Speaking into the Silence: Lesbian Intimate Partner Violence in Carmen Maria Machado’s in the Dream House and a Queer Women’s Archive

Abstract

In this article, I undertake an investigation of queer women’s archive, that collection of cultural memory which delineates queer women’s identity, and its chronic marginalization regarding narratives of intimate partner abuse. As I find, there exists a notable gap within the queer women’s archive wherein discussions of intimate partner violence are dismissed and diminished. Engaging with this archive’s minimal acknowledgment of intimate partner violence within cultural memories and discourses, I examine how this gap within the literature perseveres, and the efforts memoirs such as Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House have played in rectifying this literary absence. Through a close analysis of Machado’s text and its reception, this paper argues that Machado’s extensive experimentation with memoir form—evident in her use of genre and second person language—forges new methods of understanding queerness and queer abuse. Moreover, this article proposes that Machado’s experimentation with form reveals Dream House’s metatextual tendency to both address and attempt to fill the archival silences within queer cultural memory, in turn creating a space for queer identity to expand. That is, I contend, Machado’s experimentations with memoir form recognize—and demand recognition of—queer abuse in an autobiographical answer to the archive’s absence.

Keywords:

• Memoir
• queer archive
• cultural memory
• life-writing
• intimate partner violence
• abuse

Introduction

Carmen Maria Machado introduces her 2019 memoir, In the Dream House (Dream House), with reference to the late artist Louise Bourgeois: “You pile up associations the way you pile up bricks. Memory itself is a form of architecture.”¹ In this epigraph, Machado reveals the heart of her narrative—the notion that her memories and feelings have been pieced together in such a way that they form her Dream House, and that the memoir itself is an image of that mental architecture. This allusion to an architecture of dreams is built into the title, yet this conceptualization of a “dream” house is misleading. Where Machado invites readers in with a lure of fantastical comfort, her memoir instead recounts several years of torment she experienced in an abusive relationship with another woman, incrementally documenting her experiences as she experimentally wields genre, form, and perspective. In this sense, Dream House is not only the remembered architecture of Machado’s life, but a subversive narrative of queerness and of survival, and the intersection of these experiences.

That Dream House is situated within the intersection of queerness, abuse, and testimony is paramount: the conversations regarding queer, intimate partner abuse and violence—especially as it involves two women—are often overshadowed or neglected within wider queer discourses. To clarify, while the past several decades have seen scholarly, activist, and community-based efforts to recenter dialogues regarding partner abuse within queer communities, these conversations remain relegated to the proverbial sideline of queer archives and memory. In her essay “Through a Queer Lens,” Peri Rainbow poignantly articulates the silences heard regarding her own experiences with partner violence, and theorizes the foundations of this disregard:

My feminist colleagues continued to minimize and ignore the reality of lesbian bettering. They typically define sexual and intimate violence through a gendered heterosexual lens, seeing my situation as something different less important, not real.²

For Rainbow, Machado, and countless other individuals, the violence they experienced has been institutionally neglected, despite various efforts to recall these narratives and account for the potential of abuse among queer women. The misremembering and silence within an archive of queer women’s experiences regarding partner abuse among women, and Machado’s efforts to fill this gap, thus emerge as the key issue I address in this paper. Why have queer archives, especially a queer women’s archive, forgotten partner abuse? And how does Machado try to remember it?

There are inevitable, and at times severe, consequences of these silences. As Machado herself puts it, these acts of censorship deny queerness a sense of humanity, neither permitting queerness “wrongdoing as a possibility” nor affirming the existence of these ‘compromised’ identities.³ Representations of queerness within queer archives and cultural memory instead can become a facsimile of real life, deprived of those tangible faults which humanize individuals and communities. Machado’s memoir, as such, materializes as subversive on two fronts. First, as Machado depicts, in graphically intimate detail, the realities of her abusive relationship, she self-reflexively refutes this gap. She asserts in Dream House’s second chapter:

I enter into the archive that domestic abuse between partners who share a gender identity is both possible and not uncommon, and that it can look something like this. I speak into the silence.⁴

Her purpose outlined, Machado declares her intent to fill this archival silence. Machado’s second innovation is formic, as she revives the possibilities of misery memory form through her experimental use of genre and second person language. Where this autobiographic genre traditionally constructs, in the words of Anne Rothe, “ethically simplified conflicts of good versus evil” characterized through the designation of “victim” and “villain,”⁵ Machado refutes this simplified narrative, realigning the parameters by which testimony of trauma may be understood. It is the marriage of these two innovations that this article investigates, as I argue that it is through her extensive experimentations with form that Machado aims to create a sticky representation of queer abuse, one that may, perhaps, persevere and become remembered within a queer women’s archive.

This paper begins by introducing queer archives; detailing simultaneously how this essay understands theses archives, their purpose in remembering queerness, the fissures in archival construction that have led to the minimization of partner violence, as well as outlining the scope of a queer women’s archive wherein Dream House rests. Following this, I briefly review the catalog of queer partner abuse representations and discussions, focusing explicitly on abuse in relationships between two women, and unpacking how Machado’s narrative sits within this discussion. Finally, I examine the experimental nature of Dream House, positing that it is explicitly through her experimentations that Machado articulates and refutes the gaps within a queer women’s archive, as she unravels and exposes the realities of abuse between women and asks queer memory to recall her narrative and others like it.

Cultural Memory and the Queer Archive

Dynamic and multifaceted, the queer archives this paper addresses are conceptually defined with reference to Ann Cvetkovich’s An Archive of Feeling (2003), in which queer archives are said to aim to preserve “efforts to combat homophobia and create a public lesbian and gay culture” as well maintain historical records of queer life.⁶ Drawn both to ephemera and immaterial feeling, Cvetkovich recommends that “collectors” of queer archives find significance in those objects affectively associated with “nostalgia, personal memory, fantasy, and trauma.”⁷ Indeed, queer archives ought to be conceptualized as the efforts of queer individuals and communities to record a history which—in defiance of mainstream, heteronormatively sanctioned archives—explicitly represents and identifies queer narratives; their archival focus placed within the remembrance of queer defiance against heteronormative oppositionality.

