Painstakingly Recreating Her Fatherhood In Alison Bechdel's Fun Home

When living with his grandmother, Suina describes his memories during the frigid winter. During those cold months, “a warm fire crackled and danced brightly in the fireplace, and the aroma of delicious stew filled our one room house.” Suina’s description illustrates his grandmother’s house as a nurturing environment. It is a setting in which his grandmother clearly cares for him. He remembers enduring the long freezing winter nights when “the thick adobe walls wrapped around the two of us protectingly.” The characteristics of the house showcase a sense of connectedness between Suina and his grandmother. Living with his grandmother clearly give Suina several reasons to be happy. It is not only a place that cares for and protects him, but it is also a place that “was just right.” Suina’s grandmother’s house provides him with a tremendous amount of self-confidence. Unfortunately, all of that self confidence is lose when he goes to school. School leaves Suina utterly bewildered. He begins to realize how different the two settings are. He starts to lose sight of the essential aspects of life with his grandmother that once made him so

Ann Hulbert was born in 1956 and went to Harvard College and Cambridge University. Both the New York Times Book Review and New York Times Review of Books has featured some of her work. Interior Castle: the Art and Life of Jean Stafford and Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice about Children are two of her books. She is in the process of writing another book about child prodigies. By reading “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” readers learn that the author herself is a baby boomer. Hulbert’s dedication and hard work has earned her the Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Art, US and Canada Award and

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.

Charlotte rejects her mother’s ideology from a young age, and has the perspective to see past the illusions of perfection her mother creates, and Miss. Hancock gives her the weapons to fight her mother. In seventh grade, Miss. Hancock teaches Charlotte about the metaphor, sparking the creativity within Charlotte her mother shunned. The metaphor becomes a symbol throughout the short story, but it also develops into something deeper. The metaphor becomes an allegory of Charlotte 's rebellion against her mother’s influence, and her future. Writing is an outlet, an opportunity for Charlotte to express and understand herself. The form of expression was a gift from Miss. Hancock, who arms her with the power of creativity. “‘My home,’ I said aloud, ‘is a box It is cool and quiet and empty and uninteresting. Nobody lives in the box,” Charlotte says in seventh grade. She has a complex understanding of herself, and is able to articulate her frustrations through metaphors. After graduating out of Miss. Hancock’s seventh grade class, the story picks up introducing the reader to Charlotte as a

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

Ursula Hegi’s “Floating in my Mother’s Palm”, tells a story of a young girl growing up in a small German town in the 1950s. Hanna, who is the lead character, has a painter mother and a dentist father, both of whom try to shield her from the harsh realities of their small town. The novel tells a story of a young girl’s experience right from birth and the many things that shaped her childhood. This essay will pay special focus on the second story of the novel, “Trudi Montag’s Romantic Episode”. This part tells a story about Trudi Montag, who is the town’s librarian and Hanna’s friend, though she is older. Trudi tells Hanna of stories of her childhood and any gossip that goes around town. The story sets precedence for major themes like love, broken love and superstition evident in the community. The author also uses the story to expound on issues of tradition and diversity that is evident in every community.

As a little girl, I saw the world in the best light simply because innocence clouded my judgement. As a child, I was innocent of mortality, as a teen hope, and as a young adult love. However, later on that innocence took on the role of ignorance. Not in the sense of not being knowledgeable or educated on the matter, but rather knowing it all too well that I choose not to acknowledge it. Innocence can be served as an instrument to block out surroundings when problems arise. It is an illusion of reality to protect what the individual desires to be true to what is actual. In Wendy Cope’s poem “Reading Scheme,” Cope writes about an affair more from the perspective of children by using the villanelle form to illustrate the inability of the

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

Bechdel’s fight for her gender identity was a constant in Fun Home, as was Bruce’s attempts to force femininity onto her, driven by his need to express his gender identity vicariously through her. Bechdel’s writing explains the obvious expressions of gender identity such as page 14 when Bruce decorated Bechdel’s room femininely despite her protests, prompting her to claim that her house was going to be made of all metal. But the illustrations depict the less obvious manifestations of gender identity. On page 95, we see Bechdel calling herself a, “connoisseur of masculinity,” with a Western film playing while her father is in the background arranging flowers (Bechdel, 95).

Children’s literature is the precedent for the development of all children. Children’s literature varies from poetry to children’s picture books. Every aspect of children’s literature gives an ability to grow a child mentally and develop their ideas and imagination. In early literature, children were romanized to be perfect and well behaved. Author Maurice Sendak counters the idea of a perfect child in his book “Where The Wild Things Are”. Sendak uses his picture book to illustrate a child’s ability to have feelings of anger, resentment, and frustration. The interviewer, Patrick F. Roughen of Red Feather Journal states that“Where the Wild Things Are (1963) contains some of the earliest attempts in children’s literature to represent the intrapsychic challenges of the lives of children. Anger, frustration, and the complexities of parent-child relationships can be found throughout its pages”. “Where the Wild Things Are” reinforces the idea that children are capable of emotions that one would imagine are only depicted in the adult world.

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.

In Roth’s reimagining of Amy/Anne, he also criticizes the adaptation and those who value it as an authentic representation of the diary. In the article “To Invent as Presumptuous as Real Life Parody and the Cultural Memory of Anne Frank in Roth’s The Ghost Writer,” R. Clifton Spargo argues that Roth uses the reimaging of Anne Frank as a means to expose and parody the “cultural memory of Anne Frank.” Specifically, Spargo argues that The Ghost Writer works to “show how history belongs to cultural memory in the sense that the layerings of cultural memory build on an original event and become part of its history, and, as The Ghost Writer employs parodic memory to call attention to these structural layerings, it also explores the give and take between history and cultural memory”

Although Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home demonstrate pronounced differences in setting and design, both novels employ a reflective narration of the past to address common themes of trauma, unorthodox family relationships, and sexuality. Both stories utilize this retrospective narrative to expose masculinity’s stratified hegemony as a driving force of internalized shame, violence, and the death of self. As The Bluest Eye’s Cholly and Fun Home’s Bruce are examined in terms of hegemonic masculinity’s influence, the common themes in both works can be understood as a result of masculinity’s hierarchical ascendency.

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.

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.