In the Dream House

“Your female crushes were always floating past you, out of reach, but she touches your arm and looks directly at you and you feel like a child buying something with her own money for the first time.”

When Machado first meets her partner, their mutual attraction surprises Machado, who has not experienced such reciprocation from women. The idea of “a child buying something with her own money for the first time” evokes power, freedom, novelty, thrill, and gratification. Machado is immediately and hopelessly hooked by the feeling.

“You would let her swallow you whole, if she could.”

Machado's relationship with her partner intensifies, and their intimate encounters increasingly feature her partner’s aggressive sexual possessiveness. Machado, however, is willing to accept this possessiveness, as she is too in love to question what her partner might eventually do to her. Moreover, her partner’s behavior makes Machado feel that her body is desirable, and the gratification is overwhelming; because she has chronic feelings of worthlessness, this sexual attention seems to finally validate her worth.

“You trust her, and you have no context for anything else.”

The partner’s expression of love is full of desire and obsession. Because Machado has no frame of reference for what a healthy lesbian relationship should look like, she accepts her partner’s “love” as normal. This quote reflects Machado’s alienation from the archive.

“And it sounds terrible but it is, in fact, freeing: the idea that queer does not equal good or pure or right. It is simply a state of being—one subject to politics, to its own social forces, to larger narratives, to moral complexities of every kind.”

When discussing representations of villains in the media—so often seemingly based on degrading lesbian and gay stereotypes—Machado asserts that morality should not be associated with queerness. A queer person should not have to be morally pure in order to be respected, and their queerness is irrelevant to their morality.

“It is the first time she is touching you in a way that is not filled with love, and you don’t know what to do.”

Machado and her partner visit the partner’s parents in Florida. When her partner grips Machado’s arm hard enough to bruise and scare her, this is the first time that the partner is directly physically abusive toward her. That it occurs in the parents’ house hints that the partner has picked up on her father’s abusive tendencies toward her mother, and the partner herself later suggests as much. Though Machado elsewhere expresses frustration with heteronormative gender roles’ forced application to abusive lesbian relationships (see quote #23), yet her partner does emulate such a gendered dynamic; she reenacts her father’s marital aggression, thus adopting the stereotypically masculine role.

“You are being tested and you are passing the test; sweet girl, sweet self, look how good you are; look how loyal, look how loved.”

Machado finds sympathy for the mythical Bluebeard’s newest wife as she diligently tries to sacrifice all of her own needs—as well as her sense of self and autonomy—to appease her new husband. This quote reflects the traditional gender norm of female submissiveness, which Machado assumes in her relationship.

“You’ve won the game. You didn’t know you were playing, but you’ve won the game just the same.”

After her partner moves to Bloomington with Val, Machado receives a phone call in which the partner says she will break up with Val if Machado promises that their relationship is real. Despite genuinely liking Val, Machado feels herself to have “won” the affections of the partner and looks forward to being with her. The irony is that this “victory” will only lead to loss and suffering.

“You laugh and nod and kiss her, as if her love for you has sharpened and pinned you to a wall.”

In the chapter titled “Dream House as Entomology,” Machado’s partner asks for monogamy. The feeling of being loved by her partner is like being an insect pinned and under study. The simile emphasizes Machado’s loss of agency and feelings of being constantly scrutinized, but it is also a violent image that connotes abuse. 

“Places are never just places in a piece of writing. If they are, the author has failed. Setting is not linear. It is activated by point of view.”

Machado creates the Dream House as an embodiment of her experiences of domestic abuse. The setting of the Dream House, in this sense, activates her point of view and allows her to tell the story of her abuse. That places in a piece of writing are “never just places” suggests the metaphorical nature of every location or home in the memoir.

“She was a stranger because something essential was shielded, released in tiny bursts until it became a flood—a flood of what I realized I did not know.”

In describing the literary tradition of the American gothic genre, Machado compares her experience in the Dream House with the increase in domestic abuse following World War II. Like the men newly returned from war and essentially strangers to their spouses, like the mysterious abusive men in gothic novels, Machado’s partner kept her full personality hidden until they were already deeply committed to one another. 

“I was lucky in that moment that the deconstruction of my door was a violation of privacy and autonomy but not a risk to my safety. When the door was opened, nothing happened. It was just a reminder: nothing, not even the four walls around my body, was mine.”

Machado’s parents once took the doorknob off her bedroom door so that she couldn’t lock them out. The event has stuck with her as a reminder that a house, and even one’s own bedroom, is not fully safe from intrusion. The experience also contributes to her feelings of worthlessness, as she feels she deserves to possess nothing of her own, and her boundaries were disrespected.

“I’d come all the way to this island to write a book about suffering, and you did something terrible to a resident of the island who’d done no harm.”

