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8. Dream House as Memory Palace
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 wonders whether, if she were able to visit her past self from the future, her past self would listen to her present self’s warnings. She probably wouldn’t—she didn’t even listen to her friends when they said they were worried about her.
Machado is honest about her past failings, which suggests that she’s trying to be as objective as possible about telling her own story.
Themes
Machado explains the Novikov self-consistency principle, which states that even if someone could travel back in time, they couldn’t change any events that had already happened—they could only provide new insight. Machado sees herself as the time traveler who, by trying to warn her past self, might have only encouraged her instead; perhaps her past self would have interpreted the warning voice as a sign of excitement, not danger.
Machado’s inability to escape her dangerous situation—and the likelihood that she would’ve interpreted a warning sign as encouragement instead—suggest that it was incredibly difficult for her to finally escape from the Dream House, and that her experience in it wasn’t simply negative but tinged with desire and pleasure.
Themes
