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Dr. RosenbergEnglish 5321
Houses, Hotels, and Hauntings: The Functions of Physical Structures and Magical Realism in One Hundred Years of Solitude, Beloved, and
The Lady Matador’s Hotel
Magical Realist Houses & Hotels
In magical realist texts, material objects reserve a special
significance as compared to those found within other kinds of
literature, especially realism. Though all fiction requires readers to
visualize the material world represented on the page through words,
magical realism requires that objects not only represent themselves
“but also the potential of some kind of alternative reality, some kind of
magic” (Zamora 30). The literal metaphor, a technique often used
within magical realism, collapses the distance between the
metaphorical and real. Zamora argues that magical realism is
characterized by this quality of “semantic duplicity” (30) and that
“magical-realists texts often conflate sight and insight…by making the
visible world the very source of insight” (31). In these texts, physical
dwellings often function as containers for both the magical objects
and the narrative itself. They are also material sites of power
contestations for the issues at play within magical realist texts.
Houses and hotels are portals, liminal spaces between the real and
the supernatural, which represent reality as portrayed by magical
realism. Though the structures act as containers, they aren’t isolated
from the world. Rather, they extend outward toward the communal
and the cosmic, reimagining dominant discourses of gender, families,
diaspora, the supernatural, and history.
Gendered Spaces
Houses are often depicted as gendered spaces—the dominion of
female characters, especially matriarchs. Márquez positions Úrsula as
the caretaker of the home while José Arcadio Buendía spends his time
with scientific pursuits. The characters’ roles are representative of
Faris’s observation that “the male tone within magical realism is often
more visionary” while the female is “more curative” (Faris 186).
Márquez depicts Úrsula, the traditional matriarch of the Buendía clan,
as the tireless caretaker of the family’s house and a source of
regenerative power against the effects of time on the household. He
introduces her as an active, no nonsense “woman of unbreakable
nerves” (Márquez 9) with a work ethic bordering on the marvelous.
Throughout the novel, Úrsula’s concerns include cooking, sweeping,
baking, arranging marriages, protecting the Buendía name, and
raising children, even those who are illegitimate. She embraces her
role as a stabilizing force for the family, outliving many of the novel’s
younger characters. In a 1982 Playboy interview, Márquez claims that
Úrsula “holds the world together” and describes her as “a prototype
of that kind of practical, life-sustaining woman” (Dreifus 115). He
argues that the virtue of womanhood lies in the fact that women “lack
historical sense” (Dreifus 130). They are concerned with daily reality
as opposed to politics or history. According to Márquez, the women
“stay at home, run the house, bake animal candies—so that the men
can go off and make wars” (130). Márquez situates women within the
Buendía house, the center around which Macondo’s politics revolve.
In direct contrast with Márquez’s view of women as ahistorical,
Toni Morrison’s representation of women in Beloved situates the
house as a physical embodiment of memory and its female inhabitants
as the rememberers of history. Sethe, the matriarch of 124 Bluestone,
can’t forget the horrors of slavery, which directly resulted in the
infanticide of her daughter. Her daughter’s malevolent spirit has
inhabited the house, filling the structure with “baby’s venom”
(Morrison 1). The women and children are able to recognize the spirit
and “put up with the spite in [their] own way” (Morrison 1), but the
men flee from the house until Paul D arrives and expels the spirit from
124. In the first section of the novel, 124 functions as a bridge
between the real and the supernatural. Faris links this function to the
role of the female body in magical realist texts (Faris 181),
establishing the connection between female characters, houses, and
the supernatural. Beloved depicts the female body and the home as
locations of trauma, which opens up the house as “an explicitly
political space” that may become “a space of resistance” (Upstone
264).
Rather than anchoring the narrative to a house, Cristina
García’s The Lady Matador’s Hotel utilizes a hotel as a space of
resistance connected to strong female figures that come into contact
with the supernatural. The novel follows six main characters of
varying ethnicities, genders, and nationalities that are all guests of
the Hotel Miraflor over the course of a week, which happens to take
place at the same time as an important political election. The novel’s
second chapter focuses on Aurora, an ex-guerilla revolutionary, who
works as a waitress at the hotel and lives alone because her family
had been killed by the government during an unspecified civil war.
