`` Fun Home, By Alison Bechdel

“Your life does not get better by chance, it gets better by change.” Jim Rohns quote highlights the basis of Debra Oswald’s play Gary’s house, and also Miroshav Holubs poem The Door. This essay will explore the notion that change causes people to shift their thinking and actions after significant catalysts. Gary’s House illustrates many of the issues and predicaments confronted by the characters and how their alteration in behaviour can have a beneficial outcome for them or others around them. The concept of "The Door" is based on the idea of taking risks and embracing change. The poet uses persuasive techniques to encourage and provoke the audience to take action.

Memoirs and Authenticity: Paper 2 Jack Kenny In the personal memoir Fun House by Allison Bechdel, specifically chapters one and three, Bechdel recalls her challenging upbringing and familial relationships with her mother Helen and father Bruce, as well as the circumstances surrounding her father's death or suicide. Bechdel’s memories and personal opinions on her upbringing, relationships, and her father's death or suicide are her own. Bechdel clearly holds the opinion that her father's death was no accident and that her relationship with him was both distant and cold. Bechdel examines and transitions between personal experiences from her childhood, aiding her emotionally detached and perfectionistic father's obsessive creation of an elaborate and superficial illusion of wealth and the “perfect family” at the expense of meaningful emotional

In chapter one of Barbara Kingsolver’s novel entitled “Called home”. The author observes that American’s are depending on the manufacturing of industrial made food and is leading to the ignorance of American’s not realizing where and how their food is processed, Kingsolver’s aims to expose the American food industry and inform the readers how their everyday food is made.

Through my understanding of the book, Homeward Bound by Elaine Tyler May explores two traditional depictions of the 1950s, namely suburban domesticity and anticommunism. She intertwines both historical events into a captivating argument. Throughout the book, May aims to discover why “Post-war Americans accepted parenting as well as marriage with so much zeal” unlike their own parents and children. Her findings are that the “cold war ideology and domestic revival” were somewhat linked together. She saw “domestic containment” as an outgrowth of frights and desires that bloomed after the war. However, psychotherapeutic services were as much a boom then as now, and helped offer “private and personal solutions to social problems.” May reflects her views on the origin of domestic containment, and how it affected the lives of people who tried to live by it.

In the following essay, I shall be exploring the representation of identity in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, mainly through a postcolonial feminist lens. My analysis will focus on Bruce and Alison’s interactions with each other and how Bechdel deconstructs the stereotypical ideals of gender roles and sexuality, via intertextual references.

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

We are all living in a society that is filled with social expectations of gender. From our early age, we seem to be able to response to these expectations accordingly. For example, we notice Barbies are for girls while robots and cars are for boys only. In the “Performative Gender”, “Doing Gender”, and “Nerd Box”, authors all indicate gender is learned instead of inherited. They bring out their insightful observation and critical personal experience to illustrate how the social expectations with punitive effects construct our gender unconsciously. These articles provide a great lens for us to understand the mental state and behaviors of the main characters in Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. In Fun Home, Alison Bechdel portrays how living in Beech Creek, Pennsylvania during the 1930s not only repressed both her father, Bruce, and her from coming out as a homosexual and genderqueer, but also trapped her mother, Helen, in her “women box”. Through the graphic memoir, Fun Home is able to present the struggling process that one may need to go through before admitting one’s unusual gender identity and sexual orientation.

In the novel The Joy Luck Club written by Amy Tan, there are several stories that intertwine into one novel. Each of the stories takes place China where the roles and the actions of woman are vastly different compared to American tradition. In the different stories, they all are about different mothers and daughters. Throughout the book, the reader can see the development in each relationship between mother and daughter with their conflicting backgrounds from China to America.

Culture defines humanity. Culture makes humans different than any other living organism ever known. Culture is what makes humans unique, and yet culture is easily the most misunderstood characteristic of individuals. In Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan develops the theme of incomplete cultural understanding leads to an inability to communicate one’s true intentions through juxtaposition and conflict between mothers and daughters and their cultures.

As a mother of two young girls, I constantly worry about the decisions I am making to raise them. Like any parent, I want my children to be happy and be able to be who they truly are, even if that means they do not fit the stereotypical role of a girl. In today’s society some of the most difficult things people face is their choices they make to be themselves, whether they are little boys playing with their mother’s makeup, or the little girls who want to be a super hero rather than a princess. Sometimes these choices made can be ridiculed, criticized and even labeled as wrong. Patricia J. Williams wrote an essay in June 2011 titled “Are We Worried about Storm’s Identity- or Our Own?” In this essay, Williams explores the decision Kathy Witterick

Joyce Carol Oates intrigues readers in her fictional piece “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” by examining the life of a fifteen year old girl. She is beautiful, and her name is Connie. Oates lets the reader know that “everything about her [Connie] had two sides to it, one for home, and one for anywhere but home (27). When Connie goes out, she acts and dresses more mature than she probably should. However, when she is at home, she spends the majority of her time absorbed with daydreams “about the boys she met”(28). This daydreaming behavior is observable to the reader throughout the story. From theories about dreams, theories about

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan follows multiple Chinese-American women who struggle with their self-identity and creating a balance between American and Chinese culture. Because of their immigration and many hardships in life, many of the women feel like they cannot truly tell who they are anymore, and throughout the novel these women are portrayed as ghosts. Ghosts are used to symbolize these women because they share many parallels including being only a remnant of who they once were, or who they could be. Ying-ying St. Clair is one of the women, who has a daughter named Lena St. Clair, she has had a troubled past in China, which has made her lose her fighting spirit, and her spirit in general. Ying-ying is fully aware of her loss of spirit and is embarrassed because she considers ghosts to be shameful and weak, and wants to save her daughter, Lena, from her fate.

Alison centers the story arch of her graphic novel around the point of her father’s death, allowing for each of her anecdotes to circle back toward Bruce and his suspected suicide. Many of these memories, including the opener of the novel, begin with the Bechdel home. The first panels introduce Bechdel’s father as an aloof character not too keen on physically interacting with his children, instead concentrating on his beloved Anna Karenina and the appearance of rugs and curtains (Bechdel 4). Even amidst such an intimate moment as bonding with his daughter while playing “airplane,” Bruce fixates on material items, illustrating the focus that he prioritizes on presenting the perfect curatorial statement of his life (3). Bruce’s insecurity takes such a toll over him that when one of his children comments on his tie, he immediately changes it in sheer fear of not appearing as the perfect man that he makes himself out to be (19). His constant renovations begin to irritate Alison because of how Bruce “[treats] his furniture like children, and his children like furniture,” further distancing Alison and her siblings from their father (14). The “scrolls, tassels, and bric-a-brac(s)” infesting the Bechdel home were ornate embellishments solely placed to draw attention away from the true occurrences in Bruce’s life, which begin to manifest in Alison via her path to finding her sexuality (16).

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.

Within Tennessee Williams's story about love and abuse within marriage and challenging familial ties, there lie three very different characters that all see the world in vastly different ways. These members of a family that operate completely outside of our generation’s norms, are constantly unsure of themselves and their station within the binary not only of their familial unit, but within the gender binary that is established for them to follow. Throughout the story of the strange family, each character goes through a different arch that changes them irrevocably whether it is able to be perceived or not by those around them. The only male, Stanley is initially the macho force in the home who controls everything without question. He has