Themes of Family and Identity in Dream Homes

In Dream Homes, by Joyce Zonana, the themes of "family" and "identity" kept reoccurring. Throughout the book, Joyce recounted how hard she tried to break away from her mother's identity and find her own. But at the same time, she dug deeper into her family's history and culture to learn more about herself in that way as well. So, the entire book seemed to be a struggle between her need to be her own individual person and her need to belong to a family, to embrace the culture she barely knew.

On page 61, she told the reader how she struggled with her physical identity, trying to change her look so that she would no longer resemble her mother, even though their similarity had previously been a comfort to her. "I worked to obscure the obvious, letting my hair grow long, hiding my hips, even dreaming of a nose job. In public, I pretended to be someone else, not at all my mother's daughter. But in my earlioest years, it was gratifying to find myself reflected, the solidarity of my mother's body helping to assure me of the reality of my own."

She also struggled with her religious and cultural identity. On page 107, she surmised that the Jews of Egypt must have also had trouble determining their identity. "Were they Egyptians first, inextricably linked to their birthplace, the land where they had prospered and build comfortable lives? Or were they primarily Jews, bound to be loyal to the new Jewish homeland being established across the Sinai Peninsula?" Zonana also mentioned that her mother felt that it was their "Frenchness" that set them apart from everyone else in America...not their Jewish qualities, not their Egyptian qualities, but their French qualities. On page 116, she explained that "it was this sense of French bourgeois decency that sustained" her mother.

Another big piece of Joyce Zonana's identity turned out to be her sexuality. For more than twenty years, she only dated women. And with joining the homosexual minority, she also found another type of family: gay friends, collegues, and students. And when she ended her relationship with Kay (a woman) and slept with Bernard (a man), she felt that she was betraying that family. That action also tore at her identity. On page 186, she wrote that "Sleeping with a man after more than twenty years with women was harder to come to terms with than coming out as a lesbian had been."

Throughout Dream Homes, Zonana took the reader from Egypt to New York, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and back again to Egypt. Through her physical journey, she also goes through an internal journey to find herself and her place in the world, as well as to understand her family, their reasons for living and acting the way they did, and their place in culture and history.