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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
Years after their relationship, Machado finds a memory card with photos of the woman from the Dream House. In them, she’s naked, and Machado looks at them with a sense of distance, as though it’s someone else in the photos. As she deletes them, she feels a strange sense of loss.
Even though Machado doesn’t feel any instinctive pleasure when she looks at the photos of the woman, she still grieves what their absence represents, which suggests that while she’s moved past her attraction for the woman, she feels a vaguer sense of loss, perhaps for the potential of a relationship that once held the promise of pleasure but turned out to be full of violence.
Themes