When the military officials arrive at the Hotel Miraflor, the ghost of
Aurora’s brother appears, asking her to avenge his death by killing a
captain who is staying at the hotel. Thus, the Hotel Miraflor becomes
a location where gender norms are challenged and the supernatural
can be accessed.
The novel’s characters are portrayed as gender fluid, which
marks the hotel as an androgynous space. The female characters are
all aggressive, sexual, and non-maternal. Suki Palacios, the lady
matador, as nearly transcends gender with her sublime character
though the crowds view her as a “scandalous woman playing at being
a man” (García 4). She serves as the focal point of the hotel and
whenever she appears at the hotel, the other guests note her
presence. As an ex-guerrilla who has become part of the hotel staff,
Aurora represents women who were displaced from their
revolutionary roles during the civil war and reintegrated into the
socio-political structure. Ironically, the novel’s least maternal
character is a female adoption lawyer. Though she isn’t “maternally
inclined” (García 14), Gertrudis Stüber uses the Miraflor as an
adoption farm where prospective parents can pick up their children,
which she’s bought from the pregnant mothers she houses at a
location away from the hotel. In her business, both mothers and
children become commodities to be sold under the guise of adoption,
reflecting themes of diaspora and families discussed throughout the
novel.
Families, Lineage, & Diaspora
In Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality In the Colonial
Contest, Anne McClintock describes the emergence of what she calls
“the paradox of the family,” which figures the family both as a
metaphor that offers “a single genesis narrative for global history”
and as an institution “void of history” (44). Thus, the family became
both “the antithesis of history and history’s organizing figure” (44).
One Hundred Years of Solitude and Beloved are concerned with issues
of lineage—both genealogical and historical. The settlement of
Macondo and the subsequent building of the house simultaneously
mark the beginning of the Buendía line and the birth of a civilization.
The Buendía family’s narrative represents the whole of Macondo and,
some would argue, the experience of an entire continent. Beloved
explores the connections between Sethe and her daughters as well as
an entire lineage of people that begins with the Africans who died on
the Middle Passage. Both novels demonstrate the paradox of the
family in that the families are historical and ahistorical at the same
time, allowing them to function as universal and political elements of
the narrative.
In One Hundred Years of Solitude, the Buendía house serves as
the center of family life. Realizing that the house had filled with
people and that her children “would be obliged to scatter for lack of
space” (54), Úrsula enlarges the house. Throughout the novel, Úrsula
attempts to bring characters back to the house when they’ve ventured
too far from the center, usually because of a political endeavor. It is
both the point of origin and the place where blood returns. Márquez
uses a literal metaphor to describe the return of the child to the womb
when José Arcadio dies and his blood travels back to the Buendía
house:
A trickle of blood came out under the door, crossed the living room, went out into
the street continued on in a straight line across the uneven terraces…made a right angle at the Buendía house, went in
under the closed door, crossed through the parlor, hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs, went on to the other living room, made a wide curve to avoid the dining-room table…and went through the pantry and came out in the kitchen, where Úrsula was getting ready to crack thirty-six eggs to make bread. (Márquez 132)
Tinged with humor, Márquez’s description of the blood returning to
the house shows that, even after his death, José Arcadio’s blood
makes sure not to “stain the rugs” or soil the dining-room table. Even
the far-removed last remaining son of Colonel Aureliano Buendía dies
on the doorstep of the house, demonstrating the importance of the
home as a place that must finally be returned to. The events illustrate
the significance of the matriarch as the figure that anchors the family
and, by extension, the community. Úrsula doesn’t value full blood
relatives over adopted family members or illegitimate children. There
are various genealogical relationships present within the Buendía
household, ranging from the fully adopted, such as Remedios
Moscote, the daughter of Don Apolinar Moscote, to the far removed,
such as Rebeca, the orphaned daughter of Úrsula’s second cousins.