However, while this conceptualization of a queer archive of feeling and memory, and of recording queer history, provides a foundation theorizing archival practices and trends, as Cvetkovich alludes there is there is no single queer archive that contains the multitude of recorded queer experience, history, and feeling. The politics, sociocultural forces, and affects which carve out queer lives vary—at times radically—across time, culture, nationality, race, and gender and sexual identities among other facets of life. Consequently, in addressing partner abuse among queer women, I turn specifically toward a queer women’s archive. That is, in this paper, I address the broad trends of queer archival practices in acknowledging queer archives as a form of cultural memory, while nevertheless recognizing that the narratives I engage with are part of a queer women’s archive that is distinct, if not entirely separate, from other queer histories. This queer women’s archive somewhat recalls the (implicitly) cis lesbian archive which Cvetkovich herself designates, albeit vitally realigned with contemporary conversations within queer communities that recognize diversity and fluidity among sexual and gender identities which cannot be contained strictly by ‘cis’ or ‘lesbian’ nominations. Thus, in this paper I discuss both the widespread conceptual practices which I find exist across queer archives and more specifically a queer women’s archive that houses the collected narratives of abuse among queer women.

As I have alluded, this paper recognizes queer archives as a form of cultural memory, drawing from Aleida Assmann’s definition.⁸ In line with this understanding of cultural memory, queer archives therefore exist to parse and recall information across generations through the process of creating new and reinterpreting old memories. Alongside the act of remembering, the act of forgetting is critical to the processes of cultural memory—memory is highly selective, and only those pieces which stick may become a piece of cultural memory.⁹ As Ann Rigney establishes, literature sticks within cultural memory through sympathetic reader engagement, that the memorability of a narrative is tied intrinsically with its ability to catch the imagination of its audience thus becomes a key part of cultural remembrance and the development of an archive.¹⁰

Of course, if certain narratives and identities are granted the opportunity to stick within our cultural memories, then in turn some must unstick, become forgotten or never acknowledged in the first place and the archival capability to preserve history and represent identity gapes. As I have argued, queer archives are not immune to these gaps, as Marika Cifor establishes “queer archives often come with the implicit demand that queer individuals only vocalize pride.”¹¹ Similarly, José Muñoz posits that queer communities have historically focused their attention on developing positive depictions of a “queer utopia”: a vision of a queer future absent of the traumas associated with life in a homophobic, heteronormative society.¹² He explains that “we [the queer community] want a new society—a revolutionary society … we want a society where the needs of the people come first.”¹³ While Muñoz does not necessarily praise these utopic stipulations in his work, he nevertheless encapsulates the power this concept hold within the queer community—one which Machado herself explicitly draws upon in her memoir, as she references both Muñoz’s definition and the concept more broadly throughout her text. Machado asks of queer archives and their utopian vision: “Who gets left behind?”¹⁴

Regardless, within this vision of a queer utopia, there is little place for narratives of undoing, of violence perpetrated within queer communities against each other. While narratives of abuse and trauma altogether are not neglected within queer cultural memory—consider, for instance, the AIDS crisis, which is foregrounded in discussions of queer public culture—¹⁵ the recognition of abuse perpetrated internally in queer communities exists in opposition to affectual priorities of the wider queer community. Whereas the traumas often forefronted within archives participate in the narrative of a queer utopia—at least as far as they recognize a fellowship of queer community set in opposition to queerphobic practices—queer partner abuse explicitly resists the notion of queer utopia. Similarly, where queer archives prioritize moments of queer assimilation into mainstream culture—the emphasis on marriage equality within widespread queer discourses of the last decade, for example—addressing partner violence would resist that assimilation. To do so would undo the notion of a good, wholesome queerness, devoid from the toxicity and dehumanization which has so often been unfairly placed upon it. Queer communities have historically fought against this vilification, and as I argue, to recognize partner violence within queer archives may resist that struggle; it may provide ammunition, so to say, for queerphobic positions. Therefore, as queer archives, or queer cultural memory, articulate queer history not only for queer communities but also for heteronormative culture, they become concerned with the politics of respectability—especially in instances where marginalization intersects. This politics of respectability are further entwined with theories of homonormativity, which describe twenty-first-century politics of assimilation that, in the words of Lisa Duggan, “does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions but upholds and sustains them.”¹⁶ To acknowledge the existence of queer intimate partner abuse would dispute the predetermined, affectual needs of these archives and of queer memory, rejecting heteronormative beliefs and defying politics of respectability. As such, these nonnormative, politically compromised experiences are forgotten, and the identities of those who both perpetrate or suffer these relationships are reduced.

It is in this process of forgetting that the gap I address emerges, those insidious elements of queerness that have been unstuck from our cultural memories. These elements of queer history have become, as Assmann puts it, actively forgotten as they are dismissed and rejected from the annals of queer history and representation.¹⁷ These acts of forgetting in turn limit archival capacity to represent queerness, and indeed while representation will never encompass all facets of any one identity (community or individual), that does not negate the significant consequences of these representational limitations. As Lauren Berlant speaks to the processes of identity construction and representation, she establishes: “Subaltern personhood, in contrast, allows for no subtlety or personal uniqueness in mass society, producing realms of national stereotypes, with all of their negative transhistoricism.”¹⁸ The nuances of identity, of life and personhood, are thus dematerialized in the margins; stereotypes persevere in the representation of marginalized identities, compounding the negative implications of these queer archives’ gaps. The unique subtleties of personhood cease to exist for queer individuals, their representation within cultural lexicons reduced. The act of actively forgetting facets of queerness, of reducing queerness to a ‘national stereotype’ free of subtlety and uniqueness becomes an act of violent destruction, posited against a group whose identities have already been diminished within the annals of heteronormative cultural histories. It is this limitation that I address, arguing that queer archives—through the processes of active forgetting—have restricted what queer identity is and what it can be.

