Dream House
In the Dream House, Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir and nonfiction follow-up to 2017’s Her Body and Other Parties, is an anthology of failures. Every chapter, in fact, fails, flashing out of existence almost as soon as it forms, each falling victim to its own soaring ambitions. One could say that the book never really begins, as if it is unable to chart a path forward, no matter how tortuous. One chapter, for example, is titled “Dream House as Cosmic Horror,” another, “Dream House as Unreliable Narrator.” Dream House as Mystical Pregnancy. Dream House as Vaccine. Dream House as Choose-Your-Own-Adventure, etc. None of these similes stick, and the book begins anew.
With each chapter, Machado switches away from the latest governing simile as blithely as a dilettante switches to a new subject, leaving the distinct impression that she will return, retrieve the subject, and realign it on the straight road to narrative coherence. She leaves reminders to herself to do so, after all: dense footnotes drawn from volumes of folklore, occasional clarifications, notes to herself in the second person recalling an incident from the past. The cumulative text is, as a result, the equivalent of Penelope’s burial shroud for Laertes: it builds itself up only be torn down again, a strategic failure that, I believe, ultimately, succeeds. For in compiling these failures, in organizing them in concussive flashes, Machado bestows form and mass on something that barely even has a name.
Domestic and intimate partner violence among queer people has historically been listed near the bottom of the gay agenda, if it is has been listed at all. For a long time the concept itself was unworkable within the context of queer relationships—if there was no marriage, no shared home, could there be violence in the domus? Could queer relationships even last long enough to be afflicted by abuse, especially among gay men, who, during the formative years of domestic violence’s emergence as a concept, were dying en masse from complications from AIDS? To discuss queer domestic violence was to discuss dry water or hot ice: there was no name for the violence that did not confound the received definitions of “queerness” and “domestic violence.” If once this was the love that could not be named, it is still the violence that will not be.
Much has been made of how this memoir does that work—how it “names the violence,” or “speaks the unspeakable” or some other formulation that, while accurate, understates the scale of what Machado has accomplished here. In the Dream House physically manifests the despondent disorientation that a survivor of domestic violence can never fully correct. Its structure curls and darts and circles like an abused mind taking great pains to parse fabrication from fact, to build—as if with an unbroken brain—an airtight case against accusations of insanity and asking-for-it. Its footnotes and folktales and firm notes-to-self are like the marginalia of a survivor, scribbled into holy books and self-help guides that only lead back to the question: how did I become what I have become?
It is the question that underpins all of the others a survivor asks oneself. How does one describe what happened? Why does “domestic violence” feel both too specific and not specific enough to account for how it unmakes a queer relationship, one that was born under the tinselly optimism of the Obama years—a time that was supposed to be good for the queers, but that wasn’t good for you? To whom does one explain it, and why? How? In the Dream House offers some of the answers to these questions that I have been asking myself and that I have failed to answer for more than three years, when I became what I thought I would never be and what I thought could never exist: a gay male survivor of an abusive queer relationship. There was no ready-made metaphor that fit, even awkwardly, the contours of queer domestic violence. I had no blueprint for my own dream house. Perhaps now I do.
***
Early in her graduate program at the Iowa Writers Workshop, Machado met a moneyed soft-butch blonde from Florida with a Harvard degree and scammer energy. The blonde had writerly aspirations, intent on admission to America’s most storied creative writing MFA program, and was presumably in Iowa City to cultivate her connections to the university. Through a mutual friend, she meets Machado, whom she makes to feel “like a child buying something with her own money for the first time.” Smitten from the outset, Machado can’t believe her luck when she is brought into the fold of the blonde’s open relationship with another woman, Val.