Úrsula feels responsible for taking them all into the home,
contributing to her depiction as the mother of the world archetype
and linking her with Eve, the first woman.
Though Úrsula’s roles may be archetypal, her management of
the Buendía household still remains a political act. In an interview
with Rita Guibert, Márquez claims that the “power of women in the
home…enables men to launch out into every sort of chimerical and
strange adventure” (Guibert 40). He then claims that the civil wars
that took place during 20th century Latin America wouldn’t have
happened “if it weren’t for the women taking responsibility for the
rearguard” (Guibert 41). The actions of the characters throughout the
novel support Márquez’s observations. Most of the woman are located
at the Buendía household and it’s the men that leave the home to
work, organize strikes, travel, and fight wars. However, the political
role of the home may become obscured because the establishment of
the home has become associated with “the natural and timeless
process of settlement” (McClintock 262). Through the process of
settlement, the narrative links Úrsula and the other female characters
with a cyclical conception of time that also obscures the political role
of the home.
Márquez explores the cyclical conception of time through
Úrsula’s perspective, associating the female gender with timelessness
and ahistoricity. Near the end of the novel, Úrsula repeats a
conversation with her great-grandson José Arcadio Segundo that
she’d had with Colonel Aureliano Buendía many years before. The
repetition causes her to “shudder with the evidence that time was not
passing, as she had just admitted, but that it was turning in a circle”
(Márquez 335). The repetition of family names throughout the
genealogical line over time reflects Úrsula’s conception of time as
cyclical. Erickson argues that Úrsula’s view of time “encapsulates the
novel’s reality, rather than just her subjective impression or a
narrative technique of the author” (Erickson 144). Márquez revisits
the returning to the origin motif a number of times throughout the
novel, evoking a sense of historical determinism, which would seem to
challenge the meaningfulness of political action.
However, the Buendía house remains at the center of Macondo
and is the location from which all politics emanate. The inextricable
link between the family and the home highlights the dual roles of the
José Arcadio Buendía and Úrsula as both the heads of the family and
founders of the community. Their house, which “from the very first
had been the best in the village” (Márquez 8), reflects their position at
the top of Macondo’s social hierarchy. All of Macondo’s houses were
“built in its image and likeness” (8), demonstrating that the larger
community originates from and mirrors the Buendía family. The house
also functions as a refuge from the outside world, exemplified by the
male characters who strive for political success or territorial
expansion but return to the Buendía mansion defeated.
Ironically, it’s only through Macondo’s diaspora that the
Buendía narrative and the town’s history are able to live on. Gabriel
García Márquez, though not directly related to the Buendía family, is
the only character that escapes Macondo’s destruction at the end of
the novel. Though the Buendía genealogical line is wiped from the
face of the earth, their stories and histories survive. The novel’s end
proves Úrsula’s fear of incest to be legitimate. Amaranta Úrsula and
Aureliano, unaware of their relationship to each other, fall in love and
give birth to a child with “the tail of a pig” (412), realizing the family
curse Úrsula feared at the beginning of the novel. The destruction of
Macondo, the birth and death of the child as a product of an
incestuous relationship, and the unlocking of the family’s history
occur at the Buendía mansion simultaneously. The intrusion of
modernity, as represented by the banana farmers, the gypsies, the
corrupt government officials, and the soldiers, leads Macondo to its
inevitable destruction. However, Gabriel García Márquez’s migration
from the homeland enables Macondo to survive, highlighting the
importance of diaspora within an increasingly postmodern world.
Much like the Buendía mansion, Beloved’s 124 functions as a
symbol of both separation from and yearning for community.
According to Conner, the house “embodies the separation of the
individual and the community” (Conner 65). Stamp Paid remembers
that “nobody besides himself would enter 124” (Morrison 171) so the
funeral for Baby Suggs had to be held in the yard. Insulted by their
actions, Sethe refuses to attend the funeral, isolating herself even
further from the community. As a form of self-protection, she hides
herself inside 124, avoiding judgment. Because of Sethe’s actions, her
daughter Denver acutely feels this sense of isolation. Morrison writes
the same scene from Denver’s perspective. She states that her mother
“wouldn’t let [her] go outside in the yard and eat with the others” and
that staying inside “hurt” her (Morrison 209). 124 protects Denver
from the community’s judgment but she remains severely cut off from
everyone except for the house as haunted by the ghost of the infant,
her mother, and later Beloved.
