House of Memories: An Abstract Approach to Queer Domestic Abuse Awareness

Rylee Watson

Processing abuse and deciding to share one’s story takes courage in a world that is quick to dismiss victims and explain away their experiences. Add on a queer, nonwhite identity, and this effect is amplified ten-fold. Author Carmen Maria Machado cuts through these harmful rhetorics by writing a ghost story about her own experience with domestic abuse. This memoir, In the Dream House, poses unique challenges to linear narrative form in order to create an impactful recount of the author’s experience as a queer domestic abuse survivor. By blending the timeline of her memories, inserting folktales and historical research, and utilizing shifting pronouns to communicate with both the reader and author’s past self, Machado builds a deeply complex narrative that stretches across time to not only tell her own story, but to bring broader awareness to and spark a wider conversation about queer domestic abuse.

To frame her usage of nonlinear structure and emphasize themes of time queering, Machado uses the prologue to In the Dream House to question the efficacy of “the archive” in relation to historical accounts of the queer community. Building off of José Esteban Muñoz’s ideas about queer utopianism, particularly partitioning a “queer past” and a “straight present”, Machado begins questioning who has historically been left out of the conversation about queer lived-experience and why. In Cruising Utopia, Muñoz argues that the only way to manifest a queer utopia is within an imagined future, claiming, “The here and now is a prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there,” (Muñoz, 1). Machado, rather than forgoing the here and now to imagine a liberated future, Machado folds together the untold queer histories of the past and her own present experience to write over this silence in the archive with acknowledgement of and justice for queer victims of abuse.

The intention of connecting with other survivors is apparent in Machado’s memoir, and carried out in such a way that relates her experiences simultaneously to an audience and herself, the past version of herself that was unable to escape the cycle of abuse she endured for years in the titular dream house. Machado accomplishes this with the repeated use of the pronoun “you” and its multifaceted function in her work. The usage of this device comes to a paramount in the epilogue, ending with the assertion that, “My tale goes only to here; it ends, and the wind carries it to you” (Machado 242). The multifarious usage of the term is striking in retrospect because it gives new meaning to the dedication, which openly declares, “If you need this book, it is for you,” (Machado, front matter). Something incredulous to the reader at the beginning suddenly becomes clear and impactful, furthering Machado’s bleeding of time to tie the book together, cementing the story forever by sharing it with herself.

Machado expresses her struggle to find a satisfying ending to her story, given that she is still living it, and to represent trauma and abuse not in a vacuum but as an ongoing conversation. Researchers like Clementine Morrigan have made similar strides to critique the idea of trauma recovery having a finite timeline, particularly in the context of queer survivors of abuse, saying of Alison Kafer’s notion of ‘curative time,’: “…trauma, like many disabilities, is framed in relation to hope for a cure. I will propose resisting curative time and embracing the queer time travel of trauma as a means of queer, mad, world-making” (“Trauma Time”). Machado’s ability to blur the beginning and end of In the Dream House, coupled with her incorporation of Muñoz’s utopian ideals, refuses the idea of curative time in a similar way: the author centers inter-community connection and understanding rather than a clear-cut solution, which for an issue as complicated as archiving queer domestic abuse, there is none.

The ways Machado plays with form and structure to add layers to her narrative go far beyond linguistic devices. One of the most unique challenges to the typical form of a narrative memoir is the inclusion of a “Choose-Your-Own-Adventure” section, in which the reader further merges with past-Carmen, experiencing a day entrenched in an abusive relationship from her perspective. This not only strengthens the blurring effect of the “you” pronoun, but cleverly steers the reader towards bone-chilling revelations about the cyclical nature of domestic abuse, navigating first-hand the abuser’s traps and emotional volatility. Machado bleeds together the past, present, and future in this dizzying story, from reassuring herself of a brighter future, to pleading with her sleeping mind to escape the vicious cycle. Even the empty pages between the reader-driven narrative serve a function, one example being when Machado speaks directly to the reader, informing them, devastatingly, “You shouldn’t be on this page. There’s no way to get here from the choices given to you. You flipped here because you got sick of the cycle. You wanted to get out. You’re smarter than me,” (Machado 167). Of course though, the cycle continues no matter what page you run to to escape the harrowing narrative recount of abuse. Eventually, all roads lead to page 175, where the narrator experiences the same morning in an endless loop. The reader is prompted to recycle the events of the previous day, the only escape being a fantasy of running away. However, the author quickly informs the reader: “That’s not how it happened, but okay,” (Machado 176).

