The Dream House Themes

In The Dream House, the more privilege characters have, the less perspective they seem to have on life. Patricia Wiley, for example, has lived a life of privilege: she inherited a farm and, despite the farm’s lack of success, employs Black workers to attend to her and her husband Richard. She believes that the death of one employee, Black dairy worker Grace, was an accident and that the departure of Looksmart…

In The Dream House, characters can only hold themselves and each other accountable once they know the truth about the past. However, the characters can only make subjective judgments about what happened in the past, since memory often fails and—to complicate matters—people often lie. From the beginning, the novel makes clear that its characters’ memories fail: aging white South African Patricia Wiley can’t remember certain facts about her farm, while her husband Richard is…

The Dream House examines the idea of “rebirth,” ultimately questioning whether or not new beginnings truly exist. Early in the novel, Richard—the elderly husband of white South African Patricia—asks her whether they’re already dead. The question shows Richard’s dementia, but it also suggests that Richard and Patricia are dead in a metaphorical sense—emotionally, spiritually, or otherwise—and thus might be reborn. Indeed, as Richard loses his memories, he becomes more and more infantile: he…

Characters in The Dream House use humor to connect with one another but also to silence, deflect, or deny painful realities. Ultimately, therefore, the novel suggests that humor should not be one’s only mode of interacting with other people; to face reality, one has to be serious sometimes. Two of the novel’s central characters are the white South African farm owner Patricia Wiley and the Black South African man Looksmart, whose education Patricia paid…