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Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in In the Dream House, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Queer Visibility
Christianity and Shame
Abuse, Trauma, and Healing
Storytelling, Responsibility, and Freedom
Summary
Analysis
Back in the Dream House, Machado has an explosion of creativity, despite being constantly miserable. She starts to try out fragmentation, breaking stories into small pieces. She defends this technique by saying stories need to be told in many different ways, but that defense hides the truth, which is that she herself is breaking down.
Machado’s fragmentary style echoes her evasion of the central issue in her life. Instead of confronting abuse as the key conflict in her own narrative, she shies away from it and focuses on peripheral details, finding new ways to keep the woman’s violence a secret to those around her.
Themes
