High Place and 29 Barton Road
The House, British Colonialism, and Violence Against Women of Color.
White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi and Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia are both books about haunted houses, but that is far from the only thing they have in common.
In White is for Witching, the house is 29 Barton Road, located in England, which has belonged to the Silver family of Dover for three generations and is run as a bed and breakfast. In Mexican Gothic, the house is High Place, an isolated estate built by British settlers in Mexico over a silver mine that they owned.
In both cases, the house is inhabited by a white British family, and has been for several generations. Both families, the Doyles and the Silvers, are haunted by specters of incest between bother and silver. The twins Miranda and Eliot of White is for Witching are so close that Eliot mentions it’s a cause for alarm to his girlfriends. The patriarch Howard Doyle of Mexican Gothic married his sisters, one after the other, and then later, in a desperate attempt to produce another child, raped his niece.
Both of these call back to a still older ur-example of the genre: Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”, where the plot is driven by the unnaturally close relationship between siblings Roderick and Madeline Usher, the only two remaining members of the titular House of Usher (a title used both for the family mansion and the family itself; their treatment as synonymous is itself important). It is noted that the Usher family has no offshoot branches whatsoever, implicitly due to constant sibling intermarriage leading to the strange maladies that afflict both Roderick and Madeline.
And in both High Place and 29 Barton Road, there are women trapped in the walls, female ancestors of the present family who are not allowed to leave or rest.
The victim and ghost and consciousness of High Place is Agnes Doyle, Howard Doyle’s first sister-wife, who was buried alive (much like Madeline Usher, who claws her way out of her mausoleum, it must be noted) so that her husband might live forever from her sacrifice. 29 Barton Road collects its dead women inside its walls; Miranda, the youngest, is haunted by her mother, her grandmother, her great-grandmother.
When Miranda’s grandmother, Jennifer Silver, tried to leave her family and young daughter, the house would not let her out, and kept her inside the walls until she died.
The obsession with white female preservation and purity has a clearly white supremacist subtext. In Mexican Gothic it is made explicit; Howard Doyle is a proud eugenicist. 29 Barton Road is far more concerned with its daughters than its sons, with their purity and safety and isolation. The well-bred white girls must stay inside the house. Any happiness or fulfillment they may wish to seek outside its walls is irrelevant. They belong to the family, not to the outside world.
This is especially interesting, then, considering the sexualized violence with which these houses/families treat women of color who enter their spheres of influence.
The protagonist of Mexican Gothic is Noemí Taboada, a Mexican socialite, who has gone to High Place to check on her cousin, who was recently married to the heir of the Doyle family. As soon as she meets Howard Doyle, he comments on the darkness of her complexion, and she is subjected to constant disrespect and hostile and controlling behavior at the hands of him and other members of the family. Howard’s son Virgil makes multiple sexual advances on her, culminating in an attempted rape.
Eventually it is revealed that the family intends to physically entrap her and use her as breeding stock. She is treated by the family as inferior, as only valuable for her potential to bear children that might be stronger than their own inbred offspring, her own voice and desires literally irrelevant and overwritten.
In White is for Witching, one of the three perspective characters is Ore Lind, the daughter of a Nigerian immigrant to Britain. Ore and Miranda, when attending university together, form a friendship and eventually a romantic connection. The Silver house reacts to Ore and the concept of Miranda entering an interracial relationship with unmitigated hostility, using horrifically racist and demeaning language to describe her in its own narration.
When Ore is invited to the Silver home over a holiday, the house attempts, repeatedly and violently, to entrap and kill her.
Both books also comment on the relationship between the family of the house and their nonwhite workers. As mentioned, the Doyle family once presided over a profitable silver mine employing many local Mexican workers, their wealth built on extraction, but its operations were disrupted by the Mexican Revolution. Howard Doyle treated the workers with absolute contempt; when they organized and struck, the strike was broken violently. When one of the miners fell in love with Doyle’s daughter Ruth (an echo of the relationship between Ore and Miranda), Doyle had him killed.
At the start of White is for Witching, the Silvers are employing an Azerbaijani family for domestic labor in the bed and breakfast, but the family quits and leaves when the house traps their daughter in the elevator. In their place Miranda and Eliot’s father hires Sade, a Yoruba woman, as their new housekeeper, whom the house also hates. Ultimately, Sade’s own cultural practices are able to protect her from the evil of the house, despite its attempts to drive her out; it is also suggested that her intercession is responsible for Ore escaping alive.
Miranda, though, does not escape. The house consumes her, like her grandmother, like Agnes and Ruth Doyle. She went off into the world and did something unacceptable; she will never be allowed to leave again.
Looking at both books, we can see a picture of the divergent ways white supremacist ideologies treat white and nonwhite women. Women of color are to be exploited, denied control over their own bodies and movement, and killed if they ever pose a threat to the stability of the order; white women are to be treasured, and kept isolated and pure, from the rabble of everyday society, locked inside the walls.