The Dream House Lesson Plan

What are characters’ relationships to their pasts? How does the past inform their presents?

All characters’ pasts figure in the presents. It is their historical and personal contexts. For Patricia, that past is sometimes remembered with joy and its attendant pains—e.g., what she felt with the birth and death of their daughter, or her love for her father—feelings that she can summon in their presents. For Richard, the present sometimes overtakes the past, as when he begins to recognize the destruction the developers have done to the barn. By not remembering it, it is as if “all of this took place in his absence, or because of his absence.” He bears no responsibility. For...