The house acts both as “a respite and a jail” (Conner 54), which
parallels the role of the community itself. After Sethe’s escape from
Sweet Home, she develops a sense of personal identity through her
interactions with the people of Cincinnati’s black community:
Sethe had had twenty-eight days…of unslaved life. From the pure clear stream of spit that the little girl dribbled into her face to her oily blood was twenty-eight days. Days of healing, ease and real-talk. Days of company: knowing the names of forty, fifty other Negroes, their views, habits; where they had been and what done; of feeling their fun and sorrow along with her own, which made it better…All taught her how it felt to wake up at dawn and decide what to do with the day…. Bit by bit, at 124 and in the Clearing, along with the others, she had claimed herself. Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another. (Morrison 95)
Morrison identifies the distinction between “freeing yourself” and
“claiming ownership” of the self. By becoming part of the community,
Sethe is able to begin to heal from the effects of slavery on her
identity. Sethe’s growth and attachment to others during that time
causes the community’s actions to be even more heartbreaking when
it fails to warn her about the schoolteacher coming to 124. By not
acting, the community implicates itself in Sethe’s murder of her infant
daughter and it is only with the help of the community that Beloved
and the horrors of slavery can be exorcised from 124.
Sethe’s obsession with her family and isolation from the
community keeps her from being able to move on from the past.
Represented by her confinement to 124, she becomes trapped in a
debilitating cycle of remembrance. Beloved, the embodied form of
memory, begins to consume Sethe and “the bigger Beloved got, the
smaller Sethe became” (Morrison 250). Though memory serves an
important function, the past constantly reminds Sethe of the assault
against her self worth during her time as a slave. Denver comes to
this realization and decides that she must reach out to prevent
Beloved from killing her mother:
But there would never be an end to that, and seeing her mother diminished shamed and infuriated her. Yet she knew Sethe’s greatest fear was the same one Denver had in the beginning—that Beloved might leave…Leave before Sethe could make her realize that worse than that—far worse—was what Baby Suggs died of, what Ella knew, what Stamp saw and what made Paul D tremble. That anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty you so bad you couldn’t like yourself anymore. Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn’t think it up. (Morrison 251)
Sethe’s confinement to 124 and her all-consuming relationship with
Beloved not only isolate her from the community, they cause her to
forget who she is. She loses all sense of selfhood, giving her entire
self to Beloved out of a sense of maternal love and guilt. Morrison
depicts the loss of self as a result of slavery as worse than being killed
or maimed. It is a total psychic erasure. Ultimately, Sethe’s focus on
Beloved and therefore the past threatens to obliterate her. Family
isn’t sufficient enough to save her. She must instead look outward
toward the community. Like One Hundred Years of Solitude, the
promise of surviving into the future relies on leaving the home.
As guests of the Hotel Miraflor, all of the main characters of The
Lady Matador’s Hotel are away from home, representative of an
increasingly globalized and postmodern world. In Espacio, Cuerpo Y
Masculindad Posmodernos En La Narrativa De Cristina García,
Ignacio Rodeño argues that the fragmentation of the hotel’s space
parallels the narrative structure of the novel (59). García marks each
narrative shift with the location of where the section takes place
within the hotel. It’s the physical space of the hotel that allows the
characters and their personal histories to be interrelated against the
backdrop of a political election. The hotel, a literal fragmentation of
space, functions as a metaphor for the fragmentation of the
characters’ identities. Each character comes from various countries
and backgrounds. For example, Suki Palacios is a half-Japanese, half-
Mexican lady matador from Los Angeles. Won Kim is a Korean textiles
factory owner, but lives in an unnamed Central American country.
Colonel Martin Abel represents the government while Aura Estrada is
an ex-rebel now working as a waitress at the hotel. Because the
novel’s setting is a major hotel for internationals, both intersections
and conflicts between nationalities, ethnicities, gender, and politics
take place.
