Dr. Malsufrido
Although not really the central character of the story, more is known about Dr. Malfrusido in “The Vine-Leaf” than is known about Marquesa herself. Most of what is know about the Doctor is through is conveyed through ironic descriptive prose situating his rather unique place in society:
“So edifying is his personality that, when he marches into a sick-room, the forces of disease and infirmity march out of it, and do not dare to return until he has taken his leave. In fact, it is well known that none of his patients has eironiver had the bad manners to die in his presence.”
Popo and Alicia
In “The Education of Popo” the title character swoons for a beautiful blond American woman. His appreciation of her physical delights moves him almost to poetry:
“It seemed to him that some precious image of the Virgin had been changed into a creature of sweet flesh and capricious impulses, animate with a fearless urbanity far beyond the dreams of the dark-eyed, demure, and now despised damsels of his own race.”
Ironically, it will be revealed later in the story that Alicia Cherry in her natural state resembles those familiar damsels more than it seems: the dye of her blond hair disguises the dark roots that is her natural hair color.
The Religion of Consumerism
The presentation of the physical self of women almost always plays a major thematic role in the work of Mena. It is never simply for the sake of superficial cosmetic appeal, however, but always engages for something deeper. That something is often a critique of American capitalism and nowhere is the irony more corrosive than in “The Gold Vanity Set” in which a cosmetic set left behind by an American woman is snatched up by a poor Mexican peasant girl. The details are too complicated to explain succinctly, but suffice to say this symbol of American consumer superficiality winds up the most ironic place possible: becoming endowed with profound religious significance under the protection of a statue of the Virgin Mary.
When Plastic Surgery Goes Wrong
Even though Mena was writing in the second decade of the 1900’s, “Marriage by Miracle” is a story about a plastic surgery disaster. A disaster that takes a strange ironic turn into being a really weird success story. Ernestina undergoes plastic surgery to make herself more attractive to men for the sake of preserving the marriage proposal extended to her younger sister. (It’s complicated, but go along.) The surgery is botched to the point that Ernestina literally cannot produced a smile. The entire framework of the narrative is constructed upon irony, but no moment is perhaps more pointed in its ironic content than when the doctor who botched the job tries to cover his tracks by telling the poor, unsmiling girl that “English immobility was in the latest mode cultivated by the most fashionable senoras.” Or, put another way, not being able to smile was all the rage among Anglo women.
The Double-Perspective
The most quoted excerpt from a Mena story is “washed their little brown faces…and assumed expressions of astonishing intelligence and zeal.” It is not usually quoted in reference to the story in which it occurs—“Marriage by Miracle”—but rather in reference to its appearance in perhaps the very first critical assessment of Mena’s stories ever published. The quote is used by the reviewer to forward his premise that her writing takes a condescending and superficial attitude toward Mexicans and “downtrodden Indians.” As time marched on and more scholarly analysis of her work was published, this perspective has been almost universally rejected on the basis that what seems condescending is actually very subtle use of ironic double-perspective.