Machado accidentally kills a snail while staying on an island off the coast of Washington State several years after the events of the Dream House. This quote reflects the memoir’s multiple narrative styles in the switch from first-person to second-person point of view.

“A reminder, perhaps, that abusers do not need to be, and rarely are, cackling maniacs. They just need to want something, and not care how they get it.”

The film Gaslight illuminates the partner’s psychological and verbal abuse. Like the film’s protagonist, Machado often doubts her own sense of reality. Machado concludes that abusers who gaslight their partners are hard to identify, as they keep a calm and logical composure despite their immorality. The quote also implies a consciencelessness to gaslighting, and indeed, the partner rarely demonstrates a conscience. 

“Then one day you learned that rapture could also mean ‘blissful happiness’ and you understood, fully: that it is important to live in unyielding fear with a smile on your face.”

Machado’s past devotion to Christianity continues to influence her. Examining her fascination with the Rapture, Machado sees a connection to her behavior with her partner, which is likewise characterized by fear and judgment. Also like the Rapture, an abusive relationship may tantalize a person with the promise of “blissful happiness,” or heaven, so long as that person worships the right thing.

“Most types of abuse are completely legal.”

Machado’s partner inflicts verbal and psychological abuse, neither of which is illegal. This quote reinforces Machado’s feelings of isolation as she cannot hope to use legal action as a form of protection. This statement also introduces a theme of legality, agency, and culpability, as Machado eventually ponders whether her partner is responsible for her violence during her purported blackouts. 

“You agree to go to the museum because art has always had a balancing effect on your mind; it is a reminder that you are more than a body and its accompanying grief.”

While visiting the Brooklyn Museum with her partner, Machado seeks to forget the abuse by finding refuge in art. She assuages the pain of her isolation by reminding herself that she can exist in a larger artistic community. The quote also implies Machado’s conflicted relationship with her body.

“When you move them a second time, you can feel her anger; you can’t see her but the smell of her changes, like a cheap dish towel left on a live electric burner. She snaps around you like a Venus flytrap, pinning your arms against your torso.”

Machado’s partner becomes increasingly physically abusive as their relationship progresses. Machado is constantly on alert to not make her partner angry; her attention is focused on minute changes in her partner’s attitude or words that might signal imminent violence.

“I haven’t been closeted in almost a decade. Even so I am unaccountably haunted by the specter of the lunatic lesbian.”

After quoting Norman Mailer’s misogynistic quote asserting an inherent psychological instability of lesbian writers, Machado discusses the need for media portrayals of lesbians that do not perpetuate a connection between queerness and mental illness. She desires to portray queerness as normal. 

“But the nature of archival silence is that people’s narratives and their nuances are swallowed by history; we see only what pokes through because it is sufficiently salacious for the majority to pay attention.”

Machado’s only frame of reference for lesbian domestic abuse are the few court cases that gained publicity only because they involved physical violence. In contrast, her own experience involves mostly psychological violence, and she has no precedent as she has never been taught to fear another woman’s psychological abuse. 

“This is what I keep returning to: how people decide who is or is not an unreliable narrator. And after that decision has been made, what do we do with people who attempt to construct their own vision of justice?”

In keeping with the theme of Narratology: The Memoir, this quote describes Machado’s process in trying to convey the truth about her experiences while having her perspective invalidated due to her gender. This invalidation illustrates yet more archival silencing, but it also shows Machado’s ability to seamlessly connect psychological experience to literary technique (such as unreliable narration).

“The truth is, there is no better place to live than in the shadow of a beautiful, furious mountain.”

After her partner’s unfaithfulness, Machado considers why she experiences such bursts of creativity and vitality while in this relationship. She compares her partner’s abusiveness to a volatile and unpredictable volcano. Despite the pain, Machado acknowledges what the relationship has given her: the creative inspiration for this story. 

“The queer community has long used the rhetoric of gender roles as a way of absolving queer women from responsibility for domestic abuse.”

Machado discusses the influence of gender roles on perceptions of domestic abuse. She claims that lesbians are seen as potential abusers only if they emulate masculinity. This bias illustrates the archive’s heteronormativity—yet this quote also holds queer people accountable for exploiting those gender roles to obscure the unseemly realities of queer relationships.

“Clarity is an intoxicating drug, and you spent almost two years without it, believing you were losing your mind, believing you were the monster, and you want something black and white more than you’ve ever wanted anything in this world.”

Following her breakup, Machado wishes she had concrete proof of her ex-partner’s psychological abuse so that others won’t doubt her. In her work on Queering the Archive, Machado first laments that she doesn’t have traditional evidence, but this allows her to propose that evidence can take many different, unconventional forms without being invalid.