Though the hotel is depicted as a transitional space filled with
people who are strangers to each other, the novel seems concerned
with exploring the various forms families take. One of the novel’s
major conflicts revolves around Gertrudis’s adoption business and its
political problems. In this storyline, the hotel functions as a place
where the children are commoditized and transformed into the
diaspora of the unnamed country. After spending a few days at the
hotel, parents of various nationalities leave with their adopted
children back to their homes across the world. By the end of the
novel, the government attempts to stop this practice, supposedly out
of concern for “baby kidnappings and the exploitation of poor, child-
bearing women” (163). At the end of the novel, the Cuban-American
Ricardo does in fact kidnap his adopted child because he has already
emotionally adopted her during his time at the Hotel Miraflor and
finds his paternal bond to be too strong to let her go. Challenging
traditional gender roles, García depicts the woman as non-maternal
and the men as responsible caretakers. Not only does García use the
hotel as a space for challenging gender roles, she challenges the
distinction between life and death within families as well.
The connection between Aura and Julio, the ghost of her dead
brother, demonstrates that the hotel is a liminal space between life
and death and the natural and supernatural. Politics and family
business become entangled when the ghost of her brother asks Aura
to avenge his death by using her wait staff position at the Miraflor to
kill Colonel Abel. The ghost only appears on the hotel roof, which
serves as a fitting location to connect the living and the dead. After
asking Aura to kill the colonel, Julio tells her to “bring [him] hot
chocolate” (García 51) instead of tea. Even the dead concern
themselves with mundane matters—a representative element of the
portrayal of ghosts within magical realism. The siblings still act as if
both were alive, demonstrating that death doesn’t sever ties between
family members, neither literal nor metaphorical. Faris argues that
within many women’s magical realist narratives “the domestic sphere
in magically real houses is usually not closed in on itself in isolation
but opened outward into communal and cosmic life, as proven by the
ghosts from other times and places that wander through them” (Faris
182). Acting as bridges between the individual and the communal and
the natural and supernatural, these haunted houses function in ways
unique to magical realism as a genre.
Haunted Houses & Hotels
Unlike the houses of Gothic texts, which isolate their magic and
represent the ghosts as a supernatural occurrence, magical realist
houses “instead provide focal points of [magic’s] dispersal” and
“[welcome] cosmic forces, which may either terrorize before
ultimately refreshing [the house], as in Beloved, or destroy it, as in
One Hundred Years of Solitude” (Faris 182). The narrative implies
that with the destruction of the Buendía house, the ghosts will also be
obliterated. As Macondo and the Buendía family approach their
ultimate ends, the accumulated ghosts still haunting the dilapidated
mansion remind Aureliano Babilonia and Amaranta Úrsula of the
weight of the past:
Many times they were awakened by the traffic of the dead. They could hear Úrsula fighting against the laws of creation to maintain the line, and José Arcadio Buendía searching for the mythical truth of the great inventions, and Fernanda praying, and Colonel Aureliano Buendía stupefying himself with the deception of war and the little gold fishes, and then they learned that dominant obsession can prevail against death and they were happy again with the certainty that they would go on loving each other in their shape as apparitions long after another species of future animal would steal from the insects the paradise of misery that the insects were finally stealing from man. (Márquez 411)
The dead continue to act the same as they had when living, revealing
that “dominant obsession can prevail against death.” Erickson claims
that the summary of the Buendías’ “useless repetitive” preoccupations
illustrate how the ghosts haunt both the living and “haunt themselves
by the repetition of their own past lives” (Erickson 142). The
passage’s final image of the insects “stealing from man” foreshadows
the end of the Buendía line. The characters’ belief in cyclical time and
inability to change both keeps them figuratively alive after death and
seals their final fate.
Prudencio Aguilar’s haunting of José Arcadio Buendía is the
catalyst for the creation of Macondo, a quasi-utopian experiment, and
his ghost functions as a representation of the past in the present.