The trio lease a home in Bloomington, IN, where the blonde will begin her creative writing MFA (she was rejected by Iowa). Machado fondly recalls the fantasies she wove about the place, portraying the three women like a queer, polyamorous Fauna, Flora, and Merriweather. However, it is a short lived dream. Abruptly, the blonde breaks things off with Val, pledging herself to Machado, who proves her investment in the relationship over and over again by taking regular trips from Iowa City to Bloomington, shacking up with the blonde in the Dream House. She is always proving, pressured by the blonde’s possessiveness, which at first appears benign before evolving into outright abuse. Only Machado doesn’t perceive what is happening to her as it unfolds, and thanks to the the gaslighting of her abuser, struggles to maintain a grip on what is appropriate and not within a relationship that is supposed to be loving. It’s only in retrospect that she begins to sketch out the plan of the house in which she was trapped.
If In The Dream House is a blueprint for a house, then that house is an amalgamation of slanted floors and sloped ceilings like those in the sinister house of Lovecraft’s story, “Dreams in the Witch-House.” Gilman, the precocious and unstable protagonist, disintegrates mentally and physically over the course of the story under the influence of a spectral witch. Even while dreaming, he “could not walk or climb, fly or swim, crawl or wriggle; yet always experienced a mode of motion partly voluntary and partly involuntary,” menaced by a horror that Machado unflinchingly, almost clinically, confronts in this memoir. Much like Gilman’s, Machado’s is both hers and not hers in this book, circumscribed and disciplined by repeated manipulation by her abuser. Indeed, the heinousness of this particular case of partner violence is the way in which Machado becomes a prisoner in her own home and her own body.
This is not just the horror of things whose shapes confound our geometry, whether physical or conceptual. More inclusively, it is the horror of a body that becomes less than one’s own. This latter theme haunts Machado’s fiction, too: “The Resident,” the penultimate story in her debut collection, Her Body and Other Parties, tracks the downward spiral of a somnambulating writer at a menacing literary residency. In her memoir, Machado picks up the spools of this and other of her stories, threading them through the needle of her own body’s backstory of queerness and trauma. In fact, this book is as much a memoir of her relationship to her body as it is of her relationship with her abuser—two relationships that became inextricable, as was perhaps inevitable.
“You were suspicious of their feelings because you had no reason to love yourself--not your body, not your mind. You rejected so much gentleness. What were you looking for?”
“A queer body that has been abused by another queer is a body that has been made a stranger to itself three times over”
Throughout the book, Machado addresses a deep distrust, and occasionally, dislike, of her own body, pointing out how both made her vulnerable to abuse. In doing so, she taps into a intrapersonal antagonism between body and self that, at least to this queer reader, seems to underpin so much queer pain. Queer writers have meditated at length on how queerness already puts one at odds with one’s body, exploring how this antagonism drives some of us to build bodies that are either unimpeachably svelte, or virtually incorporeal and mostly online. Whatever the case may be, queerness has something to do with the body, which is supposed to find sanctuary from the violence of a heteronormative world among others like itself.
Safety is to be found in queerness, in other words. Consider the terror of a queer child unsure if there is even one other person in the world like them; then consider their joy at finding and joining millions of others who once felt the same: It feels like home. Accordingly, a queer body that has been abused by another queer is a body that has been made a stranger to itself three times over. It is a body so alienated from one’s psyche that it is only natural to speak to oneself in the second person; Machado takes this approach here, addressing many of the chapters to a version of herself who is as-yet-unfragmented by abuse. In doing so, she sheds light on the genesis of her signature fragmented style and its breadcrumbs of pop culture and folklore. Their trail, as it were, leads back to the dream house.
There, Machado finds a home early in her relationship with the abuser. The woman awakens her to the possibilities inherent in a world where your body suddenly, providentially, fits. “You drink, you dance. You love the way she bops on the dance floor, the dance of someone who has joy in her body,” a body that would love Machado’s own without modification or condition. The prose sighs like one meeting a lover at the end of a very long day, wholly content yet ambiently astonished that miraculous, mutual love is something real and free. “You wondered, when she came along, if this was what most people got to experience in their lives: a straight line from want to satisfaction; desire manifested and satisfied in reasonable succession. This had never been the case before; it had always been fraught.”
