Emma Barrett
One of In The Dream House’s most haunting choices occurs before its first page. In the opening dedication, Machado writes, “If you need this book, it is for you” (Machado, front matter). While this seems like sweet sentimentality, Machado returns to this idea at the memoir’s ending. Throughout the book, the pronoun ‘you’ refers to her past self, Carmen, and the reader. The reader suffers through the story’s abusive relationship with Carmen. By the memoir’s end, Machado refuses the reader catharsis, ending the book with the assertion that “the wind carries” her tale “to you” (Machado 242). Machado’s memoir of domestic abuse is a closed loop that the reader nor Carmen will escape. Critically, Machado’s choice is not raw cynicism but a dire warning against complacency in abusive relationships. By reading the ideas of queer temporality in Elizabeth Freeman’s work and hauntology in the work of Jacques Derrida in Machado’s memoir, a reader finds a sobering cautionary tale. Rather than fetishizing narratives of linear progress or the goodness of LGBTQ+ relationships, Machado locks her experience of abuse in a time loop to highlight how problematic queer people always have and will continue to exist. Like Carmen, the reader is stuck in the Dream House, except, unlike her, they will never leave.
When writing about Karl Marx’s cultural legacy, Jacques Derrida coined the term “hauntology” to describe ideas that are “neither living nor dead, present nor absent” but materialize into the discourse (Spectres of Marx 63). For Derrida, writing about Marx after the Soviet collapse, the specter of Marxist thought was a “repetition and [a] first time” since “the singularity of any first time” also makes it “a last time” (Spectres of Marx 10). An idea’s roots haunt cultural conversations, even as the idea evolves. While this concept is relevant across disciplines, hauntology has a unique relationship to queer discourse. In the Introduction to Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, Dr. Elizabeth Freeman describes this queer form of hauntology present in copies of Nguyen Tan Hoang’s video K.I.P. The figure in the video’s desire “to have sex with history” in “an era and place barred [by] linear time and racial politics” creates a “queer hauntological experience” (Freeman 13). The video footage itself and its corruptions “enliven the dead” even as such a thing “is never wholly possible” (Freeman 13). Especially given how much ordinary trauma heteronormative culture subjects LGBTQ+ people too, finding ways to link to queer narratives across points in time is significant. Freeman argues that for many queer people, “institutionalized forms of hurt are experienced simultaneously and survive” long after their deaths (Freeman 12). In this sense, blurring past and present in queer narratives is a valuable project. In Machado’s work, she blurs this line very literally, with old folktales and stories haunting modern experiences.
Throughout In the Dream House, Machado frequently references Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk-Literature. Much like Machado’s evocation of various genres and cliches, this citation may initially seem contextual set dressing. Later, though, these footnotes gradually expound on Carmen’s story as the memoir progresses. In the section, Dream House as Chekov’s Gun, for instance, Machado footnotes a scene where her girlfriend “peels the sheet away from [Carmen’s] body,” with the citation that a “ghost pulls bedclothing from [the] sleeper” (Machado 124). With an effortless gesture, Machado makes this horrifying account of assault seem like ancient evil. The dark truth, of course, is that abuse between same-sex partners is an old evil, but the “nature of archival silence” is that marginalization swallows “people’s narratives and their nuances” (Machado 138). Even the footnotes for more minor episodes add elements of dark antiquity.
Earlier in the memoir, when Carmen and the Woman in the Dream House are having sex, Machado renders the confusion caused by “the vibrations of orgasm” analogous to “weakness from seeing [a] woman” naked (Machado 28). Notable in this description is that the footnotes specify that the woman in question is a “fairy” (Machado 28). The evoking of folk tales comes to mind older fairies who acted as a “class of supernatural beings” who traditionally “interfere with human affairs (with either good or evil intent)” (OED). Even when this relationship is in its best stages, Machado does not let the readers forget how it ends. The word fairy also has connotations specific to the queer community. The slang commonly refers to “gay men” but can also refer to someone who is generally “weak [or] flamboyant” (OED). Even Machado’s more literal footnotes blend old fiction with newer realities. Even as “new forms of justice” emerge, old images stick, leaving people “living in two different time zones” (Freeman 10). What makes Machado’s references to folklore in her account of her abuse so harrowing is how it captures this sense of feeling stuck in two places. Cultural discourses force Machado to equate her horrifying story of abuse through the lens of often heteropatriarchal horror cliches. One of the memoir’s most heartbreaking notes is when Machado describes herself as The Dream House’s “ghost,” with the footnote describing her “moans,” “cries and screams,” “snores,” and “sobs” (Machado 127). This cloaking of the literal in the fantastical is a symptom of chronobiopolitics and how the politics of linear time sneak into leftist spaces.
Chrononormativity is the process by which institutions “organize individual human bodies toward maximum productivity” (Freeman 3). These socially reinforced expectations include work hours, education, and personal milestones. It also does not matter if these dynamics suit the person enduring them since society twists these milestones into “what it means to have a life at all” (Freeman 5). Life is not worth living if it is unproductive. This systemic structure, then, is the root of why our systems “do not provide protection” or even “context” for “most kinds of abuse” (Machado 138). Abuse recovery is inherently disruptive to typical standards of productivity, sometimes literally. In the entertainment industry, directors and writers “torment [their] actresses” and actors “to get ‘real’ performances out of them” (Machado 95). The ordinary cruelty of abuse becomes just another part of living and working. Chrononormativity subsumes dynamics of abuse into its narrative, robbing victims of the language to describe themselves. This paradigm is hard enough for heterosexual women, but for LGBTQ+ people, homophobia makes a dangerous situation lethal.