Abuse Among Women and a Queer Women’s Archive

Where queer archives altogether are limited in their ability to recognize partner abuse as a consequence of the politics of memory, respectability, and identity which affect all queer lives, Machado’s narrative must be considered—as Machado takes pains to articulate—as a specifically queer women’s one; her position as a woman of color, and her partner’s womanhood, play a considerable role in the ways her experiences were shaped. In the following section of my analysis, I consider specifically the archive of queer women’s experiences, and, through an acknowledgment of both Machado’s work and the existing narratives of queer women’s abuse stories, I interrogate the gendered politics which differentiate queer women’s experiences from the wider queer archive, and position Machado’s place within this archive of queer women’s testimony. Where before I designated the practices that have shaped queer archival and memory processes as widespread phenomena, here I turn to a specifically gendered practice of denying abuse among and between women within a queer women’s archive.

Most prominently, gendered biases presume an inherent status quo concerning the conditions of partner abuse, in turn influencing the means by which this abuse becomes recognized within cultural memory and the queer women’s archive. Namely, these gendered conventions dictate that domestic abuse is almost always presumed to be perpetrated by men against women,¹⁹ and that psychological abuse is not considered to have the same consequences nor severity as physical abuse.²⁰ Importantly, women are more likely to perpetrate psychological forms of abuse relative to physical ones, meaning that their role as perpetrators in instances of partner abuse is dually ignored as their gender and the forms of abuse they are more likely to commit are both dismissed.²¹ That is not to say that women do not participate in acts of physical violence. Indeed, instances of physical, psychological, and financial abuse between women are all well documented in informal and institutional spaces alike,²² despite widespread tendencies to dismiss these acts (especially physical violence perpetrated by women) within broader cultural discourses.

These gendered politics have been recognized throughout narratives of partner abuse in queer women’s narratives. In the anthology Queering Sexual Violence, Jennifer Paterson underscores the heteronormative binaries that delineate understandings of abuse: “We forget how limiting and exclusionary binaries are: male|female, victim|survivor, survivor|perpetrator, safe|unsafe.”²³ The limitations of these rigid binaries, a rigidity in thinking I would argue is antithetical to queer positions inherently, is echoed throughout queer women’s abuse testimony. From the same anthology, Peri Rainbow describes these binaries: “Masculine = male = perpetrator while feminine = female = victim.”²⁴ On the abuse advocacy website, “Say it Loud,” one abuse victim describes the differences she experienced when sharing her experiences in a heterosexual relationship as opposed to one with another woman:

I encountered an almost total lack of support within my own LGBTQ + community. I tried to debrief with some female friends each who have strong feminist values and experience working in the domestic violence sector who said things like we “brought out the worst in each other” and “there’s not enough of us to take sides.” One asked if she had hit me, and when I said no, before I could add that I was shoved, bruised and strangled—was told “oh well that’s alright then” and the subject was closed.

While there are of course exceptions to these trends, the weight of these narratives exposes a keen truth within queer women’s abuse and receptions to this abuse. That violence and abuse is known almost exclusively within a “heterosexual paradigm” that understands abusers as men and enforces a rigidity in understanding abuse. As Kierrynn Davis and Nel Glass write, “violence among women has been unable to claim epistemic space in a paradigm that predominately frames violence as heterosexual.”²⁵ There is notable historical precedent for the minimization of abuse among women, and for the gendered binaries which dictate its reception. In a 2006 paper, Celina De León collected the testimonies of abuse survivors. One woman, who suffered abuse at the hands of her more feminine partner, stated that: “I guess because I was not considered the more femme in the relationships, I was the aggressor.”²⁶ Here, something key is outlined: for masculine-presenting women, the barriers to recognizing their abuse are multiplied by the gendered assumption that abuse lies within the domain of masculinity.

Twisted conceptions of a queer utopia arise again in an explicitly queer women’s context. Testifying to the abuse she experienced in a relationship with another woman, Sandra Dickson writes:

We didn’t frame those troubling relationships in the same way we framed supporting women in Refuges, in the midst of the messy and protracted business of leaving violent men … We wanted to believe in queer utopias.²⁷

Outside of life-writing and survivor testimony, these same narratives emerge. In Bernadine Evaristo’s 2019 novel Girl, Woman, Other, for instance, one of the narrators struggles to come to terms with the abuse she suffers in a queer relationship, at least in part for the setting within a women’s commune. For feminists, and especially for queer women, the curation of safe spaces separate from gendered violence enacted by men acts as a utopian vision, literally a “Refuge,” and to recognize the possibility of abuse within these spaces would be to disavow their utopic potential. Thus, the queer women’s archive experiences pitfalls in its ability to recognize partner abuse. The gendered dimension central to cultural understandings of abuse, as well as further demands for feminist, queer utopias render abusive experiences invisible within this space.

Throughout Dream House, Machado self-consciously anticipates and refutes these gendered preconditions to recognizing abuse in a queer women’s archive. She writes, for instance, that “we were not married, she was not a dark and brooding man.”²⁸ Here, she unambiguously defies social expectations, further expanding on this notion through precise descriptions of her abusive partner: “that mix of butch and femme that drives you crazy,” “beautiful, tiny,” “short and pale … New England girl.”²⁹ This repetitive description, which emphasizes Machado’s abuser’s appearance as fitting a norm of nonthreatening white femininity, directly challenges cultural abuse narratives: that is, that abusers are men—or at the least highly masculinized; that they are large and dominating; and that small women are typically victims rather than perpetrators.³⁰ Moreover, it is noteworthy that these descriptions of Machado’s abuser occur within the first twenty-five pages of Dream House. In developing this image early on within the narrative, Machado is ensuring that the reader has a developed image of her partner when she later describes instances of physical abuse, and therefore that the reader cannot assume that the abuse is being carried out by a “masculinized” figure. Anticipating the preconception that violence is solely a masculine endeavor, Machado insists the reader recognize a female potential for violence.