Before he founds Macondo, José Arcadio Buendía kills Prudencio
Aguilar for publicly suggesting José Arcadio Buendía’s sexual
impotence. Prudencio’s ghost begins to haunt José Arcadio Buendía
and Úrsula as “a traditional manifestation of guilt” (Erickson 151).
José Arcadio Buendía remarks to his wife that the ghost’s
reappearance “just means we can’t stand the weight of our
conscience” and promises the ghost that “we’re going to leave this
town, just as far away as we can go, and we’ll never come back”
(Márquez 22-23). Thus the founding of Macondo occurs as the result
of Prudencio’s haunting. However, Prudencio arrives in Macondo after
searching for José Arcadio Buendía for many years, giving form to
Macondo’s prehistory in the present (Erickson 151). At the beginning
of the novel, José Arcadio Buendía concerns himself with
technological progress and scientific knowledge but when Prudencio
Aguilar’s ghost finds him, he “turns his back on progress and instead
becomes obsessed with the seemingly eternal reiterations of time”
(Erickson 151). Attempting to avoid the “second death” of not being
remembered, Prudencio Aguilar meets with José Arcadio Buendía
inside his laboratory, causing José to weep “for all those he could
remember and who were now alone in death” (Márquez 77). When the
time machine he’s attempting to invent breaks, José Arcadio Buendía
becomes fully obsessed with the past:
He spent six hours examining things, trying to find a difference from their appearance on the previous day in the hope of discovering in them some change that would reveal the passage of time. He spend the whole night in bed with his eyes open, calling to Prudencio Aguilar, to Melquiades, to all the dead, so that they would share his distress. But no one came…. Then he grabbed the bar from a door and with the savage violence of his uncommon strength he smashed to dust the equipment in the alchemy laboratory…. He was about to finish off the rest of the house when Aureliano asked the neighbors for help. Ten men were needed to get him down, fourteen to tie him up, twenty to drag him to the chestnut tree in the courtyard, where they left him tied up, barking in the strange language and giving off a green froth at the mouth. When Úrsula and Amaranta returned he was still tied to the trunk of the chestnut tree by his hands and feet, soaked with rain and in a state of total innocence. (Márquez 78)
José Arcadio Buendía’s illness symbolizes the entrapment of the past
he finds himself unable to escape. Erickson argues “the ghost actually
signals the illusion of repetition” rather than “a simple indication of
repetitions” (151). José Arcadio Buendía fails to understand this point
and, as a result, he withers from existing in the present time into “a
state of total innocence.” It is this obsession that eventually brings on
Macondo’s destruction because the Buendía family can’t seem to
adapt and function within an increasingly modernized world.
Much like José Arcadio’s obsession, the ghost of 124 is a
representation of the memories that enslave Sethe to the repetitive
persistence of the past in Beloved. The haunting of the past is directly
related to the house at the beginning of the novel since the ghost of
the already-crawling? baby imbues 124 with its spirit. Morrison’s
characterization of the house itself structures the sections of Beloved.
The novel opens with “124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom” (1)
and the last section begins with “124 was quiet” (239), paralleling the
novel’s narrative arc. Erickson claims that the haunting of 124 isn’t
simply metaphorical:
The haunting of 124 is distinctly characterized as an augmentation of its material existence; returning to 124 at the end of the novel…. With the disappearance of the ghost, the house has been stripped off its additional spectral ‘load,’ reduced to the bare materiality of ‘just another weathered house needing repair.’ (Erickson 100)
Denver even treats the house as if it were another character:
“Shivering, Denver approached the house, regarding it, as she always
did, as a person rather than a structure. A person that wept, sighed,
trembled and fell into fits” (29). The volatility of the house affects all
of its inhabitants but the characters who stay are the women,
reversing the concept of home ownership as only being available to
white men. However, Kawash claims that “the absence of men
registers the wounds of slavery as much as it does the independence
or strength of the women” (Kawash 73). Though Sethe owns 124 as a
free, black woman, the house traps her because of its connection to
the past. 124 acts as a bridge between Sethe and her deceased
daughter, allowing her to stay connected to the daughter she loved so
much she killed in order to keep her from experiencing life as a slave.