Machado’s skill at cracking the candied shell around life’s warm, sweet organs is on par with her mastery of gothic atmospherics: both are essential to this book’s power. Which is to say that in the dream house, not everything is a nightmare. The sex is frequent and often delicious, and Machado didn’t “know what is more of a miracle: her body, or her love of your body.” The tender moments between the two women are the cherished, enviable kind that can be spread, broad and thick like ointment, over a relationship’s fissures. Machado’s discplined attention to these moments prevents this book from becoming a gratuitously triggering specimen of queer trauma porn; more importantly, they allow it to illustrate accurately the scrambled architecture of a survivor’s inner world.
Here is the bewilderment of good fortune, the relief of finally being seen, the security of finding a home in another person; the almost orgasmic payoff of patiently enduring abuse for a moment of being wanted—here is exactly what it feels like to be drawn into the lair of a charming monster, and why it is so difficult to leave. When the possibility of something wonderful eventually happening overpowers one’s pride in deserving something better, staying is the safer choice. It’s a mental contortion that Machado doesn’t describe as much as incarnate, assembling for the reader a universe where such contortions look like straight lines.
Straight indeed. The mechanics of abuse as hitherto described could work just as well for a heterosexual relationship, which is precisely why they fail to alert Machado to the danger ahead of her. The signposts of abuse in a queer relationship are all the harder to see for the simple fact that we don’t know what to look for: there are no whisper networks, awareness months, or Lifetime movies. In domestic violence as in domestic bliss, the blueprints were drawn up by straight people, for straight people. Machado perceives as much only gradually, mostly when it is already too late. Like the great heroines of Gothic literature, she grasps the way the world truly works only after enduring its consequences.
“She is the first woman who yokes herself to you with the label girlfriend. Who seems proud of that fact. And so when she walks into your office and tells you that this is what it’s like to date a woman, you believe her. And why wouldn’t you?...and here you are learning that lesbian relationships are, somehow, different—more intense and beautiful but also more painful and volatile, because women are all of these things too. Maybe you really do believe that women are different.”
At one level, Machado is critiquing the cultural paucity of healthy, queer relationships in public life, in art, and media; but on another level, she is taking aim at the rhetoric of “love is love” and the Obama-era respectability politics it indexes. Love is not love, as it turns out; neither is the commingled terror and confusion that occur during and after queer domestic violence. Machado fleshes out some of that difference here, contrasting the narrowing scope of her personal happiness and freedom in the dream house with the resolutely widening scope of queer rights in Obama’s America.
It’s this element that compounds the personal trauma with the political trauma, that turns this memoir into a story not just about the failure of a relationship, but also about how that failure renders queer love—queer home, queer utopia—a failure, not just for you, but seemingly because of you. In the dream house, the monster’s cruelest power is to make you believe that you—your abject body, its desires—are the monstrous thing.
“By the time I got around to dating people I was a little desperate, a little horny, and a lot confused,” Machado writes, tapping into the pent up confusion and naievte and desire of a queer childhood lived out during the homophobic Bush years. By the time that era had come to an end, “I had figured out exactly nothing. I came of age, then, in the Dream House, wisdom practically smothering me in my sleep. Everything tasted like an almost epiphany.” The last sentence is circled in my galley, my abuser’s name next to it.
My abuser was the first man for who I didn’t have to starch and iron my sibilants, who I didn’t have to swindle into thinking that my makeup was just good skin. For the first time, I felt no need to apologize for having a body at all; I was home; we were safe. There was an implicit promise that we would preserve each other against a world that wasn’t built for us; when that promise failed, everything else did, too.
“This, maybe, was the worst part: the whole world was out to kill you both. Your bodies have always been abject. You were dropped from the boat of the world, climbed onto a piece of driftwood together, and after a perfunctory period of pleasure and safety, she tried to drown you. And so you aren’t just mad, or heartbroken: you grieve from the betrayal.”
You also grieve for the betrayal you have inflicted on an entire community, one that had, at the very end of Machado’s relationship in the summer of 2012, finally found itself in public alliance with President Obama. The aesthetic choice heightens the irony and alienation of enduring domestic abuse in a queer relationship right as the possibility of legally permitted domesticity arrives. We could have everything now, but you deserve nothing.