Machado’s persistence in recognizing the violence of her relationship continues throughout Dream House, recounting instances of stalking, isolation, emotional abuse, sexual abuse, and physical violence. Most definitively, Machado defies gendered expectations in the chapter “Dream House as Chekhov’s Gun,” which recounts an especially violent moment of abuse. Machado describes:

She leans over and begins to scream directly in your ear, like she’s pouring acid out of her mouth and into you. You try to scramble away, but she is pushing on your body, howling like a wounded bear, like an ancient god … she throws the other one [plate], and it also misses but takes a framed picture off the wall.³¹

In this passage, Machado viscerally details her experience with violence, highlighting the ferocity of her partner, which is enough to inflict noticeable damage on the world around her with strength likened to that of a “bear” and a “god.” Machado’s language here is also of note; the use of “acid” and “howling” evoke a tangible sense of fear in the reader as Machado describes being both physically and mentally terrorized. Reflecting on the severity of this incident, Machado closes the chapter: “On that night, the gun is set upon the mantelpiece. The metaphorical gun, of course. If there were a literal gun, you’d probably be dead.”³² Poetically recalling the chapter title—Chekhov’s dramatic principle which demands that every element of story is necessary and must be used—Machado meditates upon her abuse, categorically arguing to the reader that abuse perpetrated by women can be life-threatening, aggressive, and psychologically and physically traumatic. Moreover, this abuse, like Chekhov’s gun, must return once set in motion; it is an inevitability that could at any given moment lead to death. Violence exists, in this relationship, as an inevitability, and Machado’s partner’s womanhood does nothing to soften the blow.

While accepting these depictions of Machado’s abuser as inherently subversive of the cultural standard, it is additionally important to recognize Machado’s self-image. Throughout Dream House, Machado explicitly describes herself as a fat Latina. She characterizes herself: “Part of the problem was, as a weird fat girl, you felt lucky.” And again: “You don’t know what is more of a miracle: her body, or her love for your body.”³³ These depictions clarify, at least within Machado’s self-image, that she has become de-feminized by her fatness: she is “weird,” and the notion of accepting love as a fat woman appears elusive. Social conventions traditionally strip fat women of their femininity as a culmination of gendered ideals and standards of beauty; culturally, women are idealized for their smallness and beauty.³⁴ Moreover, Machado’s race—being Latina—further distances her from normative femininity and, as social norms would dictate, increases the likelihood that her abuse would go undetected.³⁵ Therefore, Machado’s powerfully unrelenting depiction of her image, as fat and Latina, further expands the bounds of queer memory, including images of femininity which would normally be excluded from the already limited survivor narrative.

The importance of Machado’s work, however, is not solely centered on her efforts to expand the archive’s representation of negative queer experiences, but also in the explicit calls to action she makes. Machado explains, for example, that “most types of domestic abuse are completely legal.”³⁶ Through this, Machado is arguing that domestic abuse that exists outside of a purely physical realm –financial, emotional, or psychological—is not recognized legally, and therefore cannot be combated within institutional structures. By rendering graphic depictions of her own psychological suffering, she is criticizing this gap in the legal recognition of abuse and demanding change. Extending this argument, she examines the paradigm that exists between queer utopia and representations of queer abuse. Machado notes, in reference to this utopia, that: “The literature of queer domestic abuse is lousy with references to this punctured dream [queer utopia], which proves to be as much a violation as a black eye, sprained wrist.”³⁷Alluding to Muñoz’s definition of an idealized queer futurity, Machado uses violent imagery—“punctured,” “black eye, sprained wrist”—to suggest that for the community the confrontation of a queer archive’s futuristic idealism as a result of abuse is as traumatic as the abuse itself. However, Machado seems tangibly opposed to this idea, countering it with her own thesis: “We [queer people] deserve to have our wrongdoing represented as much as our heroism, because when we refuse wrongdoing as a possibility for a group of people, we refuse their humanity.”³⁸ For Machado, not only does the lack of legal representation for sufferers of domestic abuse prove to be dysfunctional, but the gap within the archive is just as problematic, if not more so. As she puts it, the archive’s denial of abuse to preserve the utopic dream strips queerness of any realized humanity that emerges from flawed, destructive behavior, and Machado herself puts her experiences forward as a chance to reconstruct the archive with this need in mind.

Radical Representation in the Dream House

Memoir undoubtedly maintains a significant position within queer archives. As autobiographical testimony bears witness to queer life these unique details of queer history provide valuable, highly personalized insights into the queer experience that might otherwise be neglected. While not all literary works gain entrance into cultural memory, Ann Rigney and Astrid Erll note that when specific texts produce “collective memories” through the recollection of “the past in the form of narratives” they become a “medium of cultural remembrance,” thus entering cultural memory.³⁹ They stick, that is, through not only their engagement with the reader, but also their production of collective memories into narrative forms. In the following portion of my analysis, I articulate how Machado’s Dream House wields memoir form, addressing gaps within the archive in its representation of queer identity and abuse between women. Machado’s memoir, notably, exceeds conventions of memoir form as she conveys her narrative through a series of vignettes, each framed by different tropes and genres. While Dream House loosely adheres to chronology—in that the memoir and the relationship it features are presented through a beginning, middle, and end—it nevertheless defies strict temporality, instead jumping backwards and forwards through memory. Machado further experiments in her prose, narrating (for the most part) in second person.

By experimenting in this way, I argue, Machado pushes and subverts public and critical understanding of queer feeling, challenging that the reader of Dream House understands the trauma and shame foundational to her experiences with queer abuse, acting in opposition to queer archive’s affective foundations. Ultimately, Machado’s experimentation with memoir form encourages that her experiences with abuse are actively remembered within the queer women’s archive; the potential impact of Dream House as cultural memory is evident in its critical and commercial success. That is, where the curation of queer archives, including a queer women’s archive, is founded in nostalgic affects and at times heteronormative assimilation, Machado’s text challenges these assumptions—affirming new, nonnormative means of understanding queer identity. Where queer archives have traditionally shunned, or indeed actively forgotten, testimonies of abuse among queer women, Machado’s experiences stick within the cultural memory through the experimental and—subsequently—engaging production of her memory, positioning new means of understanding queer experiences in the process.

