dathomira's Reviews > The Hacienda

** spoiler alert ** the hacienda tells the story of beatriz, whose mestizo father sided with the insurgency during the mexican revolutionary war. at the end of the war, he’s branded a traiter and beatriz and her criollo mother must go live with her aunt, the only family who is still on speaking terms with the two of them. destitute and desperate to get the life she had before back (one presumes) she marries rodolfo solorzano, a criollo plantation owner and is whisked away to his home in the countryside. the marketing for this book has compared it to both daphne du maurier’s rebecca and silvia moreno-garcia’s mexican gothic. while i haven’t read the latter, i have just finished the former and i will say making this comparison has done a huge disservice to the book and author, neither of which can match du maurier for character study or, shall we say, complete derangement.

the problems with isabel cañas’s the hacienda fall under two broad categories: first, its author does not understand the genre she purports to be writing in and following that, the book cannot be said to be a novel of gothic horror or gothic romance. the second, which exacerbates the first by a distressing degree, is that the craft is unformed. the character portraits, the land which means so much to the plot of this book, the house after which the book is named: these are all at best extraordinarily faded sketches that simply don’t and really can’t make any lasting impression on the reader.

i will not pretend to give a definitive definition for what the gothic is. its a genre thats been around as a distinct category since the 18th-century at least, has as many branches as there are trees, and has spawned many more in literary communities far outside its origin. but i do think i can speak to the particular branch that cañas believes herself in conversation with, given the interviews she’s given, the marketing of the novel, and the substance of the book. gothic romance is distinguished by its (often very young) female heroines, their pursuit of true love, their naivete in the face of extraordinary (sometimes supernatural, sometimes not) circumstances, and the rapid maturation forced on them by these circumstances. often times the threat against them and their virtue is a much older man, sinister, evil, sometimes a priest, sometimes a close relative (incest runs rampant through classic gothic romance). because so often their virtue is at stake, a young woman’s sexuality is the crux of these plots: what she wants, what she should want, what she is enticed to want by the devil. these novels and this genre is also inextricable from the religious landscape in which they were produced and i think it is especially relevant to the hacienda that by the time this genre had concretized england was largely protestant and the devilish, sinister, and sexually lascivious characters were often catholic. and that is all to say nothing of the gothic mansion for which i think the genre is most widely known. the ancient house whose doors and shutters whip open and shut, whose malignance is driven by an unnamed menace.

i think on some level cañas understands all this because the trapping of these things are all there. but she either doesn’t have the patience or the skill to pull it off. our main character beatriz is approaching twenty. she has, by her own admission, never been married, never kissed, and is a virgin. she is already incredibly world-weary, given that her father has been arrested and executed for treason, and she cooks up an idea to secure a marriage that will grant her wealth and security. this is, to my mind, a great idea to invert the traditional plot. the seductress now is not the villain, is not the temptation for our naive heroine, but the heroine herself! here is the modern critique in an old genre! it’s not, dear reader. there is no seduction. we spend almost no time with rodolfo, her husband, at all. their courtship is not even overtly referenced--we just get a line about how she pastes on her brightest smile and reels him in. i beg of the author: how? if she’s essentially social kryptonite because of her father, and this is amplified by her status as a mestizo (which is, in her case, visible in her material body) how did she convince him that she was worth it? and if she did not have to convince him but he took her for some alternate reason, what about her was worth it? the absence of her seduction of rodolfo points to a broader issue in this novel: there is no sense of a body.

before i read this book i read rebecca and brandon taylor’s great essay ‘on character vapor’. i highly recommend both, but to this point, taylor’s essay is especially relevant in that he makes an argument for the presence of the physical, the material, as it is connected to the psychological. i don’t know that he thought his essay would be used in a close reading of the presence (or absence) of a sexual body in a modern gothic romance but here we are. we have no sense of beatriz’s body, no sense of how desire thrums through it, or her revulsion for rodolfo, or the strange, awful line of perversity and desire she must walk to seduce him. i don’t even know what clothes she enjoys, what joy in luxury she takes having finally freed herself from her aunt’s kitchen and into the master’s bedroom of a hacienda. there is a line early in the novel where she says that rodolfo’s touch never moved her, so by this time they have certainly slept together. but she seems to have no awareness of her body and indeed no awareness of rodolfo’s either. she is a new bride and it does not distress her to lie with someone she finds unappealing.

now, you may say, ‘it seems that you really just want the sensationalism of her distress and to be a voyeur to her suffering.’ listen, on the one hand: yes! this is the sensationalist genre. it is meant to be a heady, overwhelming sensory nightmare until it isn’t! that is one hundred percent a bedrock of the gothic! but what is far more important than that is: rodolfo is a menacing male lead. he is not the love interest. he is revealed to be a rapist, who terrorizes the women who work at the hacienda, who rapes them with regularity. beatriz doesn’t have to know this, she doesn’t even have to sense this. but then, this is not the genre that she should be in. a menacing man should be menacing. rodolfo is not. rodolfo is gone for most of the book and only returns to be killed by his younger, bastard sister. (a plot twist i dread returning to later for it made my mind blank in sheer rage.)

