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Chapter 4
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Dream House, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Privilege, Understanding, and Historical Change
Truth, Accountability, and Memory
Parental Love vs. Romantic Love
Rebirth and New Beginnings
Humor, Ignorance, and Denial
Summary
Analysis
Patricia. The next morning, Patricia looks out her window at the bloodwoods and imagines their destruction. The night before, she dreamed the builders razed the Durban house while she and the others were living in it. Since the bloodwoods are standing, Patricia assumes Rachel’s grave is undisturbed. She muses that the ancient Egyptians probably knew no afterlife existed but wanted to be buried amongst their things to keep other people from having them.
Patricia’s dream that the Durban house was destroyed suggests she believes her life will be demolished, no matter where she moves. Her speculation that the ancient Egyptians didn’t believe their own religion but took objects to their graves out of possessiveness shows that Patricia not only doesn’t believe in a resurrection or afterlife but can’t believe that anyone else would believe it.
Themes
Patricia calls Beauty, who arrives wearing a dress. Patricia notices Beauty is angling herself toward Richard’s room. Patricia wonders whether they could stop caring for him—abandon him on the farm to fend for himself while they move to Durban. She asks Beauty to go with Bheki to pack Rachel’s coffin in a trunk; that way, Patricia can rebury Rachel in Durban where she herself was baptized and her parents are buried.
It’s unclear whether Patricia wants to abandon Richard to punish him for Grace’s murder or to forget her own complicity. Yet Patricia is clearly not trying to abandon her past entirely: she wants to bring Rachel with her, suggesting maternal love makes her cling to parts of the past, even if they’re painful.
Themes
Patricia goes into the kitchen for breakfast and notices the room looks rundown. She’s never renovated the house. She’s only recently realized life’s goodness is something she should have worked to maintain, not something she’d always have because her father gave it to her. Examining the house, she accepts that her “apathy” helped make it the way it is. Hearing Richard and Beauty from another room, Patricia marvels that Beauty never told anyone about what Richard did to Grace and cared for him rather than murdering him as Looksmart desired to do.
The Wileys’ house represents the effects of the past on the present. When Patricia acknowledges she hasn’t kept up the house as she should and her “apathy” led to its present dilapidated state, she is implicitly acknowledging her accountability for the events that occurred in the house’s past: Richard’s violence, Grace’s death, and the failure of her own relationship with Looksmart.
Themes
Richard enters the kitchen wearing a shirt but no bottoms. Patricia recalls how Looksmart compared Richard to a moth and realizes she’s going to perceive Richard through Looksmart’s eyes in the future. Patricia reminds Richard to eat before their journey—they’re traveling to the coast. When Richard says he can’t swim, Patricia tells him he must remember how.
Patricia now sees Richard the way Looksmart does, which indicates that Looksmart was at least partially successful in his mission to cure Patricia’s moral blindness and hold her accountable for past events.
Themes
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Bheki. Bheki, standing with Beauty at Rachel’s grave, sees something has dug up a dog’s grave nearby. Carefully, Bheki moves the soil off Rachel’s coffin. He muses that he’s aware of Beauty’s love for him, though—as much as he has enjoyed her affection—he’s never desired her. He’s decided not to tell her that he’ll return to work for Looksmart once he’s driven the Wileys to Durban. Looksmart has promised to get Bheki’s disabled child into “a special school,” because it’s “time for black people to help each other” rather than “getting help from the whites.” Bheki likes this idea; he’s tired of this job, where Patricia can demand he dig up a dead baby.
When Bheki sees a dug-up dog’s grave, it suggests that Richard accidentally unearthed dog bones when he was trying to find Rachel—reminding the reader that, in his racist dehumanization of his Black employees, Richard has always had difficulty distinguishing between animals and humans. Bheki’s decision to leave the Wileys and work for Looksmart indicates that real historical change has occurred post-apartheid: Looksmart, a successful Black man, can now help Bheki, another Black man, find a good job—neither needs to rely on condescending “help from the whites.” Interestingly it is Bheki’s love of his son that motivates his decision, suggesting that care for one’s children’s future is of primary importance in motivating social change.
