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123. Dream House as Unexpected Kindness
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
For the month after the breakup, Machado exercises with a friend who constantly encourages her. Machado can tell she’s getting fitter and stronger. One day after working out, Machado finds she has nine missed calls with voicemails from the woman from the Dream House. She runs to her car and rushes home where she hands the phone to John, who encourages her to resist contacting the woman. Machado works out how to block the woman’s number, but then listens to the voicemails she left. Some of them are doting and affectionate, others aggressive. The stream of messages sounds like “a bad and offensive movie about a woman with multiple personality disorder.” Machado saves them in case she needs to file a restraining order, but when she upgrades her phone, the messages disappear.
Even when the woman from the Dream House is physically removed from Machado, she still finds ways to push past Machado’s boundaries, like leaving nine voicemails instead of just one. Machado is now aware of the woman’s detrimental effect on her mental health, and she seems to understand, after a long period of keeping her situation a secret, that asking for help is in fact a necessary part of the healing process. The disappearance of the messages is an inadvertent healing process, too—it suggests the inherent conflict in recovering from psychological abuse of which there’s no concrete proof. In order to move past her trauma, Machado has to sacrifice the pursuit of justice.
Themes
