El país de la selva : la bruja y el gótico mesopotámico en "Tela de araña" de Mariana Enríquez

Abstract

Mariana Enríquez´s short story "Tela de araña" included in Las cosas que perdimos en el fuego (2016) can be thought as a manifestation of "mesopotamian gothic" because it functions as a rewriting of the jungle found in Horacio Quiroga's narrative. The purpose of this text is to explore not only the characteristics of this Gothic regionalism, but also the relevance of the figure of the witch or sorceress. The aspects of this figure are linked to the local legends and beliefs and also to motives or models that transcend national and regional boundaries. In "Tela de araña ", both the hostile environment of the jungle, as the stories of the apparitions with the figure of the witch acquire an antistate and anti-patriarchal political sense. The crossroads between the local and the global must be read here enlightened by the concept of globalgothic (Byron, 2015) where the legends and popular stories functions as a specific and local expression of tropes and strategies that literary criticism has historically associated with gothic.