This essay explores the value placed on the past by different characters, namely Looksmart, Patricia and Beauty. It analyses the importance of acknowledging the past in order for reconciliation and growth. It has been marked and received an A plus.
“What are we saying? That the past is unimportant?” p. 70
Discuss how the importance of the past is a relative and personal experience and not a
collective experience.
Each of the characters in The Dream House have a unique opinion of the past, and each
have been affected by the past in different ways, demonstrating the subjectivity of the past.
While most of Looksmart’s adulthood has been shaped by events of the past, Patricia
regards the past as unimportant and irrelevant. Only when Patricia and Looksmart are able
to discuss the past, allowing them both to reconsider the events of Grace’s death, are they
able to partially reconcile and begin to look towards the future.
Looksmart is haunted by the past, especially by Grace’s death. He “has never really left”
the farm as all his actions and thoughts are governed by the effects of watching Grace die.
Although he appears to have created a family and a life for himself that is completely
separate from that day, he admits that all his relationships have suffered as a result of the
past. His feelings of hate, fear and grief have become “a wound, descending into him like a
deep well” and he struggles to love his wife fully, because of his inability to separate the
past and the present. This stems from the trauma of seeing Grace and the dog as a “double
beast,” as his love for Grace and fear of the dog have become intertwined: he “can no
longer separate them”. Consequently, Looksmart associates love with fear, violence and
death, and so he struggles to forge honest, passionate relationships. Looksmart’s belief in
the importance of the past is what leads him to visit Dwaleni again, to force Patricia to
confront the past, so that she will “be sorry” about her actions. While he does not know
what Beauty knows about Grace and Richard, he believes that he knows the complete truth
about Grace’s death and wants to ensure that Patricia too is told “the truth” so that she can
apologise and take responsibility for her involvement in it.
In contrast to Looksmart, Patricia believes that the past “doesn’t amount to much in the
end” and is not worth examining. Her trust in Richard’s version of Grace’s story means that,
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