the absence of the material pervades the whole book. i don’t know what the grounds of the hacienda look like. i barely know what the green parlor room looks like. beatriz takes no interest in her environment and the author doesn’t believe that, in a gothic romance, her environment should in any way be connected by her psychology. beatriz feels cold, she hears whispers, she picks out blue silks. the house creaks and moans. but i don’t know what her bedroom looks like, what clothes she likes to wear, what the fabrics feel like on her skin, the relief at not being touched by rodolfo and so on. and because beatriz’s psychology is so forcefully disembodied, when she meets andres, the priest-witch, their romance is…a thing they profess to but does not actually exist on page.

beatriz doesn’t seem like a married woman, she takes advantage of none of the benefits of being the mistress of a hacienda. she spends most of the novel sobbing, sleepless, in her bedroom, surrounded by incense bowers burning copal. she doesn’t even have a ladies maid. every time she dressed on her own i was…confused, to say the least. and i think what is equally distressing is that the novel could bear this if not for the manner in which it totally and completely fails at horror. there is no build up. we have no sense of disrupted normalcy. the house turns on her immediately and immediately she understands that she is in danger. and it’s like this with every plot point. there was a sense, as i was reading, that the book only had pages because books required it, and the pages required sentences and the sentences required words. if the author could have i suspect she would have pasted several pinterest images together and bound them as a manuscript. even if your only reference to the gothic was the 2015 movie crimson peak (fine, unwilling to commit, beautiful costuming) it lingers on the things that matter: thomas’s seduction of edith, the strangeness of crimson peak, her slow decline into sickness as lucille begins to poison her. the hacienda cannot pause for a single moment on anything. its the novel equivalent of a flipbook, where you are simply watching the horse run in place until suddenly it clears a hurdle.

and then there is andres. oh andres. listen, i know i’m a lesbian, but i still must ask: why is a man narrating at all in a gothic romance novel? a novel ostensibly rooted in the tradition of, if not offering critique of the patriarchy, then at least offering us an emotionally honest truth of the terrors of being a woman under patriarchy. why does a man in a novel a person wrote (so it didn’t ‘just happen that way’) occupying a position traditionally held by a woman in a genre traditionally about women?

andres represents many of the problems of the novel. he is out of place in a gothic romance (though not necessarily a gothic horror), his history is poorly drawn (i still don’t understand what necessarily is the difference between the magic he inherits from his titi and the magic he inherits from his spaniard family), he has no material imprint (every time i remember he wears a habit is a jump scare), and his motivations simply do not hold water. but perhaps what stands out the most to me about him is this: the legacy of racial terror that lives in his blood, and the conflict between two types of religious practice, never came to life. a novel that was invested in the gothic of colonial trauma would have needed significantly more work, would have needed a much higher investment in what it meant to be devout or to be made to be devout in the wake of the spanish inquisition. i don’t doubt that andres could find solace in the christian god, because faith is a strange thing we can’t always account for. but he also understands that catholicism is actively hunting people like him, that he has gone to hide among his would be oppressors. and yet: there is never any conflict about which god he prays to. we get an evil, inquisition-leaning padre, but he is balanced with a much older padre who knew andres when he was young, and so the church is defanged. beatriz expresses ambivalence to the church, as her father names them as money hungry and overly conservative, but these denouncements never hold any weight. the book has no sense of mysticism, no sense of spirituality, no sense of awe. i don’t know what andres believes in besides jesus christ, where his titi’s powers come from, or his relationship to indigenous culture. like listen, i am a religious minority who is firmly in the ‘fuck the church’ camp. i also am from a country whose ancestors were colonized by the muslims, a religion i now willfully practice as an adult. this stuff is complicated. but the book doesn’t think so. it simply says that andres found solace in prayer and in following a map provided to him by the church, which sounds an awful lot like catholic missionary propaganda, that neither he nor anyone else in the book ever questions. and you don’t have to question it--unless of course, this is a tension deliberately and repeatedly brought up by one of your narrators.

this kind of writing also undermines the racial aspects of this book. beatriz is the daughter of a mestizo and has inherited his coloring. andres is, i think, half spaniard by his father, and half indigenous by his mother. these are brought up in several ways: when beatriz laments the way her aunt treats her because she is darker, as a defense to andres when she talks about marrying rodolfo (he doesn’t understand how hard it is for a girl of her coloring), and flatly in regard to andres relationship to the hacienda and to the land. but because we don’t really spend time anywhere with anyone, we linger no where, the way this materially impacts them doesn’t stick. is she rodolfo’s exotic bride or is she actually criolla-passing if she stays out of the sun? do the other dons and doñas of the haciendas look down on her? do people look at her hair first in surprise? is she aware of the way men react to her because of her heritage? do the priests believe she needs to be civilized and so take a particular tone with her? there are a thousand small ways a racialized existence in the upper echelons of society affect your life--we see none of them from beatriz except as defiant pronouncements about how because of this, she must do things other girls would not. and to be frank, man, i don’t really believe her.

