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126. Dream House as Schrödinger’s Cat
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 early summer, a man Machado was sexually involved with at the start of her time in Iowa gets in touch again. He’s in town and asks her out to dinner. As she drives to meet him, she realizes her compliant behavior is the same as when she did everything the woman from the Dream House asked her to do. After dinner, the man tries to get Machado to come up to his hotel room. When she refuses, he kisses her by her car. She doesn’t resist, but she doesn’t reciprocate either. On the drive home, she pulls over and sinks into a ball on the grass, taking deep breaths.
Machado’s inability to defend her personal boundaries distresses her. She finds herself in a pattern of being taken advantage of sexually. The title of this chapter refers to the story of Newton discovering the theory of gravity when an apple fell on his head—a sudden epiphany that’s echoed in Machado’s realization of her compliant behavioral patterns.
Themes
