Alison Bechdel's Fun Home : A Family Tragicomic

As I read Fun Home, often reading chapters more than once, I had quite a few questions floating around inside my head. Alison Bechdel dedicates her memoir to “Mom, Christian, and John. We did have a lot of fun, in spite of everything”. I found it odd that she didn’t include her father in this as well. After all, without her father, she would not have had much of a story.

In Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, we learn about Bechdel’s parents, Helen and Bruce, and their role in her early life. Specifically, Bechdel constructs a narrative around her father’s death, allegedly a suicide. Young Bechdel lives in Pennsylvania with her parents and her two brothers. Her parents had been living in Europe, where they met, but Bruce was forced to come home after his father’s death to take over the family business – a funeral home (which the children often call the “fun home”). Alison’s father meticulously decorates and improves their old Gothic revival home.

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is a graphic novel that recounts different occurrences in Alison Bechdel's life. The most prominent story is of Bechdel’s coming out; the second is surrounding her father's death. Bechdel uses literary references, especially from Homer’s Odyssey and Joyce’s Ulysses, throughout her comic to describe her own journey, her father and her relationship with him. Through the narratives in the graphic novel, it can be seen that the Bechdel household is not mad but rather holds a disturbed family dynamic. Sigmund Freud explains the process and symptoms of melancholy. He describes it as a reaction to a loss of an ideal kind, and in reaction they lose interest of the outside world, capacity to love, etc (244,248). Through his article, it is clear that melancholy has taken over the Bechdel household, especially in Bruce Bechdel’s case. Bruce is overcome with shame because of his homosexuality and becomes melancholic and creates distractions for himself within his life. He elaborately decorates his home to create a facade. Bechdel calls him a “skillful artificer” (7); he is good at making an attractive exterior.

Alison Bechdel, a literary and queer theorist herself who would go on to coin the Bechdel test, grew up in close proximity to theory. In a family of academics, with her teacher father and former actress mother, Bechdel was always surrounded by literature, so when it comes to self discovery of her sexuality, it’s no surprise that she turns to the literary realm, from Rubyfruit Jungle to the Oxford English Dictionary, to understand herself. Bechdel’s first graphic memoir, Fun Home, examines her upbringing in a funeral home with her cold mother and her closeted bisexual father, who commits suicide soon after Bechdel leaves for college. It engages in frequent literary and theory illusions, beginning from the mention of Icarian Games on the very first page. While Bechdel’s work seems like it could be easily situated in structuralist theory, the work easily lends itself to a multiplicity of meanings, an inherent feature of deconstruction work that allows readers to veer into feminist theory, queer theory, or even Marxist theory. Just as Bechdel rewrites and reframes the events of her formative years multiple times throughout the novel, the novel particularly lends itself to structuralist, deconstruction, queer, and feminist theory, which all lead to particularly illuminating readings that compliment each other.

The graphic memoir Fun Home and the short film Pariah both contribute to a conversation on intersectional politics regarding respectability and normativity. The Bechdel family in Fun Home maintain a perfectly respectable familial façade to the external world even as the complications of Bruce Bechdel’s sexual appetites and inclinations threaten to tear the family apart internally. Likewise, Alike’s gender identity and sexuality creates a conflict in her family as they try to uphold middle-class respectability. In both contexts, respectability intersects with normativity and performance of normativity, however, both texts also challenge assumptions about the ways in which respectability politics intersect with normativity, especially in regards to family and kinship dynamics.

Gender is learned instead of inherited. In the “Performative Gender”, “Doing Gender”, and “Nerd Box”, authors bring out their insightful observation and critical personal experience in their lives to illustrate how various cultural gender signals are instructing us on behaving our genders properly. These expectations influences us unconsciously, but in the way that more than we have even thought. In the graphic memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, by Alison Bechdel, she portrays how did living in Beech Creek, Pennsylvania, in 1930s had repressed both her father, Bruce, and her from coming out as a homosexual, and also her mother, Helen, was trapped in her “women box”.

This article details the different ways that gender is socialized through children’s toys and how drastically this mechanism has changed throughout time. This doesn’t stop at toys but goes as far as sexualized Halloween and dress up costumes. Girl’s costumes more often portray sexualized appearances while boy’s costumes often resemble “masculine” characters. These toys and costumes can influence what direction a child’s life will take with regards to college major, occupation and societal roles. It doesn’t stop there; children are even being drawn away from talents and interests and towards stereotyped gender related activities. These different mechanism of gender socialization didn’t exist until recently, though. In the 1970’s, only 2% of

In Fun Home, Alison Bechdel demonstrates how myth and stereotyping contribute to the construction of prejudice. Alison’s father, Bruce Bechdel, lived a false life by denying his sexual orientation and created the illusion of a “normal” family life. By marrying a female and creating offspring, he perpetuated the public illusion that he had the perfect home and family. Despite this myth of perfect domestication, the true private life of the Bechdel family could be described as dysfunctional. Bechdel “witnessed only two gestures of action between” (Bechdel 68) her parents, which consisted of her father giving her mother “a chaste peck before leaving on a weekend trip” (Bechdel 68) and one time when her mother “put her hand on his back” (Bechdel 68) as they watched television. Bechdel writes how on both occasions, she “was astonished and discomforted” (Bechdel 68) and suggests that both her mother and father preferred “fiction to reality” (Bechdel 85). Both Bruce Bechdel and his wife, lived in a world where they did not acknowledge reality; it was easier for them to live a lie then to come to terms with Bruce’s homosexual identity. The conflict within the family could be attributed to Bruce’s suppression of his sexuality, which in turn, could be attributed to growing up in a time period when it was

