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Themes
Themes and Colors
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.
While Machado seeks to make queer stories more visible and to celebrate queer love, she’s also deeply focused on portraying the harm and violence that can exist in those stories. She scrutinizes the trend in pop culture of queer, or queer-coded, characters like Ursula from The Little Mermaid being disproportionately given the role of the villain. Machado suggests it isn’t a problem to have queer villains, as long as there are plenty of other queer characters, too, showing that queer people are just as complex and flawed as everyone else. For Machado, queer representation is only freeing when those queer characters aren’t either upheld as morally perfect or reduced to evil stereotypes, but allowed to exist in as much complexity as non-queer characters.
It’s not only in pop culture that a gap in representation has detrimental effects. Though some research on domestic violence in same-sex relationships exists, it’s not something Machado is aware of until she begins writing this book, by which time she’s already left her abusive relationship and analyzed it deeply herself. This lack of complex, widespread representation has a deep impact on Machado’s ability to label and escape from an abusive queer relationship. Because, at the time of her relationship, she isn’t aware of many stories in which queer women abuse other queer women, she struggles to identify the woman from the Dream House as an abuser. She believes that if these kinds of stories were more prominent or even more widely published, she might have stumbled across them earlier, and they could have shown her a model of the kind of danger she experienced. She notes that a portion of the queer community is wary of stories of queer people that might cast a negative light on the community as a whole. But across her memoir, Machado illustrates that sharing complex, difficult stories about people with marginalized identities is a positive step towards protecting and informing people who may be, or become, victims of abuse, even if such stories leave other people in that marginalized group vulnerable to unfair scrutiny.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Compare and contrast themes from other texts to this theme…
Queer Visibility ThemeTracker
The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Queer Visibility appears in each chapter of In the Dream House. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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Get the entire In the Dream House LitChart as a printable PDF.
Queer Visibility Quotes in In the Dream House
Below you will find the important quotes in In the Dream House related to the theme of Queer Visibility.
2. Dream House as Prologue
Quotes
What gets left behind? Gaps where people never see themselves or find information about themselves. Holes that make it impossible to give oneself a context. Crevices people fall into. Impenetrable silence.
Related Characters:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
27. Dream House as Queer Villainy
Quotes
As it turns out, queer villains become far more interesting among other gay characters, both within a specific project or universe and the zeitgeist at large. They become one star in a larger constellation; they are put in context. And that’s pretty exciting, even liberating; by expanding representation, we give space to queers to be—as characters, as real people—human beings.
81. Dream House as Sniffs from the Ink of Women
Quotes
I haven’t been closeted in almost a decade. Even so I am unaccountably haunted by the specter of the lunatic lesbian. I did not want my lover to be dogged by mental illness or a personality disorder or rage issues. I did not want her to act with unflagging irrationality. I didn’t want her to be jealous or cruel. Years later, if I could say anything to her, I’d say, “For fuck’s sake, stop making us look bad.”
88. Dream House as Ambiguity
Quotes
The story was simultaneously salacious and utterly baffling. They were… engaged? Alice had given Freda a ring, along with promises of love and devotion and material support. Should they execute her for murder, or put her in a hospital for her unnatural passions? Was she a scorned lover or a madwoman? But to be a scorned lover, she’d have to be—they’d have to be—?
119. Dream House as Equivocation
Quotes
Queer folks fail each other too. This seems like an obvious thing to say; it is not, for example, a surprise to nonwhite queers or trans queers that intracommunity loyalty goes only so far, especially when it must confront the hegemony of the state. But even within ostensibly parallel power dynamics, the desire to save face, to present a narrative of uniform morality, can defeat every other interest.