***
To read this book is to feel in one’s body the trauma that domestic violence leaves behind. Yet, even cishet survivors of abuse will not recognize all of the trauma that In the Dream House will re-enanct, nor should they. This book is not for them. It is for the queer folk who have plenty of words to describe what they have experienced in abusive relationships, but who have no conceptual framework on which to hang those words. “Our culture does not have an investment in helping queer folks understand what their experiences mean,” Machado writes here as she lays the cornerstone of what will someday be an archive of dispatches from queer history’s dark underbelly.
And so, the “despondent disorientation” this book incarnates inflicts a peculiar assault on the body, adding yet another confounding variable: the queerness of both domestic abuser and victim. But not just any queerness: Machado’s queerness is historically situated, contending with the cresting wave of the marriage equality movement and the dream of queer domesticity that it was carrying into reality. In the Dream House is therefore a thoroughly American tale: Dreams and homes are quintessentially American, after all; so are nightmares, haunted houses, and, most importantly, the Gothic novel. Here, Machado tells a Gothic tale of just another haunted house in the American heartland, of just another girl who dreamed a dream of something too good to be true. Writing queer love into the archive of American literature, Machado also writes in the horror left behind when that love curdles into abuse, as if to say that we have always been here, unavenged.
But who is we? What is a queer community good for if that community fractures at its smallest joint when queer lover turns on queer lover? If we are to consider this book an anthology of failures, then whose failures are they? The conspicuous omission of a queer support system is telling. We see the shifting tides of the country from afar throughout the book, as if caught out of the corner of a distracted eye. Machado’s queer community solidifies only occasionally—and even then, it’s monolithic and abstract. In one instance, Machado invokes “the community” as she and her abuser travel across the country, made all too aware of their difference—and the danger it invites—while passing through rural towns.
“Machado argues here that frank discussions of partner violence among queer folk should not depend on how much good or ill they will bring to the collective image of a community that doesn’t exist.”
And yet, when her antagonist becomes her lover, Machado finds her strongest support system among her housemates: a hetereosexual couple. It’s an oblique way of asserting that that there is no support system internally for queer survivors—even among lesbians, the stalwart Atlases holding up something we call a “queer community” out of convenience. In fact, Machado’s archival research confirms that there has historically been a greater thrust against allowing such conversations, lest they be used against queer people or undermine solidarity among them. And how much more powerful is that taboo now, when “equality” is ours and we are continually assessed by a cishet world that questions if these hard-won rights are our just desserts? The standard of adequacy for our relationships had spiked upward, and now, for those relationships to fail at all is, for our enemies, to affirm that which we have set out to disprove: that we should not be.
If this is true, then queer relationships that crash on the rocks of domestic or intimate partner violence are all the more savory as arguments against our existence. But, much like Andrea Long Chu’s argument that one’s freedom to transition should not be predicated on how happy it will make a person, Machado argues here that frank discussions of partner violence among queer folk should not depend on how much good or ill they will bring to the collective image of a community that doesn’t exist. That queer people can be violent abusers should not imply that people should not be queer.
For those who would choose to mistake a politics of visibility for a politics of victimhood, In the Dream House offers a useful rebuttal. As Machado points out, most forms of intimate partner violence are legal, but only insofar as they are difficult to substantiate with evidence.To speak out, to grieve publicly, as it were, is therefore less about seeking attention than it is about setting the scales of justice right. There is no recourse for the abused other than to speak; to enter into the archive the transgressions that it has strived to exclude is justice, or at least its approximation. There is no guarantee of restitution when we expose our abusers and name the violence, but doing so at least has the therapeutic force of restoring a survivor’s sense of agency over their own universe, or making them into master of their own home.
That will never really happen, however; and Machado’s deliberate, brilliant choice to solder and smooth her story of abuse bears witness to that fact. No amount of writing that can restore what is taken away from the body, and In the Dream House does not attempt to fill the space that is left behind. Rather, it testifies that the best thing we can do to heal is to continue, failure upon failure, and tend to the rooms in the dream house, letting nothing be forgotten.
Niko Maragos is a writer and book critic based in Brooklyn.