Form and Purpose

Throughout Dream House, each chapter is framed through specific genre tropes or conventions, with—in some instances—the prose of the chapter itself reflecting that standard. Examples include “Dream House as Noir,” “Dream House as Utopia,” and “Dream House as Haunted Mansion.” I explore Machado’s method of framing her testimony through tropes, first examining how this sits apart from traditional misery memoir conventions, and then the ramifications of this experimental form for cultural understanding of the archive and its limitations regarding the acknowledgment of abuse. This formic experimentation, as I uncover, emerges simultaneously as a means for Machado to effectively interrogate her own narrative, and furthermore as a subversion of misery memoir’s expectations that implores a complex, multifaceted witnessing to Machado’s story—provoking judgment which may become stuck in cultural understandings.

As Rothe designates, misery memoirs often retell a period of suffering experienced by the authors, whether that be homelessness and poverty (Maid by Stephanie Land and The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls), mental illness (Brain on Fire by Susannah Cahalan and The Body Papers by Grace Talusan), or another “traumatic” experience.⁴⁰ In his review of memoir’s history, Ben Yagoda writes that “misery memoir” looms over life-writing and establishes that these particular memoirs frequently feature “an account, usually by a non-celebrity, of childhood abuse or otherwise painful or difficult circumstances.”⁴¹ Rothe additionally explores the narrative and formative tropes of this genre, noting the artifice of good vs. evil, of suffering alleviated through neoliberal redemption—often exemplified through the nigh-hyperbolic characterization of “victims” and “villains.” Frequently entrenched within neoliberal cultural values, these memoirs frequently interpret these characterizations through such a lens; the so-called villain becomes an oppositional force preventing the author-protagonist from some neoliberally conceptualized success, and redemption emerges in the consumption of that same object. Trauma thus becomes reduced, and nuanced explorations into the sociocultural factors behind suffering may be rejected.

Machado’s rejection of conventional misery memoir form emerges, consequently, as a radical framing device as she interweaves her experiences between the lines of trauma memoir and the expectations of this genre. That is, as Machado exposes her narrative through a collection of vignettes—each framed by a specific trope—she defies the traditional narrative arc of misery memoirs, which often center narratives of struggle followed by neoliberal exaltation, and simplistic definitions of good and evil, protagonist and villain. Through this structural creativity, Machado challenges how narratives are presented, and better establishes the complexity and emotional depths of her experiences. In an interview with the podcast “Code Switch,” Machado addresses this experimentation: “[genre] is the way that I organize everything, so it just made sense and it was a way that I would organize this book that felt … impossible to categorize.”⁴² Expanding upon this explanation, she notes: “I guess I would describe it [Dream House] as an experimental memoir about many things, including queer intimate partner violence, that uses genre as a mode of interrogation.”⁴³ Superficially, therefore, Machado’s experimentation with and rejection of traditional genre conventions and tropes reflects her own intimate thought processes, and the way she organizes her experiences, memories, and feelings. However, beyond this surface level organization, Machado has expressly used these tropes as a method of interrogating her own life, as she addresses queer abuse through a myriad of lenses. These multifaceted perspectives allow memoirists, such as Machado, to conceptualize their experiences within queer cultural memory, or the archive: using this experimentation to realign the perceived boundaries on queer feeling and history. Anna Poletti expands on the use of what she calls “collage” within queer autobiographical texts, arguing that these multifaceted forms destabilize the relationships between author, text, and reader, consequently granting these texts “cultural and political power.”⁴⁴ These experimental forms thus simultaneously imbue texts with new perspectives of queerness and cultural power, repurposing the gaze upon queerness to account for these new(-ly acknowledged) experiences.

If Machado’s manipulation of genre tropes arises from her need to frame and express the emotional complexity of her experiences, then its effect is most evident in the ways that it successfully conveys this complexity to an audience, in turn allowing for a greater breadth of emotional experience to be remembered and validated. This is achieved through two means. First, in experimenting with conventions and tone, and second by prioritizing Machado’s experiences as opposed to emphasizing her trauma.

Through her investigation into narrative tropes, Machado positions her text through a multitude of lenses, evident in the tonal fluctuations between chapters, even when those chapters address a seemingly singular issue—such as the knotty process of realizing her relationship was abusive. In the chapter “Dream House as Epiphany,” which consists of a single line reflecting the nature of “epiphany,” Machado simply explains that “Most types of domestic abuse are completely legal.”⁴⁵ Conversely, the chapter “Dream House as Double Cross” implements exquisite, poetic imagery to examine the same realization, concluding with the passage: “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 … you grieve from the betrayal.”⁴⁶ While both these instances seek to represent the same emotional experience—realization that a relationship can be abusive even existing outside the perceived bounds of what abusee may be (heterosexual, masculine)—there is a tonal dissonance between the two: “Epiphany” presents this moment as a sudden, shocking realization about abuse, whereas “Double Cross” instead ponders the emotional processes of this abuse through metaphor and fantastical images of betrayal. Through juxtaposing these tropes, Machado grants her experiences the complexity they deserve, neither abandoning the nuances of abuse to a social critique of the legal system and its effects on our perceptions of abuse, nor dismissing it as a purely emotional experience. Instead, Machado insists on understanding and positing the multitudes contained within an abusive experience, defying the singular expectations of misery memoir and replicating complex memories in the process.

In addition to acknowledging the complexity of her testimony, Machado’s tonal and genre shifts strengthen her position as a reliable narrator. Implementing a breadth of genre, that is, provokes readers to examine the information presented in lieu of directly addressing the author’s perspective and motives as the text fluctuates between these formic points.⁴⁷ By approaching genre and its tropes not as a boundary but as a place of exploration, Machado presents a more credible representation of herself as her reader learns to examine her text without the implications of a singular perspective and motive. Considering Phillipe Lejeune’s “autobiographical pact,” Dream House appeases the implicit demands placed on memoirists to honor truthful representations in the curation of a seemingly genuine and unbiased self-identification.

