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45. Dream House as World Building
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 this chapter, Machado describes the Dream House as if it’s the setting of a play. The front door will never open; the residents only use the back door. In the kitchen, there’s a lamp with a fraying cord and a creaking sofa. There are old, sweet-smelling cardboard boxes all over the house. The curtain rises to reveal two women sitting opposite each other, both typing on their computers: one is Machado, a “racially ambiguous fat woman,” and the other is the woman from the Dream House. The house seems to breathe around them.
Machado’s meticulous description of certain details of the Dream House highlight how vibrant a place it is in her mind, even after a significant amount of time has passed since she was there. The fraying cord, creaking sofa, and cardboard boxes suggest a level of neglect—it’s possible that the house never really felt like home to anyone who lived there—and also lend it an ominous, even haunted, feeling.
Themes
