Empires of Extraction 229 Studies in American Fiction 50.1–2 (2023): 229–252 © 2024 by Johns Hopkins University Press Empires of Extraction: Silver Field Ecologies and Eugenics in Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic Colleen Marie Tripp California State University, Northridge Introduction I n her adaptation of the Victorian haunted house, Mexican Canadian author Silvia Moreno-Garcia explores the anthropocenic history of a nation that never felt quite at home in her postcolonial, ecogothic novel, Mexican Gothic (2020).1 If the “postcolonial Gothic references the continuation of colonial violence and its legacies, rather than its haunting remainder,” Moreno-Garcia’s portrayal of a Victorian-style manor and mine subsumed by supernatural mushrooms reveals forms of eco-imperial monstrosity that challenge what should be local, familiar, and secure.2 Set in the post-revolutionary 1950s, the novel begins with Mexico City socialite Noemí visiting her newly-wed cousin Catalina at High Place, an old Victorian manor and silver mine owned by the British Doyle family in rural, northern Mexico. The decaying home is “absolutely Victorian in construction,” and the interior is eerily evocative of the family’s adjacent silver fields: “It’s always damp and dark and so very cold,” Catalina comments.3 At their nightly dinners, the Doyle family routinely contrasts topics of racial decay with its mine’s exhausted natural resources, echoing the degeneration discourses of the Victorian fin de siècle. Catalina’s husband, Virgil Doyle comments, “On occasion you need to inject new blood into the mix, so to speak” (237). Even more strangely, Noemí begins to see the moldy wallpaper of the home move, like that of the late nineteenth-century horror story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and she experiences extra-sensory dreams of the home’s centuries-old, occluded histories and people (55). The narrator pithily concludes, “This house, she was sure, was haunted” (120). In the end, patriarch Howard Doyle reveals High Place’s Lovecraftian horrors: the 230 Studies in American Fiction family has instrumentalized a supernatural mushroom colony (“the gloom”) to mentally colonize the home’s Mexican visitors and miners.4 The Doyles control Mexicans using the mushroom gloom, from lower-class miners to the upper-class mestizas they court and wed, to sustain the future of their mine, racial lineage, and generational wealth. Mexican people and natural resources, in short, both serve the Doyles’ micro-extractive zone,an operation that depends on a future-depleting imperial episteme of slow violence and a supernatural mushroom gloom.5 Noemí’s fragmented dreams of the memories and occulted violence at High Place becomes an extended metaphor of the cultural experience and history of socioecological imperialism in Mexico and an important facet of Moreno-Garcia’s adaptation of the Victorian gothic. With its haunted house-silver field, Mexican Gothic uses conventions of the fin de siècle Victorian gothic to critique the genre’s early colonial othering, as well as British participation in the grotesque slow violence of extractive zones and other forms of ecological imperialism, such as eugenics, taking place in Mexico and the Global South.6 If extractivism functions as a future-depleting model that changes humans’ relationship to time and space,7 Moreno-Garcia’s novel compounds metaphors of extractivism with other future-depleting forms of slow violence, like eugenics, that intensified during the late Victorian period and reconfigured New World extraction fields and their relation to empire.8 Today, critics such as Benjamin Kohlmann describe the concurrent rise of a new global economy in the late nineteenth century with a form of Western imperialism rooted in “globalized speculation” during the age of extraction.9 Mexican Gothic joins a cache of contemporary texts whose basic narrative conceits focus on ecology and capture what it means to live in an age of ecosystemic decline and extinction under late capitalism. While fictional, the novel’s British family, which weaponizes a mushroom colony to colonize Mexicans and mine Mexico of its natural resources, becomes an extended metaphor for how a subset of humans and societies have exploited the planet to the brink of catastrophe for centuries and have been able to deny or avoid ecological facts. Mexican Gothic marries ecological criticism with the Victorian ghost story...

