Representational Intelligibility and the Confines of Framing the Self: Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House

ABSTRACT Carmen Maria Machado’s experimental memoir In the Dream House—a haunting account of domestic abuse between partners who share a gender identity—lays out in both explicit and nontraditional ways the problems faced when representing aspects of experience that are deemed culturally unintelligible. Telling her story in this way opens her narrative up to an understanding that could not be had without the fragmentation of form that constitutes both a rejection of and dependence on conventional representations. This article will analyze Machado’s engagement with the specifically narrative and representational obstacles she faces. Ultimately, this article argues that her story gains its power by speaking to the larger issues of violence outside of stereotypically “accepted” cultural narratives, but also that it is only by refracting her story through these framings that she is able to make her narrative of self cohere out the jumble of forces at play.