Summary
The Dream House book analysis and summary
Includes: - In depth plot summary on the book overall - Character analysis - Discussion of themes within the book - Valuable quotes from many characters
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The Dream House - Craig HigginsonSetting
- Idyllic landscape: a safe, nurturing, valued space
- A conservative, retrospective genre.
- Dwaleni is rocky, wet, poor farming land: barren place permeated by unhappiness and failure.
- Patricia has always valued the Durban house as her 'dream house'.
- The family farm owned/ruled by a dominant patriarchal figure who has always presided over a successful rural
enterprise which will be a generous inheritance
- The farm as a place of tradition and simplicity while the city is a place of progress and immorality.
- White landowners and black labourers with no access to power or land - history of black dispossession not
acknowledged.
- Dogs protect white people and property - they defend white power and inequality.
- The land bought by a company which will protect privilege and maintain exclusion.
- Primary access of hierarchy is class not race.
Narrative style
- The perspective moves from one character to another (showing the perspective of a different character)
- The chapters are short and sometimes the new chapter begins with the end of the previous chapter but from the
point of view of a different character (attached 3d person)
- Novel doesn’t have a single authorial narrator with full authority over what happens
- Untranslated use of isiZulu - reminds us that the black characters are made to live much of their lives in English
(not their language) - constant psychic burden and social disadvantage
Themes
● THE SHADOW OF THE PAST
○ How the past impacts - personal and national level.
○ Against the backdrop of a country still in a state of transition, the personal struggles of the main
characters of the novel take on greater significance.
○ Each of them is, in some way, trying to discard the burdens of the past and make a fresh start, but is this
possible, when they don’t truly understand those burdens?
○ Will confronting the truth of the past mean that they can free themselves of hatred? Or are the wrongs of
the past too indelibly etched on their characters to be erased?
○ “White guilt” is the individual or collective guilt felt by some white people for harm resulting from racist
treatment of ethnic minorities by other white people
○ Tensions between black and white in South Africa - nature of the privileged white person who is oblivious
to their own faulty value system and black people such as Beauty and Bheki are themselves oblivious to
what is acceptable treatment
● MEMORY AND TRUTH
○ The unreliable nature of memory is poignantly explored through Richard’s suffering from an advanced
stage of dementia - captures his sense of disorientation, frustration and fear as he roams through the
farmlands, while
○ Richard is not the only character whose memory is not to be trusted: each of the characters are, in
○ their own ways, trying to find the truth of their collective past, but the ‘truth’, it turns out, will not be the
same for each of them.
○ Simply suggesting how complicated and difficult this process of discovery can be.
○ The events have a slightly different meaning for everyone because each
○ witness to it is in a different place, not just physically, but psychologically, emotionally,
○ socially.
, ● LOSS AND DISAPPOINTMENT
○ An unfulfilling marriage, a stillborn child, an unrequited love, a vicious assault and a brutal murder - these
are just some of the sources of loss, pain and disappointment in the lives of the characters
○ As these characters trawl through the past and, quite literally, unearth the bones from long-forgotten
graves, they are forced to examine how these past pains and losses have shaped the people they have
since become
● RETRIBUTION AND FORGIVENESS
○ An unspoken need for forgiveness haunts the characters as they are forced to confront
○ the distressing revelations from the past. For hatred and resentment to be released,
○ pardon must be sought, even from those who are in no position to grant it.
● IDENTITY,BELONGING, HOME
○ Both the black characters and the white characters find themselves in a new landscape and they are
forced to re-evaluate their identities and their roles and their relationships.
○ This new landscape consists not only of the ‘new’ South Africa, but also at a personal level of different
stages of life.
○ This is a prevalent theme in the new South Africa – to whom do we all now belong? Are we one rainbow
nation or should we still operate within our cultural comforts and traditions? How much of our past do we
carry forward with us, what should we leave behind?
● AN IMBALANCE OF POWER
○ Disturbing nature of the relationship between Beauty and Richard
○ Despite the fact that Richard is practically an invalid, the balance of power between them is still very
much skewed in his favour.
○ Even in his advanced stage of dementia, he does not let Beauty forget that he is the one in charge. This
makes the intimate tasks that Beauty has to perform for him all the more demeaning.
○ It is interesting that she chooses to speak Zulu to him when they are alone. Speaking her own language
‘is so much easier for her’ (pg15), something that feels natural and even beautiful.
○ Reverting to Zulu could be viewed as her reclaiming some of the power of which Richard has robbed her,
putting them on a more equal footing, in a sense. It might also be a means of putting herself at ease in his
company, and protecting herself from the fear that he instils in her.
● A STRAINED INTIMACY
○ Despite the fact that Patricia and John have been having an affair for more than three decades, there is
an oddly formal, even strained quality about their relationship
○ Their final conversation was oddly stilted and guarded. Patricia is more emotionally invested in the
relationship than John. She describes him as having the tendency to ‘withhold himself’ (p.19) at important
moments and, certainly, he appears to be the one who dictates the terms of their relationship.
○ It is not only Patricia from whom he holds himself back emotionally, but also his deceased wife, children,
colleagues and pupils. Patricia ‘reflects sadly’ (p.19) that his taciturn nature and vanity have meant that he
is very much alone in his old age.
● CAST-OFFS AND CASTAWAYS
○ Beauty, Bheki and the other farm workers are regarded as second-class citizens on the farm
○ Beauty is the recipient of old and broken things that Patricia no longer wants: broken tape decks,
smashed picture frames, old clothes, things that Patricia considers as rubbish
○ She routinely eats her lunch on a ‘mangled wire cage for transporting chickens as her seat’ (pg23)
○ Her rondavel, along with those of the other farm workers, was demolished before they had even moved
out, forcing them to live in half-finished houses with no doors, windows, or basic amenities like water or
electricity
○ Having ‘a roof over her head that she can call her own’ (pg24) symbolises a kind of dignity that Beauty
craves, but that she does not currently have
○ It is in this lack of dignity, and the unwittingly condescending treatment meted out by Patricia, that the
strains of race and class relations begin to show.
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