萃取帝国 229 美国小说研究 50.1–2 (2023): 229–252 © 2024 约翰·霍普金斯大学出版社 萃取帝国：西尔维娅·莫雷诺-加西亚的墨西哥哥特式小说中的银田生态和优生学 科琳·玛丽·特里普 加州州立大学北岭分校 简介墨西哥裔加拿大作家西尔维娅·莫雷诺-加西亚 (Silvia Moreno-Garcia) 在改编维多利亚时代的鬼屋时，在她的后殖民生态哥特式小说《墨西哥哥特式》(Mexican Gothic) (2020) 中探索了一个从未感到宾至如归的国家的人类世历史。1 如果“后殖民哥特式参考”殖民暴力及其遗产的延续，而不是其令人难以忘怀的残余，”莫雷诺-加西亚对维多利亚风格的庄园和矿山的描绘被超自然的蘑菇所吞噬，揭示了生态帝国怪物的形式，挑战了本应是当地的、熟悉的和安全的东西.2 小说以革命后的 20 世纪 50 年代为背景，故事开始于墨西哥城社交名流诺埃米 (Noemí) 在高地 (High Place) 拜访她新婚的表弟卡塔琳娜 (Catalina)。高地是位于墨西哥北部乡村的一座古老的维多利亚庄园和银矿，由英国道尔家族 (Doyle family) 拥有。这座破旧的房屋“绝对是维多利亚式的建筑”，其内部令人毛骨悚然地让人想起他们家附近的银色田地：“它总是潮湿、黑暗，而且非常寒冷，”卡塔琳娜评论道。3 在每晚的晚餐上，道尔一家经常将对比种族衰败及其自然资源枯竭的话题，与维多利亚时代末期的堕落话语相呼应。卡塔利娜的丈夫维吉尔·多伊尔评论道：“可以这么说，有时你需要向组合中注入新的血液”（237）。更奇怪的是，诺埃米开始看到家中发霉的壁纸移动，就像十九世纪末的恐怖故事“黄色壁纸”中的壁纸一样，她体验到了家中数百年历史和人们的超感官梦境。 （55）。叙述者简洁地总结道：“她确信这所房子闹鬼”（120）。最后，族长霍华德·道尔揭示了高地的洛夫克拉夫特式恐怖：230 美国小说研究家族利用了一个超自然的蘑菇群落（“阴暗”），在精神上殖民了家里的墨西哥游客和矿工。4 道尔家族使用蘑菇控制墨西哥人从下层阶级的矿工到上层阶级的混血儿，他们追求并结婚，以维持他们的矿山、种族血统和世代财富的未来。简而言之，墨西哥人民和自然资源都服务于多伊尔斯的微榨取区，这一行动依赖于未来耗尽的缓慢暴力的帝国认识和超自然的蘑菇阴郁。 5 诺埃米关于记忆和神秘暴力的支离破碎的梦想高地成为墨西哥社会生态帝国主义文化经验和历史的延伸隐喻，也是莫雷诺-加西亚改编维多利亚哥特式的一个重要方面。以其鬼屋银田，墨西哥哥特式使用世纪末维多利亚哥特式的惯例来批评该流派的早期殖民他者，以及英国参与采掘区的怪异缓慢暴力和其他形式的生态帝国主义，例如发生在墨西哥和全球的优生学。南.6如果榨取主义是一种耗尽未来的模式，改变了人类与时间和空间的关系，7莫雷诺-加西亚的小说将榨取主义的隐喻与其他耗竭未来的缓慢暴力形式（如优生学）混合在一起，这种暴力在维多利亚时代晚期得到了强化。 8 今天，本杰明·科尔曼 (Benjamin Kohlmann) 等批评家描述了 19 世纪末新全球经济的同时兴起，以及植根于 19 世纪“全球化投机”的西方帝国主义形式。 9 墨西哥哥特式小说加入了一系列当代文本的行列，这些文本的基本叙事构想聚焦于生态学，并捕捉到生活在晚期资本主义下生态系统衰退和灭绝的时代意味着什么。虽然小说是虚构的，但小说中的英国家庭将蘑菇殖民地武器化，以殖民墨西哥并开采墨西哥的自然资源，这成为了人类和社会的一个子集如何在几个世纪以来将地球开发到灾难边缘的延伸隐喻。能够否认或回避生态事实。墨西哥哥特式将生态批评与维多利亚时代的鬼故事结合起来......