Themes
Though Bheki believes his absence will break Beauty’s heart, he thinks she’ll just have to bear it. He now considers her and Patricia “two sides of the same thing,” which he doesn’t want to deal with anymore. As Bheki and Beauty lift the coffin, he remembers seeing it lowered into the grave. Though at the time he thought it a shame to bury the lovely coffin, its sturdiness is helpful now.
Bheki’s callous dismissal of Beauty’s broken heart demonstrates again that most characters in the novel take romantic love less seriously than familial love. Bheki’s belief that Beauty and Patricia are “two sides of the same thing,” meanwhile, suggests that he thinks Beauty, as a loyal Black employee to undeserving white employers, enables an unjust racial hierarchy that Bheki wants to escape.
Themes
Bheki recalls the rumors that after Rachel’s death, Looksmart was the only person who brought Patricia joy. Bheki respected how Looksmart used the Wileys’ front door so casually. Looksmart improved Patricia because he “expected the best” of her. Bheki felt he and Patricia had nothing to say to one another after Looksmart left.
Patricia and Looksmart’s quasi-parent/child relationship subverted racial hierarchies on the farm (symbolized by Looksmart, a Black child, using the front door rather than a back entrance) and bettered Patricia’s behavior, making it easier for her to talk to her Black employees like Bheki. These changes in Patricia were not permanent, however—they halted after Looksmart’s departure.
Themes
Bheki and Beauty put earth around the coffin inside its trunk. Beauty closes the trunk with a lock whose combination is a secret between her and Patricia. As Bheki and Beauty carry the trunk back to the house, they make a point of performing, for Patricia’s benefit, the solemnity they feel. Bheki, carrying the coffin, realizes the Wileys are really moving away.
Patricia has told only Beauty the lock combination, a detail emphasizing how underprivileged employees end up understanding their employers’ deepest secrets. That it takes the removal of Rachel’s coffin compels Bheki to understand the Wileys’ move emphasizes the importance of Rachel to the Wileys. It also reaffirms that the Wileys are carrying their past with them, not making an entirely fresh start in Durban.
Themes
Patricia. The phone is ringing inside the house. After Bheki and Beauty deposit the coffin in the sitting room, Patricia picks up the phone. The person on the other end identifies herself as “Mrs. Bell from the school.” From Mrs. Bell, Patricia learns John is dead and may have killed himself. Patricia’s aware that Mrs. Bell knows about her affair with John. When she asks whether Mrs. Bell wants her to go to John’s house, Mrs. Bell explains that the police want Patricia to come because John left a note.
The reappearance of John, in death, near the novel’s end is unexpected—Patricia seems to have largely forgotten him after their goodbye, which indicates how much more she cares about her lost relationship with Looksmart than her long-term affair with John.
Themes
Patricia takes out John’s letter and almost opens it; when she sees Bheki looking at her, she puts it in her purse instead. She tells Bheki that John has died. As Bheki drives her to John’s house, Patricia chastises herself for her “lack of imagination” with respect to Richard, Looksmart, and John. By focusing her on certain aspects of her history, Looksmart has changed how she sees her past. She remembers laughing at a black puppy dog that tried to chase the dairy girls.
Patricia’s frustration at her own “lack of imagination” shows she has realized that her privilege has allowed her to be blind to other people’s realities. She thought it was funny when a dog chased the Wileys’ Black female employees because she never considered that, in the future, the dog might become not only a pet but also a weapon of white violence against Black victims. By revealing the truth to her and holding her accountable, however, Looksmart has made her see the past with new eyes.
Themes
In John’s driveway, Patricia sees an ambulance and a police car as well as someone’s Toyota. Bheki gets Patricia her walker but doesn’t accompany her into the house. As Patricia stands in John’s hallway, a young Indian policewoman approaches and says she’d like to talk to Patricia. Then Mrs. Bell comes up. When Patricia asks what happened, the policewoman says they suspect suicide. Patricia is surprised John would kill himself but reflects that the conversations they had with each other were shallow.
