In the Dream House

The narrative returns to Machado’s abusive relationship. She drives her partner to Bloomington, Indiana and the house she will live in during her MFA program. Machado calls this the Dream House. The partner’s parents also help with the move but interact little with Machado other than giving her a vague approval for being in their daughter’s life. Val will soon join the partner in the Dream House.

The word “Bloomington” becomes a “promise” to Machado. The word takes on a more beautiful meaning for being associated with her partner.

Machado receives a call from her partner in which her partner says that living with Val is no longer working out for her and that she plans to break up with Val once Machado promises that she is serious about their relationship. Machado feels that she has “won the game” (66). The chapter includes footnotes that reference Thompson’s folktale index on mistaken lovers, false elopements, and the connection between poets and fools.

Now that Machado is in an exclusive relationship with her partner, “nothing is the same” (67). She feels lucky to be with her partner, and their relationship has seemingly assuaged many of her insecurities regarding her appearance, weight, and worthiness to others. Machado’s greatest desire at this point is to feel crucial to someone else.

Machado’s partner asks Machado to be monogamous with her and Machado eagerly agrees. Her complicated emotional response is like an insect pinned to the wall and under study by an entomologist; her partner’s “love” is the pin.

Machado compares her experiences in the Dream House with a censored literary genre: the lesbian pulp novel. She proposes that tragedy is a “foregone conclusion” and wonders whether future residents of the house will hear the ghost of her crying and yelling.

One of Machado’s aunts is “scary” for her temper, and she once sent derisive internet chat messages to a teenage Machado during her parents’ divorce. The woman’s wrath may be connected to her chronic endometrial pain (yet Machado herself has the condition and somehow manages not to scream at children). This aunt does not support Machado’s sexual orientation, so when she meets Machado’s partner, she is “stiff.” And later, she is cold, distant, and disapproving.

Machado proposes that setting is activated by point of view, that it engages with the events of the plot. Setting is significant to those enduring domestic abuse, as many experience a dislocation from family and friends as their partner isolates them from the world. The house becomes their only world, yet “[t]he Dream House was never just the Dream House” (72); it’s many things and contains many experiences, from sacred promises to “debauchery” to entrapment. As Machado looks back on her time there, she sees that the house included various points of view from which she understood her life, including as a lover, a companion, a prisoner, and a writer.

The narration adopts the tone of a screenwriter and describes the architectural layout of the Dream House in Bloomington, Indiana. Machado emphasizes her partner’s disordered way of living and lack of furniture, organization, or cleanliness. The scene ends by describing Machado and her partner typing on their respective computers as the house “inhales, exhales, inhales again” (74) around them.

Machado can’t do laundry in the basement of the Dream House because of the many spiders down there. Machado’s partner agrees to do the laundry for them.

Machado discusses the gothic genre’s heteronormative trope of a woman encased in a threatening home and psychologically destabilized by her male lover. Machado describes the genre generally and how it is defined by a woman’s struggle isolated inside a home that seems either to be haunted or uncanny. She links the emergence of the American gothic genre to the post-World War II rise in domestic violence, as many men returned home from war and quickly married before their violence or emotional instability was apparent to their new wives. Machado believes that her own partner was also a stranger to her until it was too late.

Machado examines the idiom “safe as houses” and argues that most idioms concerning houses are used to describe the opposite of safety, security, or reassurance. She wants to redefine the expression “safe as houses” to mean that the person with the most power in the house is protected; anyone else must protect themselves from that power.

The narrative resumes Machado’s time in Bloomington, Indiana, where she feels fearful after two women have gone missing near the Dream House. One, Lauren Spierer, was a young, wealthy, blonde woman whose pictures were put up all over the city in an attempt to find her. The other woman, Crystal Grubb, was poor. She was found strangled in a nearby field.

One day, Machado makes the mistake of admitting to her partner that she is “constantly nursing low-grade crushes” (80) on the people in her life. She has never acted upon them nor intends to but admits to surrounding herself with attractive and intelligent people. From that point on, Machado’s partner is constantly jealous, suspicious that when they are together or being intimate that Machado is thinking of someone else. Machado does not know how to convince her partner that she has never cheated. Her partner makes criticizing, judgmental threats against her loyalty and becomes violent during sex.

Machado discusses the importance of having one’s own bedroom as a child. Though she had one for herself, she never felt it was fully hers, as her mother would often remind her that the room was given to her—as a loan, not a gift. She once locked her bedroom door after a fight with her parents, but her father took off the doorknob, and Machado realized that “nothing, not even the four walls around my body, was mine” (82).