
There is thinking stuck inside the box. Then, there is thinking outside of the box. And then there is turning the box inside-out and ripping it apart and cutting it up into tiny shapes, and dissecting each and every one of them.
Carmen Maria Machado is masterful in setting a scene. As she makes clear towards the start of her 2019 memoir, In the Dream House, Machado loves a good architecture allegory, and she does just that throughout the book: She compares her abusive, queer relationship to the sinister “Dream House”. “The Dream House” is the home where Machado and her ex-girlfriend resided together, the place where their love lived and died, forever immortalized in that house. She goes so far as to warn the reader that it is no arbitrary metaphor, but a real place; if she cared to, she “could give you its address, and you could drive there in your own car and sit in front of that Dream House and try to imagine the things that have happened inside” (Machado 9).
As I read the memoir, I felt the sense that while Machado was writing the book, she was simultaneously attempting to understand her complicated time with, as she refers to her, “the woman from the Dream House”. Machado analyzes the relationship through a countless amount of lens, none quite like the other. She uses literary tropes (“Dream House as Chekhov’s Gun”), locations (“Dream House as Barn in Upstate New York”), and dozens of unclassifiable perspectives, one of my favorites being “Dream House as Generation Starship”. As you experience each point of view, you learn about her story in a non-linear manner, witnessing the toxicity of their relationship.
From the several memoirs I’ve read, this has been by far the most inventive. Machado has pushed the boundaries of what a memoir and a story can be. The lenses of which she describes the relationship are both incredibly eye-opening and entertaining. Additionally, for the majority of the book, she speaks in second person, the chapters written to her past self. As she gains wisdom and clarity, the author begins to speak in first person.
Machado walks you through the haunted house and strips it of all its ghosts, and leaves you with a seemingly normal home, or rather, a normal queer love. To the naked, foreign eye, Machado and the woman’s relationship may have appeared to be healthy, nobody else quite knowing all the pain that existed between them two. This reality is pretty well-known among people today: how toxic and abusive relationships never reveal their true form to any regular stranger. It becomes even more complex and difficult for our society to understand abuse between two women, however, and therefore increasingly more dangerous for the abused. When the situation comes to two women, how is it clear which is the abuser and which is the abused? The question itself is implying a harmful connotation. How is it any more clear for heterosexual relationships? It brings forward the idea that a more “masculine” figure must be the perpetrator, and the “feminine” the victim. This theory, in turn, is harmful for everybody: for both heterosexual relationships in which men are the victim, and queer relationships, in which it is unclear who is the “masculine” and the “feminine”.
Machado, unafraid of nuance, writes about queer abuse in a more scientific, research-based perspective. She mentions and explains both the passive and active suppression of queer experiences surrounding this topic. For instance, the concept of “violence of the archive”: the deliberate destruction or silence regarding specific stories that must be brought to light. She “speak[s] into the silence” and bravely advocates for justice, starting with her own story (Machado 5).
Perhaps what I found the most enlightening and has struck a deep chord with me is the importance of recognizing queer people as people capable of wrongdoing, just like any other. In my favorite chapter, “Dream House as Queer Villainy”, Machado discusses the overused, deliberate trope of queer-coded villains in television entertainment. Take Disney, for instance. She mentions Ursula and Cruella de Vil, their flamboyance resembling those of drag queens, or the “scheming gay butler” in Downton Abbey (Machado 46). She admits to the reader her fond taste for them and their stylish evil, even though they are an obvious harmful trope. At the same time, there is also the misconstrued idea that minorities must be these “all-sacrificing” martyrs in entertainment, symbols for compassion. These can be just as damaging to our representation. It’s almost freeing, she explains, how these queer villains don’t have to be metaphoric, don’t have to be victims; they can be humans, just like anybody else. Humans capable of evil. Ursula was capable of evil, and so was the woman from the Dream House. She calls forward every queer character: “So bring on the queer villains, the queer heroes, the queer sidekicks and secondary characters and protagonists and extras…let them have agency, and let them go” (Machado 48).
I cannot stress enough how important this memoir is. It is a powerful reiteration that queer abuse and queer people must be treated as any other—not because we're queer, but because we're human.
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