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1. Dream House as Overture
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
Machado muses on the concept of “archival silence,” which happens when there’s information missing from a historical record, and disproportionately affects queer history. One example is the relationship between Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok. Hickok burned many of the letters they wrote to each other, though it’s clear from the remaining letters that they had a passionate queer relationship.
It's ironic that Machado writes a prologue immediately after saying that she doesn’t see the point of prologues. This suggests that even the author herself isn’t totally sure about how to tell her story, and that she needs to approach it from many different angles in order to fully express herself.
Themes
Not only are queer histories erased from the archive, but stories of abused women, especially within queer relationships, have only become visible and understood in the last 50 years. These stories are like “ghosts […] haunting the ruler’s house.” With this memoir, Machado wants to expand the archive to include stories like her own, which show that domestic abuse between partners of the same gender is “both possible and not uncommon.”
Machado introduces the idea of ghosts almost immediately, and with them come feelings of danger and death. Though Machado hasn’t yet shared any details of her own story, she suggests that it won’t be an easy one to tell. Machado’s story, one of both queerness and abuse, will possibly be somewhat unfamiliar to many readers—and, therefore, doubly important to tell in order to fill gaps in the archive.
Themes
