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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
A few days after the bowling incident, the woman from the Dream House invites Machado to a concert at a bar. Machado reluctantly agrees, only drinking one beer at the gig because she wants the option of driving away at short notice. It gets late, and Machado tells the woman she needs to go home, but she doesn’t mind if the woman stays longer. The woman understands this as Machado saying she doesn’t care about her at all.
As she’s demonstrated many times previous to this, the woman misinterprets Machado’s neutral comment as a statement of cruelty. Once again, she treats Machado’s boundaries as though they’re only there to upset her, and in doing so, she fails to recognize that Machado is an independent person with her own needs and desires.
Themes
The woman from the Dream House tells Machado to let her drive home. Machado refuses: the woman is drunk. Once they get home, the woman starts screaming at Machado, but after last time, Machado feels calm. She gets into the shower, but the woman follows her in and screams at her to leave the house. Machado says she can’t—she doesn’t have her car—but she’ll sleep on the floor and leave first thing. After a while, the woman comes back into the bathroom and asks, in a sweet voice, why Machado is crying.
Machado’s calm reaction suggests that she no longer considers the woman’s behavior shocking—and she seems to cope with it privately, rather than expressing her emotions. In this relationship, it seems that only one person gets to express their feelings, and that person is the woman. If Machado expresses unhappiness, the woman rarely empathizes with her.
Themes
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