In the Dream House

Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir begins, “I never read prologues” (3). She reasons that paratextual material such as prologues, which can be read independently of the main text or not at all, are a potential space for authors to hide information about the main text. She questions why all material shouldn’t be included in the main text if it is intended to be read.

Despite being suspicious of most prologues’ intentions, Machado includes a prologue in In the Dream House. She begins by describing theorist Saidiya Hartman’s essay “Venus in Two Acts,” which concerns a theory of “archival silence” for the groups of people excluded from the white cultural narrative. The theory, however, applies to other marginalized groups, such as anyone who is not heterosexual, male, or cisgender; for millennia, these groups’ histories have been dismissed, distorted, or destroyed by various societal factors—including historians and academics—and these stories often go unexpressed altogether. To that extent, these groups lack a history of themselves. Their experiences, and even their identities, continually undergo erasure from cultural memory and awareness:

What is placed in or left out of the archive is a political act, dictated by the archivist and the political

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