The two main characters in the movie, Miranda and Andy, are both independent women in the work force. It is one of the few movies in which the story is revolved around female characters. As a result a lot of people mistakenly think the movie represents gender equality and shows that women can be dominant at work, that they no longer follows the traditional division of labor and become the powerless housewives. The truth is, this movie shows that even after twenty years since third wave feminism movement has begun; the theme remains that being a successful women at work comes at a price, which is a miserable

People are oftentimes cast into roles or duties that some might believe are duties for certain groups of people. For example, some people feel nursing is a career for women; and when they encounter a male nurse, they might not be as receptive to him. In other words, they just don’t feel comfortable with their skills. Also, society has placed women in the role of stay-at-home moms and housekeepers. Men who take on the duties of stay-at-home dads are sometimes frowned upon by society and assumptions are made that the dad is not performing “manly” duties. However, there is no one mold fit all society. People, especially women, should not be stereotyped in roles or duties that society deemed “women only”. The poems “Barbie Doll”, “Girl”, and “Daystar” reveals the pain, shame, and loneliness that some women might experience because of society’s beliefs.

The feminist movement has been trying to change the idea of traditional sex roles and stereotypes in society for decades, but maybe the issue relies on society instead of biological differences. While these biological differences and research show that there are small differences in cognitive brain activity between the sexes, they also propose a theory that this “is the way it’s supposed to be” (Pollitt 2549). Although these differences exist it does not mean that sexes should have permanently assigned roles in society. Katha Pollitt, a feminist author and high profile activist wrote the essay “Why Don’t Boys Play With Dolls,” published in 1995 in The New York Times Magazine. In the essay, she argues that “biological determinism may reassure some adults about their present, but it is feminism, the ideology of flexible and converging sex roles, that fits our children’s future” (2549). Pollitt raises important ethical problems in her essay, gender roles and stereotyping. Throughout her essay she provides several claims to her argument and builds credibility with her audience by using rhetorical strategies. However, the argument also exhibits some minor flaws, which could in return limit its persuasiveness. This analysis will identify Pollitt’s three main claims and the evidence she uses to support them. I argue that overall Pollitt provides an effective argument by building her credibility and expanding her audience with the use of rhetorical strategies, such as ethos, pathos,

Beauty models, movie stars, and music artists have become role models for thousands of people despite submitting to gender roles and stereotypes. Even though some teens may believe that they are immune to the presence of these gender roles, the media, society, their cultural beliefs, and their peers are capable of influencing them into changing their opinions and life choices. An example of this is how Nora is treated like a doll and a child by her husband and blindly accepts the life that society says she should live in A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen. Despite the stereotypes that exist in her society, Mrs. Linde goes beyond the expectations and the restrictions of a stereotypical of woman because she supports her sick mother and her younger brothers in multiple places including “a small shop [and] then a small school…” (Ibsen 19).

My entire life has been spent in a small town in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where a very conservative mindset is in place. This conservative mindset not only stands for its politics, but affects a person’s religion or lack thereof, what the standards of public education include, the types of art productions showcased within the schools, and a repression of self-identity, such as a person’s gender and sexuality. Throughout much of my life, I questioned few of these aspects of mine and my community’s life. However, in the last few years, specifically high school and on, I have tried to educate myself on these topics as I have grown to know people that deal with different identities involving gender and sexuality. I also became more aware of the inequalities that are present between genders and the social stigmas that come with it, facing my own issues due to identifying as a woman; although, it is not just women that face issues with gender, but people who identify as men and beyond the spectrum of just men and women.

Women face their lives counterstained to the home in order to cook, clean, give birth, care for children, and only devote themselves to one job, family. Sarah Stickney Ellis writes about the role woman play

As children, we are indoctrinated into the social construct of heteronormativity. Based on our biological sex at birth, we are given blue or pink clothes, play princesses or superheroes, and are told either, “cross your legs and sit like a lady” or “act like a man and stop crying”. As adults, we watch movies and TV shows where the husband comes home from a long day at work to greet his wife who has just finished making dinner. Heteronormativity refers to those norms related to gender and sexuality which keep in place patriarchy and compulsory heterosexuality as well as other systems and ideologies related to power (Sharma 2009). Gay, lesbian, queer, homosexual, agender, androgynous, bigender, bisexual, butch, femme, dyke, stud, lipstick lesbian, gender fluid; There are a seemingly endless terministic screens used to label women who love women, but they all come down to one meaning, we aren’t normal. “Even if any given terminology is a reflection of reality, by its very nature as a terminology it is a selection of reality; and to this extent it must also function as a deflection of reality” (Burke 1968). Viewing lesbians through heteronormative gender roles oversimplifies complex identities into false dichotomies.