Alison Bechdel's Fun Home

Alison Bechdel’s tragicomic titled Fun Home which is a memoir of her experience in adolescence and maturity into a young woman. Bechdel’s use of mythology throughout her tragicomic allows for a more enhanced metaphor of the two-sided nature that is presented through her father, herself, and their home. The use of myth addresses some modern dualities within the characters but looking at the form of religion Bechdel’s father can be depicted as a Christ figure early In the comic and this perhaps is additive to the Greek myths otherwise presented. The myth of Icarus and Daedalus is used to juxtapose the daughter-father relationship and how they compare to the myth. Alongside the myth of Icarus and Daedalus there is the expanded story of Daedalus’

From Monica Pearl’s Redrawing the family (romance) in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home Pearl depicts the use of paradox in the comic and how these paradoxes apply to the “identities of the family members” (Pearl 269). Although Pearl notices the paradoxes of the story she fails to touches on the myth of Icarus and Daedalus more than the surface of the instead of looking at the symbolic nature the tale has with the characters and their multiple perspectives. Bruce Bechdel is seen to be described as the Daedalus through the beginning of the book as Alison describes how he would “perform, as Daedalus did, dazzling displays of artfulness” (Bechdel 9). Having Bruce being like Daedalus juxtaposes Alison to being Icarus. With Bruce being a Daedalus figure he is in the first panel of the comic lifting Alison in the air in a game of “airplane” which could be synonymous to Daedalus lifting Icarus into the sky with the wax wings in their story. The roles of Daedalus and Icarus between the father and daughter seems to change as the sexual awareness of Alison emerges. The more Alison comes out with her gayness the more she seems to take on the role of father and leader as one such as Daedalus. Bruce becomes a figure of secret harbouring and is never freed from his cage he created through hiding his gayness while Alison breaks free

This great labyrinth is a masterfully built maze used to keep inside a great secret, a hidden beast. This hidden beast can be compared to the house Bruce Bechdel builds by hand. Bruce as described earlier is a Daedalus figure and his creation of the house is his labyrinth from which he hides his own secret, the other half and the gayness he conceals. In describing the house Alison explains the maze like properties the house presents and even mentions “it was impossible to tell if the Minotaur lay beyond the next corner” (Bechdel 21) after acknowledging that they understood how to get around the house. The Minotaur depicted here being their father’s more violent mood, one which seems to be shown in the safety of the house that others outside wouldn’t be subject to seeing. This metaphor of the house harbouring a private secret is how the author presents a character and their motive and theme through the use of