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98. Dream House as Dirty Laundry
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
In the present, Machado describes an episode from the TV show Star Trek: The Next Generation. In it, the Cardassians—an alien species—capture Captain Picard and interrogate him about military plans. They refer to him only as “human” and torture him physically. After Picard repeatedly tells the Cardassians he doesn’t have any information, the Cardassian leader asks him how many lights he can see above him. Picard says there are four. The Cardassian tells him there are five and presses a button that causes Picard immense pain.
The Cardassians labelling Picard only as “human,” removing his name and therefore his identity, echoes what Machado has described about legal trials involving queer women in which juries and judges redefined those women’s identities and labelled them crudely. Picard’s experience includes gaslighting and psychological abuse at the hands of someone highly knowledgeable in such methods, and Machado implicitly compares this experience to her own.
Themes
After a prolonged period of torture, Picard still refuses to change his answer. His team from the Starship Enterprise rescue him, and later, he tells the ship’s counselor that by the end, he had been tempted to tell the Cardassians whatever they wanted to hear if they’d leave him in peace—and more than that, he really did start to believe that there were five lights.
Picard’s confession demonstrates the power of psychological manipulation to make its victim doubt themselves and question what they sense to be true. Similarly, in Machado’s abusive relationship, she frequently convinced herself that the woman’s violence and cruelty must not have been as drastic as it seemed to her.
Themes
