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Homophobia from a different perspective
Homophobia from a different perspective
Homophobia from a different perspective
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Daniel Bonsanti
11-13-17
IHRTLUHC
Bechdel’s father and his influence 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.
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She brings light to an issue that divided her family from her father, his “obsession” with fixing up the house. She states, "I grew to resent the way my father treated his furniture like children, and his children like furniture" (14). She believes her father was detached, living his life through restoring old furniture and fixing up the family home, leaving little attention for the family that lived there. She was suspicious of her father’s décor saying, “they were lies” (14). This left much to be desired, often leading her to question whether her father even liked having a family. This feeling is expressed when she says, "Sometimes, when things were going well, I think my father actually enjoyed having a family. Or at least, the air of authenticity we lent to his exhibit. A sort of still life with children" (13). He occupied his life with fixing up his home almost as if he was trying to cover up the problems going on inside himself. Bechdel suggests that the antique mirrors decorating the home were meant to distract visitors from his personal shame. She says, "His shame inhabited our house as pervasively and invisibly as the aromatic musk of aging mahogany" (20). She states that this shame stemmed from her father’s closeted sexual preferences. This would later connect them in a very powerful …show more content…
In college she took a class on Ulysses, and to her surprise her father was very excited to help her, so much so that she described it as being “suffocating” (201). He recommended several books to help aid her studies. One of the books he recommends is Earthly Paradise, an autobiography of French novelist, performer, and famed lesbian Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette. His influence helped lead her to discover her sexuality. This became a huge bond to her father. When she reflects on her father’s death she is comforted by the fact that she may be connected. Bechdel frequently refers to A Happy Death throughout Fun Home, creating parallels between her family and Camus's story. Bechdel uses a particular passage from A Happy Death: "He discovered the cruel paradox by which we always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love - first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage" and describes it as "a fitting epitaph" for her parents' marriage (28). This passage draws attention to a point she makes when she reflects on her family life. Something always confused her about her parent’s relationship, but the stronger her relationship became with her father the more she understood
Alison Bechdel wrote Fun Home as a memoir so that people understood the impact her father had on her. She went into great detail in this memoir about her childhood and moments after her father’s death. Which she claims her dad was a suicidal. During the memoir, she describes her relationship with her father. All issues, lessons, and arguments she had with her father are really significant to her. She uses her relationship with her father as the main point in the memoir. Their relationship had its ups and downs but she had very strong feelings for her father. Even though her father did not treat her as a girl most of the time, she managed to get over the fact of her father’s behavior.
It shows her desire to assert what little independence and control she has in the face of the strict gender roles she experiences within her society. She explains to Frank that she believes that the “idea that people have to resign from real life and ‘settle down’ when they have families… [is] the great sentimental lie of the suburbs” (117). She finds it difficult, like many women of her time, to find a medium between who she is and who she is expected to be, but tries to create a balance. Nevertheless, her efforts to do so are consistently ruined by the variables around her, causing her to become more and more frustrated with her
She tried to do many things to be “better” than she had been. Showering everyday to be the cleanest version herself made her feel that it enhanced her quality of life. She was doing this day in day out and even sometimes twice a day as part of her “cleanliness”. While she did not have much money, she spent her extra cash on what she felt was its place to be spent in. Herself. Her appearance. Edith had bought the nicest and most soothing scent of perfume along with a flashy wristwatch and admirable dresses in an attempt to boost her self-esteem and self-image. Amidst the scent of roses and nice clothes Edith tried to change her attitude. She refused to gossip anytime Mrs.Henderson would endeavour at gossip. Edith read beauty magazines and books about proper etiquette one of many customs she had adopted. She did this daily and accustomed to it believing that she needed to it to be the more proper version of herself as the way she wanted to execute her plan of a changed woman. Edith altered herself and the way she did many things. Although she still knew who she really was and where she came from, she refused to accept it. Along with many things were done Edith’s decisions were overthrown by her self-image on her role of a daughter
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...
In the graphic novel Fun Home, by Allison Bechdel, sexual self-discovery plays a critical role in the development of the main character, Allison Bechdel herself; furthermore, Bechdel depicts the plethora of factors that are pivotal in the shaping of who she is before, during and after her sexual self-development. Bechdel’s anguish and pain begins with all of her accounts that she encountered at home, with her respective family member – most importantly her father – at school, and the community she grew up within. Bechdel’s arduous process of her queer sexual self-development is throughout the novel as complex as her subjectivity itself. Main points highlight the difficulties behind which are all mostly focused on the dynamics between her and her father. Throughout the novel, she spotlights many accounts where she felt lost and ashamed of her coming out and having the proper courage to express this to her parents. Many events and factors contributed to this development that many seem to fear.
