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80. Dream House as Chekhov’s Gun
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 the present, Machado quotes Norman Mailer saying that women’s writing seems “dykily psychotic” to him. She observes that narratives about mental health involving queer women normally have a homophobic slant, and she feels haunted by “the specter of the lunatic lesbian.” When the woman from the Dream House turned out to have a personality disorder, Machado felt like she was making all lesbians “look bad.”
Mailer’s comment is reductive and flagrant, a reminder of the violent language that, throughout history, has dehumanized women and members of the queer community. Machado’s discomfort with the woman from the Dream House fitting into a stereotype like this one highlights the importance of broad representation: if there’s only one kind of queer villain in the literary canon or the historical archive, people are more likely to treat all queer women with derision.
Themes