However, the connection threatens Sethe from forming her own
identity because the past constantly inhabits her present.
The narrative of Beloved itself is composed of fragmented
flashbacks, memories, and contemplation, disabling Sethe to act or
escape the horrors of her past even though she’s now a physically free
woman. Sethe’s understanding of memories as external “thought
pictures” demonstrate that memories are as real as the material world
(Erickson 102). The materiality of memory is illustrated through the
process of the ghost of the already-crawling? baby moving from
haunting the house to transforming into the character of Beloved.
Kawash observes that as this process occurs, “the site of haunting
shifts from the structure of the house to the agency of the ghost”
(Kawash 72). Thus 124 need not be destroyed in order to loosen the
hold of the past on Sethe though the ghost of Beloved must be either
appeased or exorcised. When the community does exorcise Beloved at
the end of the novel, Sethe continues to live at 124 and the house
functions as a memorial to the past. Though Beloved disappears, the
novel’s last few pages remind readers that the memory of slavery has
not been fully exorcised, nor should it be. Brogan argues that the
haunting of 124 by Beloved should be read “as emblematic of a
nation’s haunting by its ugly racial history—
a haunting that Morrison, in other contexts, calls ‘the ghost in the
[national] machine’ or the racial ‘shadow’ that continues to darken
American optimism” (Brogan 89). Sethe may be able to move forward
at the novel’s end but slavery will continue to shadow her life as an
individual and America as a nation.
The physical materiality of memory represented in Beloved
affirms the link between historical events and the supernatural in The
Lady Matador’s Hotel. At the beginning of the novel, Aura muses on
the state of her country as she serves military men who’d she fought
against as a rebel during the civil war:
Aura is convinced that the entire country has succumbed to a collective amnesia. This is what happens in a society where no one is permitted to grow old slowly. Nobody talks of the past, for fear their wounds might reopen. Privately, though, their wounds never heal. (García 9)
However, when Julio, the ghost of Aura’s brother, asks her to avenge
his death, he begins to reopen these wounds again, reminding his
sister that “there’s a place in the universe where memories are
written down, where nothing is forgotten” (García 50). Though both
individual and national insomnia, figurative and literal, is a central
theme of many magical realist texts including One Hundred Years of
Solitude, García reminds readers that there’s a supernatural
recording of earth’s history that supersedes human memories and
historical accounts. According to Julio’s ghost, there is a complete and
correct version of history that can perhaps correct the wrongdoings of
dictatorships such as those depicted in The Lady Matador’s Hotel.
Just as there are limits on the living, there are limits on the
dead. The ghost seems limited in his abilities to act because he can
only appear on the roof, illustrating the dead’s dependence on the
living. Aura recognizes that Julio has more knowledge than she
because he’s dead but he refuses to share what he’s learned with her.
In addition to revealing the connection between historical events and
a supernatural historical record, the figure of Julio’s ghost politicizes
Aura’s role at the hotel and the action that comes to take place there.
His appearance on the Miraflor’s roof reminds Aura “the struggle is
[her] personal burden” (11). This makes her feel as if “she’s serving
both the living and the dead” (153) rather than herself. At the moment
she slices the colonel’s throat with her knife, Aura realizes that “the
last word in history…must be fought for again and again” (193).
Ironically, it’s through murdering the colonel that Aura can move
toward a life of action rather than waiting, “the verb that most defines
her life” (152).
Houses, Hotels, & History
Though they houses of all three novels function as a focal point
for the connections between families and politics, they also symbolize
the text’s perspective on history. McClintock describes the family as a
“trope for figuring historical time” where social hierarchy and
historical change are “portrayed as natural and inevitable, rather than
as historically constructed and therefore subject to change” (45).
Úrsula’s perspective on the circularity of history disables Macondo
from creating its own history. When they allow their history to be
determined by outside groups, the Buendías succumb to the illusion of
historical change as natural and inevitable. The insomnia plague that
takes place symbolizes a collective loss of memory and historical
awareness that allows the forces of modernity to ravage Macondo.