In contrast with the extremely serious conversation Patricia has just had with Looksmart, all her conversations with John were superficial, demonstrating yet again how much more Patricia invests emotionally in parent-child relationships than romantic ones.
Themes
Patricia says John seemed fine when she saw him the day before. Mrs. Bell asks whether Patricia didn’t know about his cancer. Patricia, “humiliated,” says she didn’t. The policewoman gives Patricia John’s note, which asks that Patricia not be bothered with news of his suicide. The policewoman asks why he’d write that. Patricia hazards that he wrote it to “spare” her. Privately, she wonders whether he wanted to spare her “the opportunity to care—to feel extravagantly,” but she just says he knew she was moving and might not have wanted to delay her. When the policewoman asks whether John and Patricia were friends, Patricia says they were—perceiving a possible knowing smile on Mrs. Bell’s face as she does.
Patricia is “humiliated” not to have known about John’s cancer because, as his long-term lover, she feels she ought to have known him better than she did. Yet she seems to feel that John didn’t want her understanding or her passionate love—that he tried to hide his illness and suicide to deprive her of “the opportunity to care” or “to feel extravagantly,” a suspicion suggesting that John was as culpable as she for the coolness and emotional distance in their relationship.
Themes
The policewoman asks whether Patricia would like to see John. Patricia, wanting to know “whether or not it is too late to care about him—to feel extravagantly,” agrees. When Mrs. Bell sniffs, Patricia wonders whether she too had an affair with John; she contemplates how she knew “nothing at all” about John, really. Patricia follows the policewoman down the hallway into John’s bedroom.
Looksmart’s revelations have led Patricia to revise her perceptions on the past. Now, realizing that she understood “nothing at all” about her long-term lover, she wants to know “whether or not it is too late” for her to change the way she understands other people.
Themes
Patricia has seen dead bodies before, though she barely remembers her mother’s. John’s is different due to “the violence of his death.” She can think about the man she knew, but she doesn’t feel she knows the man who killed himself, who “insist[s] on the mystery that must run through all things.” Disoriented, Patricia notices shaving cream under John’s ear and wonders whether he was already planning to kill himself while shaving—and whether he “still believed in God” or found rejecting God as easy as suicide.
Though Patricia still doesn’t understand John, perceiving in him “the mystery that must run through all things,” she at least realizes she doesn’t understand him, his violent death, or his religious beliefs. This constitutes character development, since earlier in the novel, Patricia was assuming falsely that she understood the people around her.
Themes
Patricia asks what happens next. The policewoman says Mrs. Bell has notified John’s relatives. Patricia decides she doesn’t want to witness John’s children faking grief while bickering over who gets his things. She says, “Goodbye, John,” and hears nothing in return. Outside, she encounters Mrs. Bell, whom she tells she’ll be leaving for Durban and won’t attend the funeral—John’s children won’t need her presence.
Given the importance of parent-child relationships in the novel, John’s apparent estrangement from his children suggests another reason he felt he had nothing to live for. Patricia’s decision not even to attend John’s funeral, meanwhile, hints that she believes it is too late for her to turn over a new leaf and “feel extravagantly” about him.
Themes
John. In his letter to Patricia, John writes that he’ll leave behind some stories and two children who didn’t want to speak to him. After wishing Patricia tranquility in Durban, he muses that he “lacked the patience” to treat his wife correctly as she died and that he didn’t fulfill his other familial and social roles—and he asks why he felt such “anger.” Unsure what he’s trying to express, he thanks Patricia for her love and says he doesn’t regret their affair, which was “a place of truth” that offered him relief and a glimpse at alternate possibilities. He hopes Patricia recalls him fondly, says he’ll wait for her, and ends, “Think well of us—and of each of us.”
