Fun Home by Alison Bechdel Essay

The Joy Luck Club is the first novel by Amy Tan, published in 1989. The Joy Luck Club is about a group of Chinese women that share family stories while they play Mahjong. When the founder of the club, Suyuan Woo, died, her daughter June replaced her place in the meetings. In her first meeting, she finds out that her lost twin sisters were alive in China. Before the death of Suyuan, the other members of the club located the address of June’s half-sisters. After that, they send June to tell her half-sisters about her mother’s life. In our lives there are events, and situations that mark our existence and somehow determine our life. In this novel, it shows how four mothers and their daughters were impacted by their tradition and beliefs. In the traditional Asian family, parents define the law and the children are expected to follow their requests and demands; respect for one’s parents and elders is critically important. Traditions are very important because they allow us to remember the beliefs that marked a whole culture.

- Characters: The main character is developed by what type of book the author is writing. My main character Sugar Mae Cole was developed because of the way she acts toward different characters in the book. And by her personality and sugars personality is sweet kinda like her name and she is polite. She is always trying to brighten the other characters up especially her mom Reba. She has a different personality that any of the other characters and connects with them in a different way that is what makes her the main character. she is cautious and also believes in people and things like her mom. Her mom Reba is about to give up but Sugar still believes in her and she believes she and her Mom will get a home and things will

Over time, Frank’s journey to rescue his debilitated sister, the siblings’ dependence on each other becomes more evident. Frank and Cee Money, the protagonists of Toni Morrison’s Home, exemplify this powerful need, a need that at times flirts with greed. The reason Frank feels so responsible for Cee is due to the fact while growing up they had neglectful parents as well as an abusive grandmother, his failed relationship with Lily, and lastly him facing his inner turmoil due to his actions in Korea. Toni Morrison states numerous times in the text, how Frank would do anything for Cee. Frank recalls, “Only my sister in trouble could force me to even think about going in that direction”

Traditions, heritage and culture are three of the most important aspects of Chinese culture. Passed down from mother to daughter, these traditions are expected to carry on for years to come. In Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, daughters Waverly, Lena, Rose and June thoughts about their culture are congested by Americanization while on their quests towards self-actualization. Each daughter struggles to find balance between Chinese heritage and American values through marriage and professional careers.

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is an autobiography written by Alison Bechdel. The graphic novel takes its readers through Alison Bechdel’s childhood using engaging diction and detailed drawings. One of the big themes of Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is the discovery of one’s sexual orientation. Over the course of her life, Alison Bechdel eventually comes to the realization that she is a lesbian. Ultimately, Alison Bechdel uses this novel to recount her experience of events that helped to shape her personal identity, which resulted in a transformation of the way she sees herself. In the end, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is a wonderful narrative that shows its readers the complexity of personal identity, and how things like love, the values of

On the surface, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home seems simply to be a memoir of her journey towards discovering her own identity, and in the process, uncovering her father’s. However, the novel is far more complex. The graphic novel is not linear in the least, and mimics memory as it moves backwards and forwards in time, or returns to specific situations repeatedly. This is layered with the numerous references to previous literary texts in an interesting manner; combined, it provides emotional and informative layers to the novel. Bechdel starts to especially question binaries and pushes the boundaries of what it means to be a female and male in a relatively patriarchal society with no middle ground around the rules; as the novel shows, this affects not only Bechdel’s own pursuit towards her identity but has a significant, and ultimately fatal, impact on her father, Bruce.

In Alison Bechdel 's Fun Home, there is a focus on a sculpted perception of gender roles produced by society and a great emphasis on how Bruce and Alison challenge these strict gender specific characteristics. Through Bruce’s femininity and Alison’s masculinity along with their homosexuality, they are able to go against the norms and the collection of rules set by society. It is also through their struggle with gender roles that one is able to understand their sexual orientation. Although Bruce and Alison seem fairly different from one another, there are elements that pull them closer together revealing their similarities.