This perceived authenticity further limits Machado’s autobiographic status as a “tainted witness”—to borrow from Leigh Gilmore—a woman who is deemed an untrustworthy and inauthentic witness, even to her own experiences. Machado is well aware of the gendered scrutiny placed upon her, and the way assumptions about her femaleness taint her testimony. In the chapter “Dream House as Unreliable Narrator” Machado explains that: “When I was a child my parents … loved to refer to me as melodramatic.” And then, “This is what I keep turning to: how do people decide who is or is not an unreliable narrator.” Machado later returns to this idea in the chapter “Dream House as Proof,” writing: “I think a lot about what evidence, had it been measured or recorded or kept, would help make my case.” And finally concluding: “You have no reason to believe me … What is the value of proof?”⁴⁸ Drawing similarly on discussions of truth in memoir, Carolyn Kraus alludes to the idea that memoirists are held, within the mind of the reader, to similar levels of accountability as other nonfiction authors, in spite of the inherent flaws within human memory.⁴⁹ For Machado, it becomes evident that as a woman—especially a queer, Latina woman—her word may never be deemed authentic if simply relayed through the genre of narrative realism and traditional memoir forms. I propose, however, that as a consequence of Machado’s creative use of multiple genres, Dream House emerges as a seemingly authentic, emotionally significant representation of queer abuse, thus encouraging the audience to perceive queerness in ways that are conventionally dismissed by the queer women’s archive and its sociocultural limitations.

Life in Second Person

The most dramatic and obvious of Machado’s experimentations with memoir form is her use of second person voice. Throughout Dream House, Machado recounts her experiences with abuse, and resultant trauma, in vivid second person prose—distancing her autobiographical self from the very narrative she depicts, and in turn closing the gap between the reader and the experiences of abuse.

Nevertheless, while the overwhelming majority of Dream House is composed using second person, Machado does sometimes use first-person address. Indeed, her infrequent use of first person—used primarily to bookend her memoir—and the transition to second person mark an important conceptual shift within Dream House. In an early chapter, for instance, she describes her life prior to her abusive relationship, writing that “before I met the woman from the Dream House, I lived in a tiny two-bedroom apartment in Iowa city.”⁵⁰ However, only a few pages later the perspective starts to shift, with Machado noting this transition:

You were not always just a You. I was whole—a symbiotic relationship between my best and worst parts—and then, in one sense of the definition, I was cleaved: a neat lop that took first person—that assured, confident woman, the girl detective, the adventurer—away from second, who was always anxious and vibrating like a too-small breed of dog.⁵¹

Through this passage, Machado defines her use of second person not only as a language technique, but as a reflection of the emotional and psychological trauma that abuse wrecked upon her, emphasized through the vivid imagery of her prose. Explicitly, while first-person Machado possesses narrative authority and agency, her second person self is defined by the lack of those same qualities and is as such linguistically distanced from her own narrative authority.⁵²

Machado’s return to first-person narration in the final chapters, ergo, signals her emotional recovery. She closes Dream House by writing: “When I turned around, my dark silver moon-shadow walked in front of me as I made my way back to the shore. My tale goes only go to here; it ends, and the wind carries it to you.”⁵³ It is expressly through this return to first person in the final stages of Dream House that Machado centers her emotional healing and triumphant reclamation of her agency. Moreover, by distinctly, and linguistically, marking her time spent in an abusive relationship, Machado signals these intrusive emotional shifts to the reader.

The effects of Machado’s transitions between perspectives on her autobiographical representation can be further understood through Paul John Eakin’s framework of narrative identity. Eakin argues that “narrative is not merely a literary form but a mode of phenomenological and cognitive self-experience” and also posits that narrative “is an identity content.”⁵⁴ He proposes that through autobiographical narratives, authors shape their self-conceptualization and identity. Acknowledging this, I contend that Machado’s two, linguistically distinct selves reflect two distinct narrative identities, each shaped by their proximity with abuse and the emotional lens that Machado offers at these opposing points. These notions of identity offer new, radical perspectives for the archive, as Machado reveals herself adjacent to W. E. B. Du Bois’ conceptualization of a double consciousness. Where Du Bois speaks to an African American double consciousness born in the distinctions between a culturally defined self and the self that exists outside this normative prescription, Machado instead reveals a double consciousness that exists for queer abuse survivors—a culturally consistent self (the “I” whose identity conforms to normative expectations of queer relationships) and the self who has been “cleaved” from this cultural understanding (“you”).

Machado’s use of second person perspective further shapes the reader’s perception of and connection with queer experiences, as the reader becomes an “adequate witness” to Machado’s testimony. Gilmore defines the adequate witness as a witness who can “pre-empt the processes of judgment that taint a witness but can also undo that stigma by altering the practice of judgment itself,” existing in parallel to the aforementioned “tainted witness.”⁵⁵ As Gilmore further details on the use of first-person language, the “grammar of victimization” surrounding testimony limits subjectivity, as the speaker must assume a passive position regarding their own trauma.⁵⁶ I contend, therefore, that Machado’s use of the second person reclaims that active subjectivity as she addresses herself: Machado declares not that “I was abused” but rather that “you were abused.” This language is no longer a defense tainted by Machado’s position as a woman of color, but a declaration of authority. In turn, the practice of judgment is transformed as Machado takes active authority of her testimony, undoing the potential for stigmatization as the reader assumes the role of adequate witness.

A consideration of a model of the relational self further enhances understandings of the modes of connection in Dream House and Machado’s use of second person. Nancy Miller explains that “the female autobiographical self comes into writing, goes public with private feelings, through a significant relation to an other.”⁵⁷ That is, female memoirists recognize their feelings and identity not only as reflections of their own lived experiences, but as an empathetic response to the world around them. This phenomenon arises, Miller argues, as women are forced by oppressive circumstances to recognize collective identities.⁵⁸ Indeed, through her use of second person Machado extends this relational mode to herself. She writes, for instance:

One of the questions that has haunted you: Would knowing have made you dumber or smarter? If, one day, a milky portal had opened in your bedroom and an older version of yourself had stepped out and told you what you know now, would you have listened? You like to think so, but you’d probably be lying.⁵⁹

Through this, Machado questions her own behavior, narrowing the gap between past and present selves as she empathizes with not just the world around her, but her own past as it is defined by “you.” As Machado declares “you’d probably be lying,” she outlines not just the magnitude of the abuse she suffered, but sympathetically levels her gaze inwards. In turn, as the reader adequately witnesses this sympathetic engagement, they too become engaged enthralled with Machado’s relational self, thus appreciating Machado’s agency and emotional perspective.

