanded, mutated, to the point of breaking the molds of the horror genre,” Mónica Ojeda, the writer who, after being a finalist for the National Book Award for
Mandíbula
(Candaya, 2018) , explains in an email exchange.
), leads the new Andean Gothic and will publish in February the long-awaited
Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun
(Random House).
Defender of this turn as “a work of emotional caving,” the Ecuadorian assures that what distinguishes this stage is treating the territory as something alive and not as a simple stage.
“Each society has particular fears that respond to its own historical experiences.
Gothic studies the history of a certain geography, its mythologies, its orality, its way of narrating itself, its traumas and its wounds.
In Ecuador, for example, traditional horror narratives have been linked to colonialism, racism and exclusion in general”, she defends a genre that no longer seeks to provoke fear in the reader, but rather “brings him closer to the sublime”.
Mónica Ojeda, at the Café Comercial in Madrid in 2020. INMA FLORES (EL PAIS)
Her next novel, a hallucinated retro-futuristic landscape where a young woman attends a music festival in Guayaquil that brings together thousands of people for days, would not be what it is without the political awakening of her generation.
“There has been a change in reception.
Many things have happened: feminisms, the recognition that we live in neocolonial societies with normalized structures of violence, the creation of the term 'femicide'.
Before, people also wrote about violence and the fear it instills, but we ask ourselves different questions than writers did in the seventies.
Sabato's
Tunnel
has nothing to do with
The Invincible Summer of Liliana
by Cristina Rivera Garza.
They are different approaches when it comes to narrating violence,” she defends.
Rephrase myths
“Gothic has always revolved around the female experience, living under male dominance and negotiating both love and fear of men.
As in previous times, women must live with their oppressors and, in many cases, they must love and trust them to be happy,” highlights, via email, the film director and now also a writer Anna Biller.
After turning his film
The Love Witch
into a cult film, he has just debuted with the gothic novel
Bluebeard's Castle
, a revision of the erotic gothic where its protagonist, a successful writer, buys a castle to which she moves with her new lover. and there he will discover how evil he is.
The interesting thing about this new wave of which she is a part, she explains, is adding complexity to the supposed victims of this violence: “In these new narratives, women are seen as a complex creature with enormous appetites.
Internally, she is messy, rude, crazy and rebellious, although she is usually conventionally attractive and appears harmless on the outside,” she points out.
Something similar happens in
Mireia,
the novel by Purificació Mascarell, originally published in Valencian, winner of the Lletraferit 2022 and translated by herself into Spanish at the Dos Bigotes publishing house.
There the Gothic archetypes are updated to review the myth of Lilith and prejudices about the
femme fatale
.
Purificació Mascarell, in Valencia, in January 2023. Mònica Torres
Mireia
recovers the stories of the experiments at the Salpêtrière hospital in which thousands of marginal women were forcibly locked up under the spectacle of female hysteria and denounces the intellectual vampirism that painters exercised on their muses, such as Elizabeth Siddal.
It is a vindication of those who challenged male control and who were violated for doing so.
Mascarell, via
, assures that the Gothic is reinvented in each generation of authors "because it contains the power of those stories that mothers told around primitive play to warn their daughters of the dangers and horrors that stalk us."
Towards a gothic feminism
With anguish and discomfort as the social heartbeat of our time, it makes sense that these authors and themes have permeated autofiction and essays that analyze the present.
Mar García Puig, influenced by
The Yellow Wallpaper
by Charlotte Perkins, claimed in
The History of Vertebrates
(Random House, 2023) all Victorian writers and their stories from psychiatric hospitals to contextualize female alienation as a reaction to the repressive control of bodies. Women's.
Mar García Puig, photographed in Madrid in March 2023.Jaime Villanueva
In the recent test
Traumacore: chronicles of a feminist dissociation
(Cielo Santo, 2023), researcher Núria Gómez Gabriel relies on the authors of the new Latin American Gothic and the theories of Sarah Ahmed or Julia Kristeva to claim a “gothic, deranged and melancholic feminism” in this era of uncertainties and social disorientation.
If women today live exhausted and dissociated, she defends, it is as a reaction to the idea of an optimistic feminism, to the myth of self-made women with which an entire generation of young people who wrongly believed , in the culture of effort.
“The Gothic perspective allows us to think about how we relate to the deformations and alterations of our bodies and our vital signs in a feminist key to exorcise systemic guilt,” says the cultural communicator, who became closer to Gothic authors thanks to the workshops of the writer Ana Llurba, regarding this tangent that is committed to making peace with the discomfort that we carry and going through its own times of healing.
Reading it, it is not surprising that all these series, films and gothic horror fictions full of violated and alienated women explode in parallel.
Magic mirrors not so deformed that give us a reflection of our desires and fears.
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