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When Women Abuse Other Women
On Carmen Maria Machado’s “In the Dream House”
Machado’s literary memoir In the Dream House is her account of domestic abuse in a lesbian relationship. It subverts the archival silence on women abusing other women — a stigma ensuring that victims of intra-lesbian abuse hardly ever speak up about their experiences. If anywhere, their accounts are to be found in the margins and the lacunae of the archive, in the silences of literature.
The literary canon — the archive — is controlled by the “norm” — white, heterosexual men. As Carmen Maria Machado points out, the word “archive” stems from the Old Greek and means “the house of the ruler”[1]: traditionally it has been the elite — the old, white, straight men — who would decide which narratives will go down in history and which will fall into oblivion. These men are not only the literal “masters of the house” but also the masters of the archive.
“The abused woman has certainly been around as long as human beings have been capable of psychological manipulation and interpersonal violence, but as a generally understood concept it — and she — did not exist until about fifty years ago.”[2]
As a lesbian abused by another woman, Machado has not only the “abused woman” blanks to fill but also the “queer abused woman” silences to break. Her quest is…