In the final third of Dream House, Machado’s use of second person develops, as Machado persuades the reader to presume an empathetic position in the chapter “Dream House as Choose Your Own Adventure.” In these 14 pages, Machado implements a “choose your own adventure” style of storytelling, as the reader navigates the horrors of living through an abusive relationship for a day. While the use of second person perspective prior to this moment encouraged the reader to assume the role of an adequate witness, this chapter explicitly forces the reader to experience the subtle machinations and psychological horror of abuse from the moment of waking up and facing emotional manipulation (“‘You were moving all night’, she says. ‘Your arms and elbows touched me. You kept me awake’.”⁶⁰) over a 24-hour period. Following the tradition of choose your own adventure stories, at the end of each page Machado offers the reader a choice—or in some cases a command—of where to proceed in the story, with directions such as “If you tell her to calm down, go to page 193” and “Go to page 195.” These mechanisms place narrative authority—at least to a certain extent—within the hands of the reader, allowing them to assume control of the story. This narrative control, in turn, reveals and provokes a key tension within Dream House, the tension between story and reality, and invites readers to align themselves within the written world of Dream House.

Acting as the pinnacle of Machado’s experiments with second person, this section primarily works to highlight the severity of queer abuse, as well as the realities of living with an abusive relationship. In doing so, Machado refuses the nostalgic, utopian traditions of queer archives, instead emphasizing the nightmarish realities of her own queerness as it existed in her relationship, parsing that knowledge to her readers and the wider cultural landscape. This effect is in part achieved as Machado encourages readers to realize how abused individuals become trapped in these damaging relationships, testifying to the psychological harm abuse has on individuals. This is conjured by the narrative certainty Machado constructs: any decision the reader makes within the story inevitably leads back to confrontation, persecution, or the revelation that escape from abuse in unattainable. For instance, if the reader chooses to confront the abuser about her actions at any point in the story, they are led to page 193, which reads: “Are you kidding? You’d never do this. Don’t try to convince any of these people that you’d stand up for yourself for one second. Get out of here … END. Go to page 204.” Machado here reveals the tragic heart at the center of abusive relationship: that often, they are by nature almost impossible to confront from within or, afterwards, to leave behind. This notion is reinforced through Machado’s dismissive language—“are you kidding” and “get out of here”—as the well as her final command, which abruptly pulls the reader out of this chapter: “END.” This idea culminates in the final pages of the chapter, wherein the cycle of abuse begins again in a scene that mirrors the first in the chapter, with Machado offering to the reader: “If you apologize profusely, go to page 190 … If you tell her to wake you up next time your elbows touch her in your sleep, go to page 191.”⁶¹

As this chapter develops, the structure and realism of Machado’s writing devolve. For example, toward the end of the chapter, Machado offers the reader a brief escape from the horrors of the narrative in an imagined dreamscape, literally removed from reality:

It’s going to be all right. One day, your wife will gently adjust your arm if it touches her face at night, soothingly straightening it while kissing you. Sometimes you’ll wake up just enough to notice; other times, she’ll only tell you in the morning. It’s the kind of morning you could get used to.⁶²

Gently mirroring this opening scene from this chapter, Machado offers both her past self and the reader an opportunity to briefly escape the abuse she faces, heightening the juxtaposition between a hopeful future and her real experiences. Through this contrast, Machado reveals the hopeless abandon of her own situation, so far removed from any comfort. Machado again reflects these ideas in the final passages of the chapter, where she presents the reader again with somewhat optimistic potential for escape:

If you toss back the blankets from your body and hit the floor with both your feet and tear through the house like its Pamplona, and when you get to the driveway your car keys are already in your hand and you drive away with a theatrical squeal of the tires, never to return again, go to page 203 … That’s not how it happened, but okay. We can pretend. I’ll give it to you, just this once.⁶³

In these vivid descriptions, the reader comes imagine Machado’s longing for escape, her desperation for a new reality. Of course, these ideas exist only in dual imaginations of Machado and the reader, and any hope for escape is quickly dismissed. Of note, in these passages Machado’s prose offers more striking descriptions than previously seen in the chapter. These imagined futures, as a result, emerge with a vibrant sense of optimism in contrast to the stripped back despair evident in the simple language that precedes it. Nevertheless, both these brief respites are ultimately burdened by the fact that they exist outside of reality and as such exist chiefly to emphasize the horrific reality of Machado’s life, thereby highlighting the nature of queer abuse.

Regarding the queer women’s archive, this use of second person and its empathetic qualities within Dream House, challenge public perceptions of these queer identities. That is, as the reader assumes the role of a survivor, denying the existence or severity of these abusive relationships becomes nigh impossible. Consequently, the barriers that have historically limited the inclusion of abuse narratives from the queer archive are stripped down by Machado’s profound assertion and her reader’s subsequent empathetic understating of queer abuse. Simply put, I argue that Machado uses the empathetic tools at her disposal to ensure that her testimony will succeed in representing and actively remembering her experiences within the archive.

While the ultimate success of Machado’s endeavors is yet to witnessed given the recent publication of Dream House, this memoir has nevertheless made an impact on the cultural landscape. Dream House has achieved significant critical success in the months and years following its publication, achieving consistently positive reviews globally and being longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. Moreover, Dream House’s public reception has been both widespread and acclaimed: on the review aggregate site Goodreads, Dream House boasts almost 60,000 ratings, with an average score of 4.5/5 and similarly on Amazon reviews, the memoir has been rated almost 1,500 times with a score of 4.6/5. The explicit role of Machado’s experimentations with memoir cannot be understated in this reception, as her complex representation of queer abuse primes Dream House for entry to the wider queer archive, as Machado’s experiences are validated and acknowledged by public and critical audiences. In a review for the New York Times, for example, Parul Sehgal wrote that: “There is something anxious, and very intriguing, in the degree of experimentation in this memoir, in its elaborately titivated sentences, its thicket of citations (New York Times, Nov. 4, 2019).” This critical sentiment is widespread, and Johanna Thomas-Corr of The Guardian concurs, stating that: “It [Dream House] shatters the memoir form … like a dream it shapeshifts. It’s literature as gaslighting. It ensnares and unsettles, tantalizes and wrongfoots (The Guardian, Jan. 5, 2020).” It would seem then, that Machado has begun to stick—her experimental efforts to revitalize notions of partner abuse between and among women within the queer women’s archive recognized within wider cultural spheres.