The recurrent return to addressing her past self, the version of herself who was actively and unwittingly experiencing abuse, is an intentional blending of time that the author uses to identify the stages of abuse, bringing the reader along for the crushing experience of realizing the dangerous signals in retrospect. One way this narrative tool is realized is through the deliberate positioning of three nearly identical passages throughout the book, all sharing the title “Dream House as Deja-Vu”. The first encounter of this passage has a hopeful tone, but this feeling is later tainted by the anxiety induced by its second iteration, and finally the crushing devastation of the third. Only with this further context can the reader see the smokescreen of love-bombing encasing the first passage, just as Carmen did in real life. This pervasive feeling of confusion and guilt as an abuser’s facade breaks to reveal their manipulative, volatile behavior is a commonly recognized experience for survivors of domestic abuse. The term “hermeneutical justice”, coined by Miranda Fricker, is meant to describe this experience of not having the knowledge and resources necessary to seek help and get oneself out of unjust situations (LEAP). In the Leiden Elective Academic Periodical, a journalist writes of Machado’s book, “Analyzing the memoir through the lens of hermeneutic justice and injustice, I argue, allows for a more open-ended exploration of trauma narratives, breaking down a range of binary distinctions. These include the distinctions between truth and lie, fiction and non-fiction, and, more broadly, between clearly defined identities as abuser and abused,” (LEAP). By repeatedly reaching through time, such as she does in the “Deja-Vu” sections, to analyze patterns of abuse in conversation with herself, Machado is retroactively arming past-Carmen with the ammunition of “hermeneutic justice”. She is healing her trauma by holding her past self, having direct conversation with her, and surviving this with her.

In this complicated attempt to process and heal her trauma, elements of reality and fantasy complement each other. By bleeding together the real and the imaginary, Machado makes vibrant analogies to her experiences and simultaneously critiques the skepticism expressed towards victims. By sewing together research, memories, and folktales, Machado disrupts the societal call for objective truth from victims to favor a more accepting space for them to heal. One way Machado morphs personal narrative with fairytale occurs when the narrative devolves into a magical, surrealist account of her own feelings after her partner breaks up with her on Skype for, almost, the last time. Machado writes, “When it is over, you stare at your dark, dead phone; a rectangle of black glass. It grows in your hand, larger and larger, and you discover that, instead, you are shrinking” (Machado 190). This surrealist distortion continues and by the time the section ends, Machado inserts herself directly into the scene in Alice in Wonderland where she is drowning in a pool of her tears, cleverly ending on the line, “That will be a queer thing, to be sure! However, everything is queer today” (Machado 190). The author’s refusal to conform to an uncomplicated retelling of her experience springs from a long history of the public and the justice system upholding rigid understandings of abuse, and dismissing any case that falls outside of these specific guidelines.

Midway through the memoir, Machado returns to address how rigid narratives of domestic abuse amplify an archival silence. Particularly, Machado gives a history of queer domestic abuse as it has been handled in courtrooms. Queer people, and in particular queer people of color such as Machado herself, being historically left out of the conversation of abuse has been perpetuated by the fabricated narratives presented to courts in order to appeal to traditional white, cisheterosexual storylines of abuse. This, therefore, grants victims justice at the expense of sharing their authentic, diverse experiences. Even once courts began to acknowledge lesbian relationships, their stark ignorance forced victims to conform to the firm definition of abuse as, “physical violence and a white, straight woman” (Machado 137). So, naturally, it was believed inconceivable that masculine women could be abused by their traditionally feminine partners, a belief exacerbated even further for black and brown victims. This is exemplified in the memoir by black queer abuse survivor Debra Reid, who was forced to dawn a feminine appearance and domestic role to be palatable to a court. Of her case, Machado recounts, “When a panel was convened to hear the women’s stories to consider commuting their sentences, Debra’s lawyers did their best to leverage the committee’s inherent assumptions and prejudices by painting her as ‘the woman’ in the relationship…The attorneys believed, rightly… the abused needed to be a ‘feminine’ figure–meek, straight, white–and the abuser a masculine one” (Machado 137). Machado’s decision to uplift cases like Debra’s, alongside her own experience as a woman of color and queer domestic abuse survivor, brings awareness to the forced conformity that robs an incalculable amount of victims, most of which being non-white, traditionally gender nonconforming, or both, of not only the justice they deserve but the right to exist without their presentation eclipsing their personhood.

In only 200-odd pages, Carmen Maria Machado bleeds time and reality to communicate a shared trauma and make way for others like her to join her cry for equity and acceptance. Her approach is unconventional, blending her own memories, investigating historical archives, embedding reality in folk tale retellings, and completely breaking down narrative form to craft a half-memoir half-haunted-house-story that is effective in both chilling readers to the bone and mobilizing them to further Machado’s cause. The striking narrative lifts her call to fill the seemingly boundless gap in the archive and strive for a future akin to Muñoz’s utopia, in which queer and otherwise othered bodies are respected, uplifted, and most of all, believed.

Works Cited