"The Dream House was never just the Dream House:" Unhousing, Domestic Abuse, and Archival Silence in Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House (2019)

Abstract

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado (2019) is a formally inventive memoir that addresses domestic abuse in lesbian relationships. It is presented as a collection of vignettes, each framed through the lens of a different literary trope as a means of interrogating Machado’s own experience (a total of 141 are used). The memoir explores how the process of archival silence has erased accounts like hers from historical records, as a form of cultural violence. Drawing from the concept of what Paula E. Geyh calls “unhousing” and considering the claim that Machado makes that “the Dream House was never just the Dream House,” the first part of this work centers on the versatility of the so-called Dream House and how its multiple meanings serve to illustrate to what degree the effects of trauma stemming from an abusive relationship reverberate in the abused subject. The way that the concept of the Dream House works on various levels because of the process of unhousing shows how it is used as a narrative device, in close relation to both the text’s form and content. The second part of this work deals with how the memoir aims at widening the archive of representations of domestic violence by offering a new space to accounts of intimate partner abuse within lesbian relationships. Moreover, this second part also examines how Machado builds missing context around her account by identifying mirror experiences in the archives of classic fairy tales and folktales, represented in the memoir by Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk-Literature.