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3. Dream House as Not a Metaphor
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
Before Machado met the woman from the Dream House, she lived in a small, dilapidated house in Iowa City with a couple, Laura and John. They treated Machado like “a beloved sibling.” Machado calls herself a “picara” and lists other people she lived with and met at various stages of her life before arriving at the Dream House—people who helped her when she came out or when she broke up, and the readers of her LiveJournal who, along with John and Laura, have been “kindred spirits” and taken care of her.
The term “picara” means a rogue, adventuring woman, the main character of a picaresque—though the hero of a picaresque would conventionally be male, or a “picaro.” The term is originally Spanish, which provides a subtle link to Machado’s Cuban heritage, and the fact that she sees herself as a picara reinforces her desire to carve out a place in the archive for her own story by using and subverting the kinds of stories that already exist.
Themes