The Tale Goes Only to Here

In the final pages of Dream House, Machado reconciles her narrating self with “you.” “I wished I had always lived in this body, and you could have lived here with me, and I could have told you it’s alright, it’s going to be alright.”⁶⁴ Machado writes, offering her abused self the comfort she was never afforded in real life. Her two displaced identities finally reunited, her narrative given harmony, Machado ends her story: “my tale goes only to here.”⁶⁵

That this text exists at all is an act in and of itself of unlikely perseverance; lesbian abuse stories are rarely given the space they deserve, and yet Machado has taken that space and used it to heal. More than her own reunification, Machado’s memoir offers itself up for consumption within the queer women’s archive, and in its enthusiastic reception it provides the potential for vital reunderstandings of abuse among women. In this act of taking space, Machado indeed refutes the nostalgic underpinnings of the queer archive, Dream House positions itself away from that longing for an ambiguous queer utopia—there is no utopia, Machado argues, only humanity in all its complexities.

It would be neglectful, however, to suggest that Machado’s narrative has completely unfurled the issues which persist in the queer archive—especially considering the relatively narrow focus of her text. This archive is immense, and the communities which engage with it are global. Yet, Machado’s efforts are not singular. Alison Bechdel’s memoir duology (Fun Home (2005) and Are You My Mother? (2012)), for instance, considers the complexities of queerness outside a nostalgic framework, marrying discussions of queerness, sexual deviance, and family. Additionally, fictional works such as Bernardine Evaristo’s aforementioned Girl, Woman, Other (2019) actively engage with lesbian abuse and other compromised queer positions. It is in this multitude where the possibilities for widescale change emerge, as those like Machado position new queer realities ready for remembrance in the archive. In doing so, questions arise about what the queer archive can be—what it can offer for the communities it serves. Can new identities be forged among these texts? How can the archive detach itself from the grasps of heteronormative considerations of respectability and assimilation? Can the archive become a place not only for queer remembrance, but also for a reckoning?

Disclosure Statement

I declare I have no known competing financial or personal interests that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Isobel Lavers

Isobel Lavers is a PhD Student at the Australian National University, working in the School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics. Her research project considers the significance of mother-daughter relationships in women’s life writing.

Notes

1 Machado, In the Dream House.

2 Rainbow, “Through a Queer Lens,” 184.

3 Machado, In the Dream House, 50.

4 Machado, In the Dream House, 4.

5 Rothe, Popular Trauma Culture, 88.

6 Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings, 242.

7 Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings, 243-4.

8 Assmann, Cultural Memory Studies, 97.

9 Assmann, Cultural Memory Studies, 97.

10 Rigney, “Portable Monuments,” 381.

11 Cifor, “Aligning Bodies,” 769.

12 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 1.

13 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 19.

14 Machado, In the Dream House, 3.

15 Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings, 5.

16 Duggan, “The New Homonormativity,” 2002.

17 Assmann, Cultural Memory Studies, 97-8.

18 Berlant, Queen of America, 36.

19 Bates and Weare, “Female-Perpetrated Intimate Partner Violence,” 583.

20 Capezza et al., “Perceptions of Psychological Abuse,” 1415.

21 Capezza et al., “Perceptions of Psychological Abuse,” 1416.

22 This paper relies on these instances of documentation. Especially significant are essay collections such as Queering Sexual Violence and curated online forums such as “Say it Loud”; however, there are countless other examples of this documentation across published works, online forums, and private social media posts.

23 Patterson, “Introduction,” 21.

24 Rainbow, “Through a Queer Lens,” 184.

25 Davis and Glass, “Reframing the Heteronormative Constructions of Lesbian Partner Violence,” 13.

26 De León, “Closeted Violence,” 36.

27 Dickson, “Queers Don’t Do Sexual Violence, Do We?” 58.

28 Machado, In the Dream House, 87.

29 Machado, In the Dream House, 13; 19; and 24.

30 Capezza et al., “Perceptions of Psychological Abuse,” 1416.

31 Machado, In the Dream House, 143.

32 Machado, In the Dream House, 144.

33 Machado, In the Dream House, 26; and 44.

34 Taylor, “‘Flabulously’ femme,” 460.

35 Carbado, “Colourblind Intersectionality,” 819.

36 Machado, In the Dream House, 129.

37 Machado, In the Dream House, 124.

38 Machado, In the Dream House, 50.

39 Rigney and Erll, “Literature and the Production of Cultural Memory,” 112.

40 Rothe, Popular Trauma Culture, 87-8.

41 Yagoda, Memoir, 9.

42 “Code Switch,” 00:01:05-10.

43 “Code Switch,” 00:01:20-36

44 Poletti, Stories of the Self, 17.

45 Machado, In the Dream House, 129.

46 Machado, In the Dream House, 165.

47 Trahan, “Genre and the Memoir,” 155.

48 Machado, In the Dream House, 166; 258; and 259.

49 Kraus, “Proof of Life,” 248.

50 Machado, In the Dream House, 8.

51 Machado, In the Dream House, 12.

52 Lejeune, On Autobiography, 7.

53 Machado, In the Dream House, 278.

54 Eakin, “Talking About Ourselves,” 100.

55 Gilmore, Tainted Witness, 5.

56 Gilmore, The Limits of Autobiography, 67.

57 Miller, “The Entangled Self,” 544.

58 Miller, “The Entangled Self,” 544.

59 Machado, In the Dream House, 17.

60 Machado, In the Dream House, 189.

61 Machado, In the Dream House, 189; and 202.

62 Machado, In the Dream House, 200.

63 Machado, In the Dream House, 202; and 203.

64 Machado, In the Dream House, 278.

65 Machado, In the Dream House, 278.