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
As a writer, Machado knows that places are active players in stories, not inert things. In many stories of domestic abuse, the victim experiences “dislocation”: they may have just moved to the area or lost connection to their support system. She describes the Dream House as an “island” surrounded by a golf course, a small forest, and the houses of strangers. It represented many things to her: a “convent of promise,” a “den of debauchery,” a haunted house, and a prison. When she dreams of it, the front door is green, which it never was in real life.
Machado uses her knowledge of literature and her writing skills to help her analyze and process her abusive relationship. Just as world building allows characters to fully come to life in their fictional settings, the Dream House, with its isolation and wildness, is a living part of Machado’s story. It’s so alive that it takes on a new form in her imagination and seems to keep living there even many years after the incidents she depicts in this memoir.