The central characters in both “The Yellow Wallpaper” and A Doll’s House are fully aware of their niche in society. In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the narrator’s husband believes her illness to be a slight depression, and although she states "personally, I disagree with their ideas,” she knows she must acquiesce their requests anyway (Gilman 1). She says, “What is one to do?” (Gilman 1) The narrator continues to follow her husband’s ideals, although she knows them to be incorrect. She feels trapped in her relationship with her husband, as she has no free will and must stay in the nursery all day. She projects these feelings of entrapment onto the yellow wallpaper. She sees a complex and frustrating pattern, and hidden in the pattern are herself and othe...
Looking back at the past and to see how portraying it at a later time can change someone’s perspective. Looking back at all the events that had happened Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir, Fun Home, is where she expresses how her family had gone separately one by one and how it has made an effect on herself to become who she is now.
Her identity of a wife and mother is stifled through the work of her husband and sister in law. Both John and his sister Jennie, do not want her to think about her condition, however that is the only thing she is able to think about. She had given birth to her baby a short time before moving into the house with the yellow wallpaper. Perhaps she suffered from postpartum depression, however not much was known about this during these times. If she had gotten proper treatment for her depression, maybe she would have overcome her illness. Instead, she was essentially locked away in a room and told to rest. She strives to form her own identity that has been lost due to her illness. Ultimately the narrator loses her whole identity to the wallpaper. She transforms from the depression filled wife and mother to one of the women creeping behind the wallpaper. The narrator destroys the wallpaper in an effort to escape the hold her husband has over her. In the end she loses her identity along with her
Marie, who is a product of an abusive family, is influenced by her past, as she perceives the relationship between Callie and her son, Bo. Saunders writes, describing Marie’s childhood experiences, “At least she’d [Marie] never locked on of them [her children] in a closet while entertaining a literal gravedigger in the parlor” (174). Marie’s mother did not embody the traditional traits of a maternal fig...
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.
Some parts of the comic memoir are told out of order, with alternating scenes of therapy between her new therapist, Carol, and her previous therapist, Jocelyn. This interspersion of scenes disguises the progression of the relationship between Jocelyn and Bechdel because Carol brings the narrative back to Bechdel’s family situation, specifically the relationship between Bechdel and her parents. The two therapists and their offices are drawn very similarly, but the astute reader may be able to pick out the chronological order of scenes.
she was pretty and that was everything” (225). This captivation with herself along with the constant looking in the mirrors and thinking her mother was only pestering her all the time because her mother’s own good looks were long gone by now (225) shows a sign of immaturity because she believes everything revolves around whether or not someo...
In Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel entitled Fun Home, the author expresses her life in a comical manner where she explains the relationship between her and her family, pointedly her father who acts as a father figure to the family as she undergoes her exhaustive search for sexuality. Furthermore, the story describes the relationship between a daughter and a father with inversed gender roles as sexuality is questioned. Throughout the novel, the author suggests that one’s identity is impacted by their environment because one’s true self is created through the ability of a person to distinguish reality from fictional despotism.
Once her husband, John, realizes the deepness of depression that his wife is in due to her birth of their child he decides to take action. He decides to isolate his wife from the world for her own betterment. Once arriving in her newfound place of isolation where there is no stimulation, except for her journal, the narrator is placed within a room that is lined with yellow wallpaper. This yellow room is meant to free her from any stresses, but her dislike for the wallpaper concerns her. The pattern of yellow begins to become more of an obsession, being this is her only stimulation due to her confinement. She begins to visualize a woman behind her yellow wallpaper, this woman she sees seems to be trapped pacing behind the paper as if she is trying to free herself. It is not long before the narrator begins with withdrawal pieces of this wallpaper from the wall in attempt to free this trapped woman. As the novel ends the woman who once was in such disgusted with this yellow room now traps herself, locking herself away from
Similarly, the furniture in the house is as sullen as the house itself. What little furniture is in the house is beaten-up; this is a symbol of the dark setting. The oak bed is the most important p...