Lee Ann Darte Professor Deborah Brothers EGL 101-20 Critical Analysis: Essay #2 / Draft #1 24 October 2017 Unconventionality and Acceptance in Alison Bechdel’s “Fun Home” In the first chapter of Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, a graphic novel by Alison Bechdel, the author uses an intriguing combination of pictures and words to draw her readers through the story with many surprising twists and turns similar to the way a carnival fun house lures in curious adventurers . As the author first introduces her father to the story, one would believe him to be a loving and engaging father. However, once Bechdel begins comparing their playful exchange with the “Icarian Games” (pg. 379) and noting his distraction to the game because of his concern with …show more content…
Her family life is depicted with contradictions of order and chaos, love and animosity, conventionality and avant-garde. Although the underlying story of her father’s dark secret was troubling, it lends itself to a better understanding of the family dynamics and what was normal for her family. The author doesn’t seem to suggest that her father’s behavior was acceptable or even tolerable. However, the ending of this excerpt leaves the reader with an undeniable sense that the author felt a connection to her father even if it wasn’t one that was desirable. This is best understood with her reaction to his suicide when she states, “But his absence resonated retroactively, echoing back through all the time I knew him. Maybe it was the converse of the way amputees feel pain in a missing limb.” (pg. 399) Works Cited Bechdel, Alison. "from Fun Home" The Little Norton Reader: 50 Essays from the First 50 Years, edited by Melissa A. Goldthwaite, W.W. Norton, 2017, pp. 377-399. Badman, Derik. "Fun Home by Alison Bechdel." The Quarterly Conversation, © 2008 Scott Esposito TQC, http://quarterlyconversation.com/fun-home-by-alison-bechdel-review. Accessed 24 October 2017. Dean-Ruzicka, Rachel. "Mourning and Melancholia in Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic." 7.2 (2013): n. pag. Dept of English, University of Florida. 25 October 2017. Web. Accessed 24 October
Alison Bechdel uses her graphic memoir, Fun home, to explore her relationship with her father. She uses the book as a tool to reflect on her life and the affect her father had on her. She discovers how her fathers closeted sexuality affected her childhood and her transition into adulthood. His death left a powerful mark and left her searching for answers. She clearly states this when she says, “it’s true that he didn’t kill himself until I was nearly twenty. But his absence resonated retroactively, echoing back through all the time I knew him.” (23). This feeling drove her to look back on their relationship and find what binds her so strongly to a man she never understood.
8: Why is this book becoming more common in college classes-why do you think that is? Alison Bechdel’s best-selling graphic memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is
The tragicomic Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel, is generally considered one of the most important pieces of the modern LGBTQ canon of literature. The graphic novel tells the story of Alison Bechdel’s attempt to find the truth about her father’s sexuality and what lead him to possibly commit suicide. Along the way, Bechdel finds her own sexuality. Bechdel’s choice to write about her and her father’s simultaneous journey to finding their sexuality was revolutionary at the time. Very few authors were writing openly about their own sexuality, and something even more revolutionary that Bechdel addressed was mental illness.
Throughout chapter one of Fun Home, Alison Bechdel portrays artifice and art as two very similar but distinct things; both overlapping and making it hard to differentiate between what is what. Art, in her view, is the truth, and a skill that has to be mastered. On the other hand, artifice contains partial, or full, amounts of falsehood; it covers up the truth in some way but contains art in itself. Artifice can be, like art, something mastered, but can also be a coping mechanism to cover up something good or bad. Bechdel turns both art and artifice into a very interlinked, combined, version of the two forms. When truth and falsehood are combined, after awhile, it becomes a challenge to distinguish between the two; evidently true to herself.
Fun Home shows how as the reader we can become educated and heal from the stories like that of Alison Bechdel’s childhood. We also can see Alison’s journey of healing as well. This full circle journey is why literature is so versatile and important to our society and culture. We depend on the creation and growth of literary themes like the ones we see in Fun House to help us grow and deal with the real world.
In Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Bechdel uses the theme of appearance versus reality to highlight her relationship with her father. Bechdel utilizes her illustrations and short sentences to reveal these things about herself and her father. Bechdel opens her memoir with a chapter entitled “Old Father, Old Artificer”. Bechdel refers to her father, Bruce Bechdel, as an artificer because she sees him as a skilled craftsman. Bechdel describes, “His greatest achievement, arguably, was his monomaniacal restoration of our old house.” (Bechdel 4). Her father restored their old house to make it look like a huge mansion. Bechdel knows that this is just the appearance of their household because it is not an accurate representation of their family life inside the house. Bruce created an appearance that was the opposite of reality to cover up the actual wealth of their family. He hides the fact that his family may not be as wealthy and perfect as they appear to be. In this case, Bruce reveals he believes that appearance is more important than the reality of a situation. Appearance is also important on the inside of the home as well. Bechdel mentions, “Sometimes, when things were going well, I
In chapter one, “Old Father, Old Artificer”, of her graphic novel Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, the young Bechdel generated her identity through the tensions and mysteries that engulfed her family the home. Masculinity, physical strength and a modern outlook were her personality traits as she grew, becoming the “Butch to [her father’s] Nelly” (269) and his opposite in several aspects. A conscious effort was made on her part to set her own pace from what her father expected of her. He was a strong, influential figure within her life. Expressing emotions towards her father was strictly not allowed in the home. Bechdel was left “rushing from the room in embarrassment” (273) on the one unforgettable occasion that she went to kiss him goodnight. She...
Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home is a novel about a girl who discovers not only her sexuality, but family secrets too. This novel walks readers through the story of the development of a lesbian identity through the use of visual and verbal representation of memories and interpretive acts. The narrator, Alison, draws pictures of her memories through original scenes, passages from novels, photographs, lines from family letters, interior décor, and dialogue. She opens up her life to readers and wants to make sure they get a clear picture of who she is and what has happened to her. There is a lot of ellipsis. However, with Alison’s narration and drawings, we go into depth of her complicated life and find all the missing puzzle pieces that have been left out for so long.
Fun Home by Alison Bechdel shows us her discovery of her own and her father's homosexuality. This graphic memoir touches on things like homosexuality, family relationships, and suicide. What’s unique about this autobiographical story is that Bechtel used the graphic novel medium to tell her story. When we close read pages fourteen through seventeen in Fun Home we can understand how a Bechdel employs words and graphic devices to allow for specific events. One can also see how the specific content of the pages connects to the book entirely. This part of the graphic novel shows the relationship between Bruce Bechdel and his family and his attempts to cover his homosexuality by making an image of an ideal family, these
Although, half of the essay was split into two different points of view of what happened before her aunt’s suicide. The first point of view was by Kingston’s mother, who gave a short perspective as to what happened to her sister-in-law. The second point of view was by Kingston herself, who gave her own version as to what she believed had occurred during those tragic moments, even though she wasn’t there during those events. Kingston believed that there were good reasons why her aunt did what she did, and that she was completely innocent as to what happened with her. However, Kingston’s mother believed that her sister-in-law was completely at fault and disgraced the family. Her mother intimidates Kingston by telling her the story and says she must not tell anyone, yet the author reveals her mother’s thoughts in her
Every family has secrets. Taboo secrets are typically the one's we'd like to keep hidden the most. Unfortunately, what's done in the dark always finds itself resurfacing to the light. In Allison Bechdel "Fun Home", she recollects the memories that impacted her life the most when she was in the stage of discovering her true self. The memories we remember the most tend to play a major role in our life development. For Allison, one well-kept secret that her father contained well from her, unraveled many memories of the truth that laid before her eyes.
In the poem “Terminal Resemblance,” author, Louise Glück talks about her younger self and the complicated relationship with her father. Her father tells her that he will die soon and she does not know how to take it. Glück is not close with her father and never was before, even though he was always present in her life. When the father tries to connect with his daughter in the last conversation they have the speaker feels awkward because her father has never tried to have an emotional connection with her before so she focuses on her surroundings and notices how much life has changed while she was away. The speaker tries to focus on anything other than her father to avoid the fact that the father she was never close to is about to die.
As a girl, she had an extremely difficult childhood as an orphan and was passed around from orphanage to orphanage. The author has absolute admiration for how his mother overcame her upbringing. He opens the third chapter by saying, “She was whatever the opposite of a juvenile delinquent is, and this was not due to her upbringing in a Catholic orphanage, since whatever it was in her that was the opposite of a juvenile delinquent was too strong to have been due to the effect of any environment…the life where life had thrown her was deep and dirty” (40). By saying that she was ‘the opposite of a juvenile delinquent’, he makes her appear as almost a saintly figure, as he looks up to her with profound admiration. He defends his views on his mother’s saintly status as not being an effect of being in a Catholic orphanage, rather, due to her own strong will. O’Connor acknowledges to the extent that her childhood was difficult through his diction of life ‘throwing’ her rather than her being in control of it. As a result, she ended up in unsanitary and uncomfortable orphanages, a ‘deep and dirty’ circumstance that was out of her control. Because of this, the author recognizes that although his childhood was troublesome, his mother’s was much worse. She was still able to overcome it, and because of it, he can overcome
tragedies that befell her. She is an example of a melancholic character that is not able to let go of her loss and therefore lets it t...
Mrs. Mallard’s repressed married life is a secret that she keeps to herself. She is not open and honest with her sister Josephine who has shown nothing but concern. This is clearly evident in the great care that her sister and husband’s friend Richard show to break the news of her husband’s tragic death as gently as they can. They think that she is so much in love with him that hearing the news of his death would aggravate her poor heart condition and lead to death. Little do they know that she did not love him dearly at all and in fact took the news in a very positive way, opening her arms to welcome a new life without her husband. This can be seen in the fact that when she storms into her room and her focus shifts drastically from that of her husband’s death to nature that is symbolic of new life and possibilities awaiting her. Her senses came to life; they come alive to the beauty in the nature. Her eyes could reach the vastness of the sky; she could smell the delicious breath of rain in the air; and ears became attentive to a song f...