Alison Bechdel’s memoir, Fun Home, is a compelling narrative in which Bechdel takes the reader through her life and gives insight into her relationship and the complex lifestyle her closeted homosexual father, Bruce Bechdel. However, her serious topic is told through the narrative of comics, images that literally put the readers into the moments of her life with her. Even though, the graphic images provide visual insight, Bechdel makes a conscious decision to include a multitude of literary allusions because, as Bechdel describes, “I employ these allusions to James and Fitzgerald not only as descriptive devices, but because my parent’s are most real to me in fictional terms.” (Bechdel, Page 67) Her continued use of literary allusions can be seen as an insight to her life. The particular works of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Oscar Wilde’s plays An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Ernest because of their content concerning facades and the lengths one person goes through to keep a part of their identity or life a secret. TRANSITION Bruce Bechdel was the master of secrecy, hiding a part of his sexuality behind his heterosexual marriage in order to keep his idea of an acceptable livelihood. It is clear that Bruce Bechdel had a few infidelities with males throughout Bechdel’s childhood, infidelities that she did not know until later in life. This creates a whole new perceptive for Bechdel. The father who she thought as a controlling, stern, literary fein

Cheap Amusements by Kathy Peiss is about the women of the early 20th century and the roles of the women in the work place along with their leisure time in New York City. The novel covers several key aspects of the way women changed their roles in the work place specifically factories during this time period and the social injustice that women faced when it came to free time. It dives into the amusement that women would seek whether they were high class or middle class. It contrasts the differences between men and women in the social aspect of life after work as well. Whether that was the men at the bars or country clubs with other women while the women would enjoy going to the park or a dancing halls. It all truly depended on the discretionary income that families would bring in. While the book is not the most interesting book I have ever read it still hold true to do. It is also surprising that this time period is not even over 100 years ago, yet it feels as if it was 300 years ago with how the times have changed. Kathy has a take on women in society in a whole new light that changes people thoughts and ideas of what truly went on during this period.

Part graphic memoir and part psychoanalytical study, Alison Bechdel’s, Fun Home, is a charming story about a girl’s search for identity within an unconventional family. The novel style autobiography frames Alison’s childhood and adolescence as she struggles with themes of sexual confusion, gender identity, and convoluted family dynamics. These ideas are explored through the examination of Alison’s relationship with her father, and their shared passion for literature.

Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, documents the author's discovery of her own and her father's homosexuality. The book touches upon many themes, including, but not limited to, the following: sexual orientation, family relationships, and suicide. Unlike most autobiographical works, Bechdel uses the comics graphic medium to tell her story. By close-reading or carefully analyzing pages fourteen through seventeen in Fun Home one can get a better understanding of how a Bechdel employs words and graphic devices to render specific events. One can also see how the specific content of the pages thematically connects to the book as a whole. As we will see, this portion of the book echoes the strained relationship

In the prologue, Audre describes her “home” as being a place that could only be from a fairy tale (enchanted even). This home is somewhere Lorde never visited or never observed. She only knows this extraordinary place through her mother’s stories. As Audre grows older, “home” is something she does not have in life. She even expresses that the extraordinary place (Carriacou) from her mother’s stories in no longer the home, she longed for it to be (Zami 256). Even though her home was in Harlem, New York, Stamford, and Cuernavaca, they never felt like home. Throughout the novel, it appears that Carriacou helped Audre deal with the racist society. She finally accepts her character in society as a black lesbian. She in time grows to admit that

Cheap Amusements, written by Kathy Peiss describes the cultural and societal changes that affected lower to lower middle class working women at the turn of the last century. Kathy Peiss organizes these changes in multiple chapters and paragraphs that each focus on the separate changes in womens recreation or explaining the state of womens recreations before, during, and after this time period. This treatise explains the changes of working womens leisure at the turn of the last century and helps to explain how the modern culture of heterosocial relationships in the workplace and recreation between men and women came into being.

Fun Home is a retelling of Alison Bechdel’s life through the lens of her relationship with her father. However, because of what she considers to have been his suicide, Alison is left with an incomplete picture of who he was in life. By calling Fun Home an autobiography, Bechdel enters an autobiographical pact with the reader that ensures that what Bechdel is telling us is the truth. However, elements out of her control leave Bechdel unable to provide certain objective facts necessary to her narrative. As an attempt to remedy these absences and in turn maintain the validity of her story, Bechdel uses intertextuality to fill in the gaps of in her retelling. By overlaying masterplots of fictional narratives over her own, the reader is able to get at an understanding of the kind of person Alison’s father was. In this way Bechdel is able to reveal things about her father that she can 't prove to be true, but are reflective enough of his life to become true.

The book “Fun Home: A FAMILY TRAGICOMIC” is a captivating autobiography that entertains readers as well as engages audiences. The content provided in the book challenges views on normative stereotypes while offering a unique perspective. The book impresses upon readers a stir of emotions while conveying messages effortlessly. The memoir focuses upon uncomfortable subjects such as death, homosexuality, and coming of age offering a candid look into aspects of the Bechdel’s life. The book is an interesting read, the subject matter produced is relatable to readers and unique in its format. Additionally, the content produced in the book relies on her relationship with her father, which aids in entertaining audiences because of their strange kinship.