In The Dream House, Carmen Maria Machado, 2019
Taken in fragments from “In The Dream House” pp. 201-204:
“Dream House as the Queen and the Squid
Here is a story I learned from a squid:
There was a queen, and she was lonely again…she summoned all of her counselors, who then summoned all of the personages in the land. So she could find a companion of her very own.
…after three days behind closed doors they brought her a squid…She was utterly delighted. The squid was everything she had ever wanted…The squid, in turn, was delighted…
At first, their friendship was a magnificent one…at night they trawled the shadowed halls in search of midnight snacks. It was a companionship defined by its tenderness, and the two were unspeakably happy.
But after a while, the queen grew bored with her companion…and even when the queen and the squid kept each other company, the queen was distant, often cruel…And the queen would scrub whatever surface the squid touched, scolding her for her thoughtless messes. (The squid, as you know, has three hearts, and all of them broke…)
…
Some time later, the squid looked out the window and saw that the queen was cavorting with a bear. The bear was beautiful…When the queen and the bear departed for a picnic, the squid asked a chambermaid to take her into town.
When the queen discovered that her squid was gone, she was enraged…the queen sat down and wrote the squid a letter.
“My dearest creature,” “…I must ask you to keep an open mind…
“…The fact that you refuse to come to my chambers, even just as a companion and not a lover, stills my heart. You seem to believe that the fact that our love has ended means we can never be in proximity to each other, and I beg you to reconsider. I have loved many creatures in my lifetime—a goat, a honeybee, an owl—and despite the fact that our love did not endure, I still see them regularly. We are still friends. Just because I have found happiness in the companionship of a bear does not mean that our time together meant nothing.
“I am sorry that things did not work out between us. I have, as I hope you would agree, behaved honorably and beyond reproach. I am filled with grief and sorrow that you do not believe in amicable partings. I would have thought that you—intelligent creature that you are—would know better.
“The truth is that you have been with me during a very difficult period of my life, and I am sorry that I have not been on my best behavior. But such is love! What we have will transcend this messy business, and we will be in each other’s lives forever. Does that not please you? None of this jealousy or betrayal; just a friendship based on mutual trust. I hope one day we can meet each other in some neutral space, our pain limned with understanding, with all of this behind us…”
…the queen wrote another letter:
“Sweet squid!…I have spent my days mediating, fasting, abstaining from alcohol, and am now realizing how profoundly I failed you…I wish I could suckle your tentacles and kiss your cool mantle…The bear is beautiful and very special in her own right but she is nothing like you…no one will have known happiness like ours…”
…the squid began to construct a reply…
…
“My queen,” the letter said, “your words are very pretty. And yet they cannot obscure the simple fact that I have seen your zoo.”
Here is a story I learned from a bear:
There was a queen, and she was lonely again.”
Machado, Carmen Maria. “Dream House as the Queen and the Squid,” In The Dream House: A Memoir. Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2019, pp. 201-204.
I was going to have a single critique about this memoir (I don’t anymore).
First, about this memoir: Machado courageously recounts her long-term relationship with
“woman from the Dream House” in splices and guides the reader in understanding it from different angles; examples being “Dream House as High Fantasy,” where she writes about feeling intensely loved and desired in the early days of the relationship, as often seen in high fantasy novels, and “Dream House as Soap Opera” where she writes about a melodramatic scene the abusive girlfriend plays out, and even “Dream House as Choose Your Own Adventure,” where she offers a scenario like girlfriend tells you to clean her dishes, and you choose to skip to page 163 if you will do them, or 164 if you won’t. This sequence acted, in my opinion, as some nice comedic relief and an antidote to possible boredom (which I didn’t have, but I could see could have been possible), as it was fun to go through the adventure prompts, and then also to go back to the pages skipped and see Machado teasing that you had no reason to get here but of course you did, you cheater (I laughed).
