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Lee Six, Abigail. The Gothic Fiction of Adelaida García Morales: Haunting Words. Woodbridge: Tamesis (Monografías A, 223), 2006. viii + 164 pp. £45/$80. ISBN 1–85566–123–3, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume 43, Issue 3, JULY 2007, Page 322, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqm031
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Extract
Lee Six's principal aims in this book are to shed new light on the Gothic elements in the fiction of the contemporary Spanish writer García Morales, and to draw attention to the relevance of the “Gothic” label to Hispanic Studies. Because of the lack of a satisfactory definition of Gothic writing, she approaches her subject by comparing nine of García Morales' narratives with appropriate texts from English literature. El Sur, for instance, is compared with Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, on the basis of the parallel between the relationship of Adriana and her father in El Sur, on the one hand, and Dorian Gray's picture and the real person on the other. Other examples include the comparison of the sublime aspect of mountainous landscapes – inspiring awe, but ultimately leading to death – in El silencio de las sirenas (1985) with the treatment of the same feature in Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho, while references to ghosts in Las mujeres de Héctor (1994) are set alongside Henry James's The Turn of the Screw. While Lee Six achieves her goal of exposing the expression of human anxieties through Gothic imagery in the work of García Morales, the comparisons also frequently provoke fascinating new insights into both the Spanish and the English texts.