When John mentions his estrangement from his children, it strengthens the implication that one of his reasons for killing himself rather than living longer with cancer was the failure of his familial relationships. By describing his affair with Patricia as “a place of truth,” he implies he received from understanding or insight from their relationship. Finally, his ending request that Patricia think well of “each of us” suggests he knows Patricia may have a more negative view of their affair than he does.
Themes
Patricia. As Bheki packs the car and Richard wanders the garden, Patricia thinks about John’s letter. It made her angry. Given his death, he “could have confessed to anything”—but he chose not to. Patricia never gave him “a place of truth”; neither of them understood the truth. The letter strikes her as syrupy, false. Moreover, she notes that he never told her he loved her.
Patricia’s disappointment with John, her belief he was dishonest when he “could have confessed to anything,” and her denial that their affair was “a place of truth” demonstrate her development over the novel: she now cares about understanding the past and finding the truth, whereas before she wanted to dismiss the past and didn’t believe in truth.
Themes
Beauty comes onto the veranda, where Patricia sits with the letter. Patricia marvels that Beauty never revealed the truth and invites her to sit. Hesitantly, Beauty does. When Patricia asks why Beauty didn’t leave the farm or tell anyone what happened, Beauty says the farm was her family’s home and her job was decent. Patricia asks whether Beauty wasn’t furious about Grace. Beauty replies she and her family consider Grace simply “lost.”
Beauty’s explanation for why she stayed makes clear that she didn’t have the privilege of anger: due to white-supremacist economic structures, Beauty and her whole family were economically dependent on the Wileys and had to consider Grace “lost” rather than murdered.
Themes
Patricia begs Beauty to tell her the truth. When Beauty asks why, apparently unsure of truth’s nature or utility, Patricia replies, “Because that’s all we have left.” Beauty tells her that Richard and Grace had an ongoing sexual relationship, for which Richard paid Grace money. Grace didn’t love or want to marry Looksmart, who was too young and too educated for her. When Patricia protests that Looksmart said Grace was “good,” Beauty says Grace, very poor, “did not think about good or not good,” but about survival.
Beauty’s version of past events suggests that Looksmart’s own privilege, as an educated man, prevented him from seeing Grace clearly. Whereas he and Patricia had the privilege to “think about good or not good,” Grace (a poor girl without an education) did what she had to do to survive. Looksmart allowed his desire for Grace to blind him to that.
Themes
Beauty says Richard had impregnated Grace. In the dairy, Grace told him she planned to keep the baby because abortion violated her cultural and religious beliefs. That’s when Richard sicced the dog on her. Horrified, Patricia asks why Beauty didn’t say this to Looksmart. Beauty says Looksmart couldn’t have handled the facts. Patricia asks why she should believe Beauty’s rather than Looksmart’s narrative. Beauty says with finality that Patricia “must find the truth” herself.
Though Beauty claims Grace thought only about survival, Grace refused to have an abortion on moral grounds, suggesting that while poor people focused on survival may not care about romance, they still have lines they won’t cross when it comes to protecting their children. Beauty’s claim that Patricia must “find the truth for herself,” meanwhile, suggests that people won’t always know the truth about the past and simply have to make personal, subjective guesses.
Themes
Patricia remembers Richard talking about “two dead children” the night before. Aloud, she says he murdered his baby. When Beauty denies the pregnancy counted as a child to Richard, Patricia thinks but doesn’t say that “Richard felt more about that child than he could ever have admitted.” She tells Patricia that once they get to Durban, she plans to leave Richard in “a home that is for people who are sick.”
This passage reveals why Richard talked about “two dead children” and why he referenced “it” being a “joke” some unnamed “she” told him: he didn’t want to believe Grace when she told him about her pregnancy. Patricia’s speculation that “Richard felt more about the child than he could ever have admitted” suggests that Richard really wanted a baby—but was too violently racist to accept his baby would be half-Black, leading him to murder Grace. That Patricia decides to put Richard in “a home that is for people who are sick” after this revelation shows both her desire to punish Richard by abandoning him and her belief that only a “sick” man would kill a woman pregnant with his baby.