Machado is hyperaware of the “specific political response” she should have to villainous LGBTQ+ characters (Machado 46). Especially as queer people are labeled groomers by ravenous news circuits, there is a tendency to overcompensate. Even Machado concedes to this, writing that “queer villains become far more interesting among other gay characters” (Machado 47). That said, this also comes with the understanding that scrubbing bad LGBTQ+ people from the record is equally toxic. If anything, the pitting of ‘good gays’ against ‘bad gays’ is only harmful to the fight for queer rights. When describing some of the early responses to discussions of abuse in LGBTQ+ communities, Machado details a popular rebuttal among activists. Specifically, Machado describes how some activists clung to the belief that “women who were women did not abuse their girlfriends” (Machado 199). It is a narrative born of old fears of anti-LGBTQ+ violence, but its consequences haunt modern queer discourse. Even worse, “the irony,” as Machado highlights, is “that queer folks need [the] good PR” (Machado 228). Activists must think strategically, which can risk tolerating some truly horrible ideas. It does not matter if LGBTQ+ people can be as abusive as straight people because bigots will weaponize abusive LGBTQ+ couples against the community’s progress. It does not matter how “freeing” the “idea that queer that does not equal good” is because there are older demons that LGBTQ+ activists must consider (Machado 48). These facts, naturally, present a problem for Machado. How does one write a narrative of abuse that inherently disrupts chrononormativity and neoliberal queer politics? The answer, for Machado, is structuring a narrative in queer time.
As a memoir, Machado’s story is inherently retrospective. Machado’s descriptions complicate this, though, as she describes her memoir as “an act of resurrection” that “summon[s] meaning from events” long dead (Machado 5). To this effect, while Machado’s timeline of abuse is relatively linear, Machado infuses this account with breaks from the past, present, and hypothetical futures. Machado knows that the Woman in the Dream House is “not [her] first female crush” or even her “first female lover,” but that does not matter (Machado 45). The Woman in the Dream House glues herself to Carmen’s psyche to the point where, even years later, Carmen has a “physical revulsion” to certain people for no reason “at all” (Machado 238). Carmen’s done it. Carmen’s escaped, but she remembers. Trauma warps memories, and those memories repeat, which is most evident in one of the memoir’s most experimental sections.
In a “Choose Your Own Adventure” sequence, the reader plays as Carmen. However, this radical gift of agency does little to improve things. Regardless of what the reader does, the Woman in the Dream House always leaves Carmen “going from awake to afraid” for something as trivial as moving around in bed (Machado 162/75). Even pages that the reader has “no way to get” without deviating “from the choices given” provide no relief (Machado 170). These are pauses, but they do not break the loop. There are only two ways to end this twisted game. The first is to pick the option that Machado would “never do” (Machado 166). The second, arguably the more tragic of the two, is if the reader elects to “drive away with a theatrical squeal of the tires” (Machado 176). This action breaks the loop, but Machado does not let her readers forget that this is “not how it happened” (Machado 176). Machado breaks a typical narrative structure to highlight the most horrifying thing about this memoir: there is no true escape. There is always a piece of history where Machado was the victim of The Woman in the Dream House. Even worse? Someone will always be the victim of similar abuse.
Machado deliberately frames the story of her memoir with the pronoun “you” (Machado 242). At first, Machado uses the pronoun “you” to refer to herself in the past tense. However, by the memoir’s end, Machado no longer refers to herself this way. It is gradual, but by Part V of the memoir, Carmen “still dream[s] about it,” but the “you,” both a past version of Carmen and the reader, are still in the memoir (Machado 221). By the book’s end, “you” refers not to Carmen but to the reader. When the pronoun ‘you’ does return in these later sections, it is in sections where memories disrupt Carmen’s optimistic future. One of the episodes, Dream House as Myth, throws the reader into the shoes of Carmen, desperately conveying her situation, only for people to treat her like a “proselytizing Jehovah’s Witness” (Machado 223). If Machado were content to end this narrative happily, why keep the reader in this state? Machado even seems aware of this tension, struggling with what “the end of the story” truly means (Machado 239). Ultimately, the horror in Machado’s memoir comes not in Machado’s account of abuse, but Machado refuses the reader an ending.
By ending her memoir on a closed loop, Machado forces readers to confront this idea. Like many a silenced abuse victim, Machado carves out a part of the reader and forces them into a nightmare they will not wake from. Machado smears cultural ideas of the past and present to rebuild her Dream House and then locks the reader inside. The protagonist of Machado’s memoir is Carmen, but it is also you, and you will never leave.
Works Cited:
Derrida, Jacques, and Peggy Kamuf. Specters of Marx: The State of The Debt, The Work of Mourning, and The New International. Routledge, 2011.
“Fairy, noun.” Defs. 3, 3a. The Oxford English Dictionary. 3rd ed., Oxford UP 2016. Accessed 19 April. 2024.
“Fairy, adj..” Def 3. The Oxford English Dictionary. 3rd ed., Oxford UP 2016. Accessed 19 April. 2024.
Freeman, Elizabeth. “Introduction: Queer and Not Now.” Introduction. In Time Binds: Queer
Temporalities, Queer Histories, 1-19. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.
Machado, Carmen Maria. In The Dream House. Graywolf Press, 2019.