Essay Questions

Dr. Malsufrido in “The Vine-Leaf” is noted in the opening sentence for knowing a great many family secrets. What is the secret that is revealed in the story?

The title of this story refers not to an actual plant, but rather a birthmark on a beautiful Spanish marchioness. The lady is no lady, if you get the drift and it is the doctor’s story—which he is not telling himself because he knows how to keep a secret—which reveals this to be true. The doctor tells the story of the marquesa looking to have that birthmark removed. Which is odd, you see, because its placement upon her body is not where it would cause any sort of public embarrassment. The physical flaw in this case, as always in a story by Mena, is not significant because it is an anatomic disfigurement.

The presentation of the flawed physical self is a manifestation of a flaw located elsewhere, though in this case it remains within the marquesa herself. This particular family secret held by Dr. Malsufrido is that the birthmark shaped like a vine-leaf could be considered as what would eventually come to be known by the term forensic evidence of the commission of a homicide. The marquesa wants the birthmark removed in order to remove evidence linking her to knifing murder of the artist who painted her portrait.

What is the key phrase in “The Gold Vanity Set” that stipulates the canonical view the author’s narratives hold toward American tourists in Mexico?

Originally dismissed as merely a writer of “local color” stories featuring Mexicans and Native Americans, Mena’s work has since undergone a thorough reassessment. Today, the universally held perspective is that she engages a very subtle form of irony to conduct social commentary that attacks American capitalism and specifically consumer culture as exploitative mechanisms toward underprivileged cultures like that among the peasantry of Mexico. “The Gold Vanity Set” opens with a raucous interruption of normality in a Mexican pueblo by ugly Americans who are loud, brash, condescending and oblivious. The patriarch of the family and homeowner looks on with a complexity of resentment that is encapsulated in his interior thoughts which can be also be effectively applied to any number of other characters in other stories by Mena: “To be sure, much silver would accrue to the establishment from the invasion, but business in the Mexican mind is dominated by sentiment.”