Simas writes that the “vicious cycle of social injustice and oppression”
that overwhelms Macondo “acts as a metaphor for the social condition
of Latin America” (Simas 191). The invasion of these forces
represents the novel’s second conception of time that drives the
narrative to its apocalyptic end.
Márquez symbolizes the narrative’s merging together of
circular, ahistorical and linear, chronological conceptions of time
through the image of a gyrating wheel. Pilar Ternera, the novel’s
illegitimate matriarch, divines Macondo’s eventual return to its
primordial sources:
There was no mystery in the heart of a Buendía which was impenetrable for her because a century of cards and experience had taught her that the history of the family was a machine with unavoidable repetitions, a turning wheel that would have gone on spilling into eternity were it not for the progressive and irremediable wearing of the axle. (Márquez 396)
Erikson points out the difference between “the novel’s metaphorical
presentation of Latin American history and the characters’ ideological
apprehension of their own history” (Erikson 199). The eschatological
progression of time in the novel reflects Márquez ’s representation of
Latin America looking too much toward an idealized past while
allowing outside forces to define its history. As Aureliano reads his
family history written by the gypsy Melquiades, the wind, full of
“voices from the past” picks up and finally wipes out Macondo and
“exiles [it] from the memory of men” (Márquez 416-417). The
destruction of the Buendía mansion and its inhabitants at the novel’s
conclusion symbolizes the self-destructive nature of Latin American
history due to a belief in the cyclical nature of time.
Another type of erasure takes place in Beloved though the
physical structure of 124 still stands at the end of the novel. The
questions surrounding Beloved’s identity and Morrison’s suggestion
that her character also includes the already-crawling? baby and the
African slaves who died on the ships during the journey through the
Middle Passage complicate her exorcism and therefore Morrison’s
representation of history. Though Beloved ends with her exorcism
from 124, the unspeakable story of slavery “continues to haunt the
borders of a symbolic order that excludes it” (Wyatt 226). In the last
section, Morrison describes 124 as quiet—the voices have been
silenced. However, the structure of 124 memorializes the traumatic
past of American slavery. Kawash writes, “American literature
frequently figures the nation as a house haunted by the national
shame or repressed trauma of slavery” (Kawash 70). Though the
voices have quieted and the stories have been repressed so that the
characters can make “some kind of tomorrow” (Morrison 275) for
themselves, the national specter of slavery continues to haunt
American history.
In The Lady Matador’s Hotel, the Hotel Miraflor itself serves as
a transitional home where characters of different cultures and
ethnicities interact with each other, which reflects the global
postmodern condition. Nearly everyone has become part of a diaspora
and the traditional institutions used to concentrate power come into
question. The colonel’s murder takes place at the same time a bomb
detonates at the Hotel Miraflor, signaling the people’s affirmation of
agency against governmental and militaristic institutions. Aura’s
personal act of murdering the colonel changes the country’s political
landscape and allows her to move on from reopening the wounds of
the past. The remaining characters flee from the Hotel Miraflor for
new lives. The dispersal asserts the theme that no one can go home
(García 203) and questions whether a traditional conception of home
even exists in the present age.
Zamora’s concept of “semantic duplicity” (30) establishes the
importance of physical objects in magical realist texts, which tend to
conflate objects with ideas. Architectural structures are not only
central to the physical world of these particular narratives, they’re
metaphorical centers of power contestations and bridges to the realm
of the supernatural. As domestic spaces, houses possess a particular
connection to female characters, especially the matriarchs. Families
are also associated with houses while questions regarding adopted
families and diaspora surround the figure of the hotel. Houses are of a
dual nature, functioning both as prisons and sanctuaries to their
inhabitants. The hotel serves as a location where strangers meet and
interact, their perspectives and identities conflicting with one
another. Both structures represent a liminal space that connects the
living and the dead—earthly history and ghostly politics. Finally, the
structures house memories of individual and communal trauma. Each
undergoes a unique transformation, but those that survive are
simultaneously alive and memorialized, representative of the ever-
present influence of the past on the present.
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