Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House is a beautifully written memoir chronicling the abuse she suffered at the hands of her first girlfriend. The Dream House is both a physical space, her girlfriend’s house, and a symbolic place, the metaphysical place that kept her trapped with her abuser. Throughout the memoir, Machado often emphasizes that discussion around intimate partner violence often centers around straight women in heterosexual relationships. The discussion fails to include lesbians that have experienced abuse because lesbians are not viewed as “ideal” victims and society does not seek to protect them in any way. Their experiences are often devalued because women are not believed to be able to dish the same kind of turmoil that men are. Even when lesbians are included, they are often accused of having a hand in their own abuse, with claims that the violence or dysfunction being two-sided.
The politics of respectability often enter the minds of marginalized victims of abuse. Machado talks about how she wished the woman was a man “because then at least it could reinforce ideas people had about men, and…the last thing queer women need is bad fucking PR” (“Dream House as Comedy of Errors”, 140–141). The idea that the abuse victim’s experience is doubly bad because it makes their community look bad is something that is unique to marginalized victims. In a world that treats each marginalized person like an official representative of their “group”, victims have to think about how their abuser’s abuse affects the mainstream view of their group outside of the effects it has on them alone. It puts undue stress on a person who is already dealing with enough. Marginalized people should not have to beg abusers to stop abusing them because it makes us look bad. All abusers should be treated with the same amount of vitriol, not more because they’re queer or Black, or less because they were drunk. However, just like everything else in America, there is a hierarchy of victims and abusers.
Machado also mentions how at some point she wished the woman had hit her, that she had physical evidence of the abuse she’d suffered. The burden of proof is always on the victim; victims must go to great lengths to get someone to believe that their pain is real. Being believed and having our pain acknowledged is essential to our healing, but it’s uncommon.
I want to focus on a single passage from In the Dream House. This passage stuck out to me because it’s something I have experienced and felt, and still feel. “Dream House as Luck of the Draw” describes a feeling that is not unfamiliar to me. For what feels like my entire life, no one ever had a crush on me and people would literally act like being interested in me was a last resort. And I think the reasons “why” differ from person to person, and I can only speculate on the reasons and I assume they have to do with things that were already insecurities. Never being on anyone’s radar and never having anyone express interest in me (to my face and in-person) is just very sad to me. I think being on the other side of desirability has allowed me to gain a lot of awareness, but it’s also made me appreciate my other relationships more. I doubt that I will find someone I want to be romantically involved with because it’s gotten to a point where the idea just makes me uncomfortable, but I think the friends that I’ve made fill me with so much joy and love, and they treat me with so much kindness and tenderness and that’s more than I could ever want. I don’t believe that any love I could ever feel would outweigh the love I feel from my friends and family.
Machado, Carmen Maria. In the Dream House. Minneapolis Graywolf Press, 2019.
