Personal Essay: Themes In Alison Bechdel's Fun Home

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In the memoir, Fun Home, Alison Bechdel effectively depicted her life as a child all the way up to age nineteen when she finally decided to come out to her family. Growing up Alison’s path crossed paths with struggles that try to hinder her while she attempts to grasp on to the identity of being homosexual. Even though Bechdel encounter struggles she is able to overcome those struggles in a supportive environment. Despite her father, Bruce Bechdel homosexuality, which was unknown to Alison for the majority of her life could possibly be the emotional core of Fun Home. In actuality, it is Alison 's personal coming out party that assists her mother, Helen Bechdel, to expose Bruce 's hidden relationships to Alison. Effectively, the process of writing the memoir has really permitted Bechdel to reminisce about her father through the spectacles of her experiences, later giving her the chance to reveal clues about her father 's undercover desires that she was incapable of interpreting at the moment. In a scene where Bruce takes his openly queer daughter to a gay bar embodies the dissimilarities amongst Bruce and Alison 's attitudes of dealing with their homosexuality. Bruce tussles with the shame of hiding his …show more content…

Bruce Bechdel 's tombstone is a penis shape figure, a shape he loved. He even collects obelisks before his demise, and this odd hobby comes to symbolize his pursuit of youngs boys. In Bechdel 's illustrations of Bruce calling young Alison into the embalming room, she highlights the cadaver 's penis by interpreting it in intense portion. Although such a raw picture of the male sexual organ might wonder the reader, Alison does not display any type of emotion whatsoever. Young Alison 's indifference finally relates to Bruce Bechdel 's hidden homosexuality - a part of himself that he suppressed. Later, his daughter learns to suppress her emotional response to his loss of

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