Although we aren’t totally aware of how much time is passing, it feels like we’re given the right little snapshots of their relationship in that the pacing progresses correctly, or that it feels like a deliberate span of time between each moment. Each splice is its own length—some as long as five pages, some as short as five lines—allowing for us to take the same breaths as Machado. She gives us enough to tell us the setting, the interaction, and the aftermath of it, without overwhelming the reader with too many characters or distractions. Setting in this memoir is huge, as both partners are part of different MFA programs (so fun and niche) and it easily frames the narrative so the reader can see how the dynamic between them changes at different social events. Also, it’s interesting to imagine that both of these women are artistic, intelligent, creative writers.
Machado also does a great job at letting it be known the purpose for writing this memoir. While most snippets are narrative scenes, some are private moments of Machado herself, and some are actually essay-style research to educate the reader on how little is known, and how little is believed, about domestic abuse between queer couples. She says in the Afterward that this is a “very rough, working attempt at a canon ” (245).
Another little piece of this book that I absolutely adore are the constant footnotes to Stith Thompson’s Motif Index of Folk Literature. For example, when the woman in the Dream House tells her “Don’t you ever write about this. Do you fucking understand me?,” she references Thomspon’s folklore index “Type C420.2, Taboo: not to speak about a certain happening” (44). Taboos and other folktale motifs are probably footnoted on about a third of the pages, which, to me, is a reminder that all societies (big, but also small, like the society made in a home between lovers, such as them in the Dream House), are ruled by timeless archetypal constructs that can [maybe] be undone by calling out its parts. I think Machado’s point, though, may be that her time in the Dream House is remembered as a fever dream; some nightmarish fairy tale that haunts her.
My single critique was going to be that we don’t get enough about why she stayed. Machado does not hold back exposing the aggression she received from her partner, but as the narrative becomes more and more intense, there are very few good moments shown to make their love convincing. I even wondered, at a point, why the abuser would stay in the relationship if it felt like she was always dissatisfied—what were they holding onto? Sure, the good moments can be assumed, but I would have liked if we readers could feel the push and pull that is common in abusive relationships, as Machado likely did.
But then, BUT THEN, I got to the story of the queen and the squid, which I couldn’t help but plaster [probably half of] to the top of this review. This splice comes in the fourth quarter of the memoir, after the plot twist, which is that it is the abuser who ultimately ends up cheating, coming back, and leaving again for good.
The single story of the Queen and the Squid filled me with such understanding of the abusive cycle, and such despair at how easily, and with such extreme, abusers can change and make up their minds—which really, in many cases, is the cycle. The story made the love felt between the partners sort of irrelevant because the abuser had become its own muse. In how many ways can the writer use language to manipulate; in how many ways can she outsmart this person she is dumbstruck by; in how many ways can she succeed at the challenge of appearing to take responsibility (which is really only a template, and really easy to emulate). The abuser is an artist—she can play this game creatively, she can exercise her mind here, she can learn about herself, she can do better next time. She can attach and detach at her own whim because she’s an artist—reality is at her command. If she thinks you less than she is, then that’s what you are. God forbid you’re someone who loves her—she changes her aesthetic as soon as she’s mastered it.
Through this anecdote there’s a thread of sympathy that seems to be had by Machado for the woman in the Dream House. She starts the piece by saying the queen was lonely, then later bored, then enraged. She ends it by saying she is lonely again. Isn’t this the experience of us all? This sympathy—or allowing the woman in the Dream House to be related to the average person—isn’t quite shown anywhere else except for “Dream House as Parallel Universe,” 231, where she imagines another reality that could have gone right if only her partner had been “normal,” which I understood as a gracious thing to wonder, as it implies that if her partner had been “normal,” (or, possibly, if her partner had been herself) she wouldn’t have been an abuser.
Anyway, wow what a read, what a story. 5/5. Early on, in Dream House as Exercise in Point Of View (14), Machado notes how her point of view has changed by writing this memoir. Cheers to her for that; for normalizing that truthful writing is, usually, first and foremost, an experience for the writer before an experience for the reader!
Trigger warnings for domestic violence, sexual violence, and demeaning takes on the size of women’s bodies
I would usually add here my favorite quotes, and believe me I’ve got LISTS, but the writing felt so authentic and raw and her own that it is hard for me to pick pretty sentences and highlight them as if that is the greatest takeaway. So I won’t, but take my word for it Carmen Maria Machado can write!
