Dream House as Perpetuity in Physical Linguistics
Dream House as Perpetuity in Physical Linguistics 3 May, 2025 Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir titled In the Dream House is without a doubt a masterpiece in experimentation of form. Spanning 144 mini-chapters, the memoir illustrates the author’s unsung story of domestic abuse within a queer relationship. One of the questions at the heart of the memoir is the very same many folks ask victims of abuse: “why did you not leave sooner?”. Machado’s story reveals the cyclical nature of abuse that perpetuates it into an all-encompassing, time-spanning experience. Additionally, the book seeks to bring awareness to the invisibility of queer domestic abuse (and emotional abuse at large) by bringing the reader into the story and universalizing it. How Machado manages to accomplish these goals is—whether intentionally or not—partly due to her manipulation of Einstein’s theory of special relativity alongside Saussurean linguistics. ...