The Dream House Study Guide

Craig Higginson was born in 1971 in the city of Salisbury (renamed Harare in 1982), the capital of the unrecognized Republic of Rhodesia (1965-1979), which is equivalent to modern Zimbabwe. In 1976, Higginson’s family moved to Johannesburg, South Africa to escape the political conflict that came before Zimbabwe’s independence. From ten to fourteen years of age, Craig Higginson attended a boarding school in KwaZulu-Natal, a province in eastern South Africa. Near the boarding school lived an elderly couple with a farmhouse; Higginson later used the couple as loose inspiration for Patricia and Richard Wiley in his play Dream of the Dog (2007) and his novel The Dream House (2015). After attending the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, Higginson moved to England, where he lived for a decade while working in theater. While in England he published his first novel, Embodied Laughter (1998). Since moving back to South Africa in 2004, he has published five more novels and written or co-written seven plays. Currently he lives in Johannesburg.

From the late 1940s to the early 1990s, South Africa enforced racial segregation and white supremacy through a set of laws known as apartheid. Under apartheid, South Africans were sorted into legally defined racial groups: white, Black/African, or “coloured” (i.e., mixed race or non-white and non-Black). Which racial group South Africans belonged to determined where they could live, where they could work, and whom they could pursue romantically—sex or marriage between white and non-white people was illegal in South Africa from 1949 to 1985. In the early 1990s, apartheid laws were slowly repealed. Then, from April 26 to April 29, 1994, South Africa held its first elections in which no restrictions were placed on voting according to voters’ race. Famous anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandela became South Africa’s president—and the first Black person to be South Africa’s head of state. Notably, The Dream House takes place after apartheid’s end, but apartheid still affects the characters’ lives. All the major characters grew up under apartheid. Of the major Black characters, only Looksmart, who received a good education due to white Patricia Wiley’s intervention, has become economically successful after apartheid’s end; the rest of the Black characters, without Looksmart’s educational opportunities, have remained poor. Moreover, the apartheid-era violent death of Black farm worker Grace—never investigated, it is implied, due to white policemen’s racism and indifference—hangs over the post-apartheid events in the novel.

The Dream House (2015) is a novelistic reworking of Dream of the Dog (2007), Craig Higginson’s first solo play. Both the play’s and the novel’s plots center around characters’ differing accounts and memories of a shocking crime. Higginson may have been inspired by Japanese writer Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s 1922 short story “In A Bamboo Grove,” which filmmaker Akiro Kurosawa made internationally famous when he adapted it into the award-winning 1950 film Rashomon. Like The Dream House, “In A Bamboo Grove” retells the story of a murder through different characters’ unreliable, conflicting accounts—without ever representing the murder directly or revealing to the reader whether any character’s account is accurate. Another South African writer, Nadine Gordimer (1923-2014), who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991, may also have influenced The Dream House. Though the novel was published after Gordimer’s death, she read and commented on it for Craig Higginson when it was in manuscript form. Moreover, Gordimer’s sixth novel The Conservationist (1974), somewhat like The Dream House, dramatizes the relationship between a white South African farm owner and Black farm workers when a Black person dies on the farm.