Themes
Bheki. Bheki doesn’t eavesdrop on Beauty and Patricia, not caring what they say to one another. When Beauty collects Richard, Bheki approaches the veranda carrying a gun. The dog growls, and Bheki thinks it’s worried for Patricia when it should be worried for itself. Patricia tells Bheki, “I’m sorry to ask you to do it”—itself a request. Though the dog senses something wrong, Bheki thinks “it still believes that a man like Bheki will always come second to a dog, and that such a man will never be allowed to harm it.”
Throughout the novel, dogs have represented the relationship between white and Black South African people—specifically, white violence, white supremacy, and anti-Black racism. Bheki’s thought that the dog falsely believes “a man like Bheki will always come second to a dog” suggests that Black South African people no longer do come second to dogs, as evidenced by Bheki, a Black man, euthanizing the Wileys’ last pet. Yet Patricia is still the one requesting the euthanasia and controlling the action, showing that even though some historical change has occurred, unjust racial hierarchies continue.
Themes
Richard. A gunshot distracts Richard from the rose he’s smelling in the garden, whose odor has made him reminisce about England. He sees a “long black man” (Bheki) carrying a dog and an “old woman” (Patricia) releasing a sheet of paper into the wind. He considers investigating, but the rose distracts him again.
Though historical changes have occurred and greater racial equality is coming, these changes cannot remedy past injustices. For instance, Richard, who murdered a Black girl with impunity, no longer remembers what he did or consistently recognizes the people involved and so cannot really be brought to justice.
Themes
Patricia. Patricia gets into the car. Bheki drives, while Beauty and Richard sit “as far apart as possible” in the back. Realizing she’s left John’s letter behind, Patricia decides not to retrieve it. Bheki comments it’s stopped raining, in a tone “as if […] a war or a plague” had ended. Patricia, though curious what Bheki realizes and believes about Looksmart’s visit, thinks that in the future none of them will discuss what happened, “even if that double beast in the garden” always haunts them. Intending sarcasm, Patricia says it will be “a lovely day”—and realizes her comment “bristles with a range of meanings, some of them good.”
Over the course of the novel, many things have not changed: Bheki still drives the car, a symbol of (racialized) wealth inequality, only as an employee of Patricia’s. Beauty and Richard are still bound together by her economic dependence and his physical dependence, despite his crime against her sister. The “double beast in the garden”—the dog attacking Grace, which symbolizes white violence dehumanizing Black people—haunts them all. Yet despite these past injustices continuing into the present, Patricia realizes her claim that it will be “a lovely day” includes “good” possibilities—hinting that though the characters cannot change the pasts or achieve fresh starts, there may still be hope for their futures.
Themes
As Bheki guides the car down the driveway, they see a car coming. Bheki moves aside to let it pass. It stops, and each driver rolls down his window. Looksmart, in the other car, greets them. Jokingly, Patricia asks whether he’s checking that they’ve really vacated the property. Apparently not hearing her well, Looksmart apologizes, saying he didn’t realize they’d still be here. Though Patricia and Looksmart try to see each other “through the gloom of the cars,” they’re indistinct to each other. Patricia gives the house keys to Bheki, who tosses them to Looksmart. The two cars go their separate ways.
When Looksmart drives past the Wileys in his car (which symbolizes access to wealth), it suggests he is now equal or superior to Patricia and Richard in status. This new equality suggests some historical change, but since Bheki and Beauty are still economically subordinated, it also suggests these historical changes have failed to aid many Black South African people. In this final scene, Patricia tries and fails to joke with Looksmart, and the two characters try and fail to see each other—suggesting that despite their love for each other, their relationship is over. When Looksmart takes the keys to the Wileys’ house, finally, his possession once again suggests partial, incomplete historical change: a Black man now controls the house that represents the characters’ shared past, yet he controls it on behalf of a company allowing white people to flee Black neighbors even after legal segregation in South Africa has officially ended. Thus, even as historical change occurs, the past remains relevant.
Themes
