Amparo Dávila’s The Houseguest, published in 2018, provides a beginner’s handbook to feminist existential literature through short stories that embrace the uncanny and unseen. Dávila’s storytelling style is compared to that of Kafka, Poe, and Shirley Jackson through the genre of magic realism reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s mark on Latin American literature. What is existential literature, how is it feminist, and why should Dávila’s published work matter? The Houseguest introduces the reader to the question of individual will and determinism placed within the alienating restrictions of womanhood beyond Western standards. The intersection of feminist anxieties and violence within the household—a danger within—is neatly wrapped up in the genre of domestic noir in which The Houseguest depicts unseen monstrosity and madness brought on by a mysterious “he.” The uncanniness lies within the gray area of affliction and madness, as the reader doesn’t know if the female protagonist is facing danger or simply losing their mind.
The Houseguest is a short read consisting of twelve short stories that can serve as a way to get out of a reading block or provide an unsettling bedtime story. The prose is concise and seemingly minimalistic, maybe an effect of translation, but the coldness and detachment offer a sense of malevolence in which the protagonist is desensitized. A taste of the plot is represented in the short story named after the title,“The Houseguest,” depicting the narrator’s cruelly controlling husband bringing home a mysterious and sinister guest to stay at their home and torment the narrator and her children. The narrator’s solution to free her and her children from the unwelcome guest is brought on by madness, embracing the trope of “female hysteria” as rebellion, another mark of domestic noir.
To understand the existential work, it’s important to place The Houseguest within the Mexican origin of writing and highlight that Dávila’s work was originally written in Spanish and published with translations done by Audrey Harris and Matthew Gleeson. The initial layer of existentialism lies within the translators’ personalized choice of converting Spanish phrasing and sentence structure to English, in which the reader can only wonder what sentiment is salvaged and what is lost to Western language barriers. Further, Dávila is one of very few Latina women of the genre to have her work translated and made accessible to Western literature in which her existential narrative as a minority woman diversifies the male-dominated and white-washed definition of existentialism, and more devastatingly, who gets to be considered an existentialist. While Western culture assumes a narrative of individualistic pursuit against predetermination, Dávila is for the girls — or more so for the generation of women that silently adhere to expectations of womanhood that serve as an enemy to the male luxury of individuation and often manifest as the titles of wife or mother. The Houseguest slowly contextualizes the terrifying entity from an undefined sense of calamity the female protagonist is trapped in the house to a focused archetype of an indifferent man inflicting madness through domesticity.
At its core, The Houseguest resembles violence within the household through a lurking presence or an emotionally absent “he” that the women, often wealthy housewives, must endure. Dávila’s depiction of existential dread reflects that of The Metamorphosis in combination with the absurdity of magic realism. The feminist lens then provides a refreshing nuance of diversified voices in which Dávila brings her female protagonists to a call to arms to which I found myself searching for the unseen existential narratives within Western culture that silently endure.
