DreamHouse as Rhetorical Questions

Throughout Carmen Machado’s In the DreamHouse, she sifts through the history of her abusive relationship with an unassuming, small-statured, blonde who we come to know as Girl in the Dream House. She and Machado spend time early in their relationship squinting through the haze of love and lust, falling between their beds and road trips between their respective homes. Yet, as their relationship settles in, we see glimpses of aggression coming from Girl in the Dream House that taint their relationship. As Carmen tells their story through various short chapters written in different styles a common literary device sticks out. Machado’s use of the rhetorical question punctuates the end of many tumultuous chapters, posing these questions to the audience to elicit different emotional responses. These questions function as accusations, as pleas, and as moments for intimacy. These different styles play into each other and bring together a cohesive humanizing feeling.

Machado’s use of questions exhibits a certain level of confidence in her experience and recognizes that she does not have the answers to understand all that has happened to her. She urges the audience to look at the ways in which young women are taught to look for red flags in their relationships and comments that queer women are not taught how abuse looks in WLW relationships. Instead of filling in her narrative with things she learned in hindsight, Machado lives in the grey area by asking questions to the audience and to herself throughout.

Rhetorical Questions as Accusations

“If a tree falls in the woods and pins a wood thrush to the earth, and she shrieks and shrieks, but no one hears her, did she make a sound? Did she suffer? Who’s to say?” (In the Dream House, 226)

Some of the questions that wrap up chapters directly look to the audience as a culprit. The series of questions above are asked after Machado is no longer speaking to Girl in the Dream House and is trying to tell others about her experience within her relationship. There is a large amount of doubt about the severity of the abuse and this causes frustration and anger that comes out through the questions. These do not directly call out the audience for being complicit but urges the audience to look for times in their life where they may have acted similarly in response to situations that they did not understand.

Rhetorical Questions as Moments for Intimacy

Machado reaches out to the audience through seemingly tangential asides that humanize her after long moments when she functions as a “character”. We can see this following Girl in the Dream House’s drunken verbal abuse as Machado delves into her following day on her trip back home, her conversation with a TSA agent, her melting into a puddle of tears, and ultimately pulling herself back together to brush off the treatment. The next chapter (Dreamhouse as Demonic Possession) ends with a question laced with meaning, “What is lurking inside?” (In the Dream House, 133). These moments of connection between chapters are not coincidental, they function in tandem with each other and guide the reader to understand the connections between Girl in the Dream House and the host of a demon. Ending connected chapters with a question that Machado is asking but also trying to avoid elicits the feeling that she is worried to ask directly if we see this sign or feel this feeling. This hesitance conveys a feeling of closeness, like how kids say, “My friend was wondering if….” when they’re nervous to ask a question, rather than being up front.

I have mentioned this thread in autobiographical work before, but when looking at the narrated “I” versus the historical “I”, there is an impulse to refer to them differently. By that I mean that the narrated “I”, the character that is written by the author, is more comfortably referred to by their first name, for example - Carmen. On the other hand, the historical “I” has the knowledge that the narrated “I” does not, giving it the wisdom that comes with knowing how the story plays out. That relationship is what I mean when saying that Machado is switching between her character (Carmen, the narrated “I”) and herself (Machado, the historical “I”).

Rhetorical Questions as Desperation

“Instead, you say: Why don’t you understand? Don’t you understand? You do understand? Then what don’t I understand?” (In the Dream House, 111).

Questions also show the uneasiness between the author and the actions taking place. For Machado, these questions are often present after conflict and/or manipulation. But what I found really interesting was her consistent integration of how these experiences were so recognizable but also so uniquely queer due to an outsider’s interpretation of their relationship. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives discusses the nature of sexual narratives (be that romantic, physical, emotional, platonic, etc.) and while Machado’s memoir is not a coming-out story, there is still a complicated and nuanced relationship that the Carmen is coming to terms with. This genre of autobiography “aim[s] to complicate identifications and the directions of desire by unfixing the alignment of body, desire, and the performance of identity” (Reading Autobiography, 153). Machado recognizes instances in which her fixed understanding of her body and her identity did not allow for easy understanding. This happened long before Girl in the Dream House but is pointed out well in “DreamHouse as Ambiguity” as Machado discusses the lack of context for abused women in relationships. There is not a social dialogue for asking and answering these questions about harm in queer relationships because of the strict understanding of what a relationship, especially an abusive relationship, looks like.

Rather, queer people are tossed into a culture that is strongly heteronormative where they are urged to find answers on their own. Answers that are often very hard to find. Machado exemplifies this, “When I thought about her, I squirmed, tormented. What did it mean” (In the Dream House, 139)? But we can see that Machado isn’t given a way to recognize that this behavior is alarming, noting the chapter where Girl in the Dream House gets aggressive when at the bar with her friends, "Isn’t this funny? This is funny! It’s so funny! It could be funny! One day this will be funny! Won’t it?”

This complicated and challenging journey to understanding is wrapped up when Machado’s historical “I” looks towards the reader and says, with great implication, “But then, I didn't know what it meant to be afraid of another woman. Do you see now? Do you understand?” (In the Dream House, 139)

To read more from Carmen Machado, check out her website.