there are three possible stories in this novel. the first is the story of a keen-eyed girl who chooses her husband on purpose, figures out her house is haunted almost immediately, and seeks help. the second is the story of a younger, bastard sister, who committed an unspeakable act to secure an inheritance (that the reader is never entirely clear on), and who is, in the tradition of some of my favorite gothic stories, summarily dragged off to hell for committing this act. the third is the story of racial and religious trauma and terrorism absorbed by the land and the hacienda, and the man able to bridge that conflict to satisfy the restless spirits of his ancestors. none of these are fully committed to, but the second one is truly the most insulting nestled in this book.

we have not talked about juana, rodolfo’s younger sister. when beatriz and rodolfo arrive at the hacienda, she is greeted by the staff, and then juana, his brash younger sister (who, as others have said, is truly the biggest case of lesbian bait i’ve seen in a novel in a minute). the servants, and most especially ana luis (the house keeper), all look up to and respect her. there is a moment where juana seems to like beatriz too, but when beatriz runs screaming to her about a body in the wall, she turns on her and they are firmly set as enemies. this is because: juana bricked a body into the wall. why did she do that? don’t worry. we’ll get there. for the rest of the book, juana is mostly absent, present only in the sense that beatriz resents her, and resents the way she has set ana luisa against her, once in an andres chapter, and then near the end when she gets belligerently drunk at a dinner party. at the end of this dinner party beatriz and andres overhear rodolfo calling her a bastard, threatening to have her evicted from the property if she doesn’t marry, and then strikes her. the next morning juana has murdered rodolfo, and the book careens towards its end where we learn that she also killed rodolfo’s first wife, the malignant presence haunting the house. its implied that juana did this because doña catalina (the first wife) threatened juana’s rule of the house.

ostensibly, juana is present throughout the novel, but her appearance as the actual villain feels like a third act deus ex machina, that satisfies neither the expectations of the genre nor the expectations set by the book. the book’s investments (such as they can be, given everything) lie in two camps: first, beatriz’s terror, a result of the house’s seemingly baseless fixation on her given her ambivalence to her husband and her disconnect from the land and second, the abuse of the staff by rodolfo and catalina. juana doesn’t figure into it at all. beatriz is entirely uninterested in running the actual plantation of the hacienda (a thing both she and the book avoid almost religiously in a way i found both insane and comical), and juana by her own admission has no interest in the house. and because, as with most things in this novel, we spend almost no time with juana we get no sense of her relationship to anything. not her relationship to ana luisa, not her relationship to paloma, not her relationship to beatriz, or to the house, or to catalina. we don’t even know that she wants to run the hacienda until the very end. we don’t know rodolfo and catalina’s relationship to one another, or their shared relationship with juana, or juana’s relationship to the servants. we don’t know why she wants the hacienda and doesn’t want to marry. and she’s deeply representative of the things the novel purports to be interested in but spends no time with. if there is some sinister legacy of the solorzano’s beyond their abuse of servants (which the book doesn’t really care about beyond flavoring for the horror) we aren’t told. that juana is not just a bastard child, but a bastard child of rodolfo’s mother is prime gothic material--the subversion of expectation for women’s behavior under patriarchy is bone and blood deep and manifests not only in her strained relationship with her brother, but in the unwomanlike way she behaves (again, i say, wailing, lesbian bait!). she is neither menacing nor sexual, and because she is absent we lose our only tangible collection to catalina, who menaces beatriz though no one really knows why. and then, even when catalina’s spirit is loosed through an accident she doesn’t pursue juana, she finds ana luisa.

i said in the beginning of this review that the book’s comparison to rebecca has done tremendous damage to the book. this is, in part, because the author does not actually understand what lies at the core of the haunting of the second mrs de winter. the narrator arrives at manderly young, inexperienced in love, sex, and money, of a lower economic class than her husband and his peers, knowing only that she loves maxim de winter and thinking this will be enough. she is haunted by rebecca not because manderly supernaturally rejects her but because she stands on the cusp of womanhood, haunted by its very specific shape, not knowing how to fit into it. the servants are similarly haunted, living inside rebecca’s ghost, her laugh, her fashionable clothing, her charisma and magnetism, all things the second mrs de winter cannot hope to embody. on the solorzano hacienda no one seems to remember catalina. no one talks of how she arranged things, of how she loved them, of how she made them laugh. none of her peers visit beatriz and so her mark on society is largely left unexplored. beatriz is haunted by a crazed ghost with aimless rage--she is collateral because the ghost, and so in many ways the story, does not care for her at all. [continued in comments]