63 pages • 2-hour read
The Dangers of Smoking in Bed
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Symbols & Motifs
Fear
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of mental illness, child sexual abuse, graphic violence, sexual content, illness, and death.
Fear is a central motif throughout The Dangers of Smoking in Bed. It drives the narrative and also serves as a lens through which Enriquez explores reactions to the grotesque, taboo, and uncanny horrors that populate the collection’s stories. In these stories, characters face abstract threats, like poverty, trauma, and gender discrimination, rather than immediate physical dangers. In response, their fears become misplaced or dislocated, manifesting as anxiety and paranoia.
For example, Josefina in “The Well” experiences intense, debilitating fear that seems to have no apparent source. Similarly, Julieta in “Rambla Triste” is gripped by a seemingly irrational fear of the neighborhood, sensing something dark beneath its gentrified surface. These fears are not rooted in conventional horror tropes but rather in the characters’ recognition that the world is not what it seems. This is also true of the children in “Kids Who Come Back” or the spirit impersonating Pinocchia’s brother in “Back When We Talked to the Dead.” Although these beings aren’t overtly harmful, they inspire terror in their victims due to their link to traumatic pasts.
In general, characters in these stories experience fear when their previous understanding of reality is challenged by the unexpected, whether ghosts and spirits or the breaking of social taboos. Their impulse is to turn away from the source of fear, ignoring it to the fullest extent possible. However, Enriquez also shows that fear can fade with familiarity. In “Angelita Unearthed,” for example, the narrator is terrified of the dead baby at first, but with time, she realizes “that [the baby] isn’t evil” (10), and her fear dissipates. This suggests that characters are most afraid of the unknown and that confronting fear can bring some peace.
Ghost Children
Ghost children haunt many of the stories in The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, symbolizing The Impossibility of Hiding the Past, especially when the innocent or vulnerable have been wronged. Enriquez draws on the history of Argentina’s violent military dictatorship, and the ghost children in the collection symbolize the many babies and children who disappeared along with their parents or were illegally adopted by families sympathetic to the government.
The ghost children in these stories break stereotypes and are never beautiful and angelic; they are rotting, stinking, uncanny, and on a mission to remind those left behind of how they have been wronged. In “Angelita Unearthed,” the narrator is haunted by the corpse of her infant great-aunt after her bones are abandoned when the family home is sold. Angelita is a manifestation of familial neglect and a refusal to acknowledge the past. In “Rambla Triste,” child victims of poverty and destitution fill the gentrified neighborhood with a sickening stench and trap residents there. In “Kids Who Come Back,” legions of dead and missing children fill the parks of Buenos Aires, spreading terror across the city. None of the ghostly children in these stories is violent or even particularly angry or vindictive; they just want to be remembered and draw attention to the social issues that led to their suffering.
The Female Body
The majority of the characters in The Dangers of Smoking in Bed are women, and their bodies often become symbols of the grotesque and the taboo. In these stories, women’s bodies are not idealized or sanitized; instead, Enriquez renders them as flawed, physical, and deeply human. Through this, the collection confronts the societal obsession with objectifying and controlling women’s bodies, challenging the idea that a woman who cannot be desired loses her value in society.
The women who populate The Dangers of Smoking in Bed reject and defy these expectations. They are described in ways that break from conventional standards of beauty. For instance, the narrator of the titular story catalogs her problem areas: “dandruff, depression, zits on her back, cellulite, hemorrhoids, and everything dry, so dry” (173). Though many of these women crave sex, they are unattractive to men. They are described as having “flaccid” stomachs and “tubby legs.” These descriptions are intentionally unflinching, challenging readers to confront their own internalized standards of beauty.
Many of these women are aging, paranoid, or struggling with trauma or mental health issues. By placing them at the center of these stories, however, Enriquez challenges the invisibility usually imposed on women like these. Their grotesqueness is not a flaw but a way to question social norms that dictate whose stories are valuable.
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