Novel Thoughts: What Work Surprised Your Expectations?
In this week’s edition of Novel Thoughts, Assistant Editor Lu Humbug delves into the works that played on genre expectations of mechanics and structure to elevate the experience and elicit unexpected, but welcome trains of thought in his reading of Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House.
The Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index is a catalog of folklore story types. It was first developed by folklore scholar Antti Aarne in 1910, with expansions and revisions first by Stith Thompson in 1928 & 1961 and then by Hans-Jörg Uther in 2004. Within the ATU Index, hundreds of Eurasian and North American folklore are organized by their similar arcs: The Boy Steals Ogre’s Treasure, The Animal Bride, Friends in Life and Death, et cetera. These are story shapes, repeated with differing aspects, across many cultures; in comparative folklore study, this is an essential tool.
The Thompson Motif-Index of Folk-Literature is a six volume catalog of discrete, precise elements of folklore, developed by Stith Thompson first in 1936 and then revised in 1958. Used in tandem with the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index, the Thompson Motif-Index is the other essential folklorist tool. It takes the smaller building blocks of folk tales as its focus: Man in the Moon, Ogres, the Wild Hunt, specific tests, types of magic objects. To understand the mercurial and strange world of folktales, with their just-so magic and emotion-spurred consequences, one must see the forest and the trees.
Why have we always made folklore? That’s an impossible question to answer fully, but we can take a crack at small slivers of it. For my purposes, I’d like to highlight the historical tendency for folk tales to reflect so much of our own experiences. This is not some secret reading either; we all know fairy tales and myths are partly morality plays, propagating social morays and lines to not cross, and partly reflections of human foibles. The gods of old pantheons were messy, fallible, constantly acting like irascible siblings to each other (which they often were). Heroes of folklore make human mistakes and pay restitution in preternatural ways. We humans were the ones writing and telling the stories, after all.
Sometimes, though, we experience our own personal folklore. We find ourselves living through something extraordinary and coming out on the other side with a muddy idea of the how, the why, and the what next. This destabilizing experience is not inherently bad, but unfortunately and relevantly here, it often is. The dark forest full of witches and ogres does not have to be literal; far more often, it is the metaphorical kind of dark forest that does the most harm.
Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House is a memoir about abuse. It is, more specifically, a memoir about abuse within a lesbian relationship. Machado makes sure to remind us of this many times, that this is a story set within a minority of a minority. There is scant writing on abuse in lesbian relationships, though hearteningly there is still some. This is not the first time this specific type of story is being told, but with so little around otherwise, the rep sweats come quick and fast. More than once, Machado wrestles with this both for herself and the Woman in the Dream House (Machado’s nom de guerre for her abuser). “For fuck’s sake, stop making us look bad,” Machado wishes she’d said to the Woman, wanting her to not be a statistic for the lunatic lesbian trope. More than once, Machado highlights this feeling of betrayal, not just of their relationship but to queerness as a whole. You are making us (lesbians, queer people, women) look bad.
Machado turns this on herself in more oblique ways, ways that cast discomforting shadows in improper directions. In a section called ‘Dream House as Bluebeard’, Machado imagines the path the wife of Bluebeard would have trod had she obeyed and not put the key in the door to the room of death. How, truly, both the wife and Machado survived their Bluebeard, but how easy the other path of training and acquiescence could have been, too. You, too, could be the frog slowly boiled; also folklore, also not real, and yet poignant. You, too, could become a story more fiction than fact, and you wouldn’t even know it until it was too late. Until you were boiled alive.
Abuse specifically, and trauma broadly, often come with a hefty amount of disbelief. There is external disbelief: the trauma-inflicter, family, friends, doctors who do not believe you, trust you, support you, or help you. The way abusers specifically isolate their victims from all other support networks makes this inevitable, because at that point there is only one person to stabilize your truth, and it’s a person who wants you to not believe. This only exacerbates a growing internal disbelief: maybe all this is correct. Maybe this terrible thing happening to you is, in fact, an appropriate response to your own failure. It becomes bleakly easy to start believing the most noxious things about yourself when there is no one around to say otherwise. Repetition legitimizes.
Early in the memoir, in the section ‘Dream House as Omen’, the Woman’s ferality exposes itself for the first time. She berates Machado for going incommunicado for several hours, and not even Machado explaining she was helping someone in a crisis can assuage the Woman’s anger. Near the end of this section, as the explosion is only just in the rear view mirror, the Woman turns to Machado and hisses in her ear: “You’re not allowed to write about this. Don’t you ever write about this. Do you fucking understand me?” There’s a footnote number attached to the end of this, and it cracks my ribs when I read “Taboo: not to speak about a certain happening”. In that moment, Machado is cursed. She has lost her tongue, like Ariel, but there is no guarantee Machado will turn into a soul and sea foam by the end.
There’s just one big caveat to it all: this abuse is real.
Here is the true core of In the Dream House and, to me, the part that shocked me more than any gut-wrenching event of domestic violence: abuse is, to many people, modern folklore. Look to Me Too and the regular refrain of ‘believe women’. The external disbelief is there, constantly shouting back at victims who need support and justice. Whether admonished for dressing too provocatively, not being ‘self-aware’ enough around certain powerful men, or merely for complaining about something that ‘happens all the time’, women’s actual stories are treated like myth, like scary stories to tell around a campfire. Now, make that a queer woman and you’ve doubled down on the disbelief, injecting nearly a century of harmful lesbian tropes into an already toxic stew.
This fairy story treatment of real, material harm is structural, too (as if we had any doubt). Machado sums this up in eight words in ‘Dream House as Epiphany’: most types of domestic abuse are completely legal. What protections there are overwhelmingly deal with heterosexual violence, explicitly male-on-female. Machado extracts several historical records relating to lesbian domestic violence where the courts don’t even believe such violence can happen because there is no penetrator. Compounding that is that emotional and mental violence, being ‘invisible’ violences (in that they do not leave tangible evidence), rarely are treated with the same seriousness as physical counterparts.
Even in writing this memoir, Machado understands that there’s an unreality to her story no matter what she does. In writing it for public consumption, she must find a way to narrativize something that does not inherently have a narrative. Trauma is not prestige television where stories have reasons for happening. Trauma is when something terrible happens to you and you cannot understand why. Even to tell one’s own story you have to satisfy the audience, Machado posits implicitly. This is likely how she came to land on such a fractured, evocative, truth-be-damned recounting of her experience. There’s chronology, but no neat structure of escalation, climax, and denouement. There is no inventive planning for a flight or a final confrontation. There is just a day where Machado finally hits escape velocity and is grabbed by the gravity wells of her friends, away from the Woman in the Dream House. No one got pushed into an oven, or made to dance in red hot shoes, or had their eyes pecked out by birds. There is no satisfying fanfare to the end of an abusive relationship, just the yawning void one has to construct themselves back up in.
In the Dream House is a memoir, but it is also a horror story. Are any of us able to truly perform ‘proper’ victimhood? What would that even mean? The unreality of abuse is not from the event itself but from all the artifice built around it, the search for meaning and the equivocating of the abuser merely walls to contain messy, uncomfortable truth. Who builds these walls vary, but often it is manifold actors. Escape seems so futile, when the walls of the Dream House reach up to heaven and down to the molten core. Yet, anything constructed can be deconstructed. Anything built can be unbuilt. The way to defeat the monster is to pull open every curtain and burn it with sunlight. Telling these stories, no matter how burdened by our context, is important because the more we tell them the less they can be denied. Repetition legitimizes.
