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.
As she was growing up, Alison and her father both struggled with their sexuality, more importantly gender roles. Some struggles were public, like her refusal to grow her hair long, or unwillingness to wear dresses, skirts, or jewelry or her father’s likings to gardening, fine creams, and colognes. However, there was also a lot of resentment kept behind closed doors such as her resentment to her breasts, and her father's affairs with other men. As a child, Alison was somewhat aware of the gender roles that occurred between her and her father. She hated it. On page 96, she says, "where he fell short [with masculine things], [she] stepped in."
Although she didn't realize it fully until she was in college, Alison and her father have spent their lives dealing with the realization of their sexuality. Oddly enough, Alison’s preference towards women and her father's preference toward men became their bond. Her mother made her aware of her father's homosexual affairs when she decided...
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...one piece that makes the novel even more complicated. Its complexity is what makes this novel so captivating. She is able to draw connections and realize things she was never able to see as a child. She lets the readers understand her childhood, but only in the way she herself was able to come to understand it. Bruce and Alison struggled with gender roles because they were both were struggling with their sexuality. With Alison’s graphic novel, it highlights the unique nature of her story. There are a lot of missing pieces that don’t quite add up as to why the characters behave or act in certain ways, but readers do find out their story through her eyes. Finally, Fun Home provides a complex yet relatable story for many homosexuals that are afraid to be who they are. Her memoir also shows the examination of family and self through literature, drawings, and memories.
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.
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
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
Bechdel recounts her childhood growing up with a closeted homosexual father and a mother who
In Nella Larsen’s Passing, Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry show us a great deal about race and sexuality in the 1920s. Both are extremely light-skinned women of African-American descent. However similar they appear to be, their views on race, a very controversial issue at the time, differ significantly. Clare chooses to use her physical appearance as an advantage in America’s racist and sexist society, leaving behind everything that connects her to her African-American identity. She presents herself as an object of sexual desire, flaunting herself to gain attention. Irene is practically the opposite, deciding that she wants to remain with the label of being black. She is subtle with her sexuality, never attempting to use her beauty to gain advantages. Linking these two women is a strange relationship, in which Clare and Irene both view each other in a sexually desirable way. Nevertheless, even with that desire for Clare, Irene obviously holds some contempt for her through jealousy, to the extent of wishing that she were dead. This jealousy is also based on social status. Irene is jealous of Clare’s ability to succeed, even though she may not know it. The root of Irene’s jealousy of Clare is in these three ideas of race, sexuality, and class, making Irene despise someone who she obviously also loves.
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.
She later goes on to make a new friend named Greg who is a newly open homosexual and goes to a gay club and dances with him and takes note of “what it is like to act sexually in the world”(P. 202) and then later goes on to become friends with a grouble of transvestites and again helps her gain another view of the world to continually shape her identity and her sense of beauty and love in the world through many different
The prevailing standards of masculinity have placed a trivial label on female values compared to the values of men. Most noticeably, A Room of One’s Own, authored by Virginia Woolf, effectively conveys the inequalities between men and women. During this era, Woolf recognizes the literary cannon works of women; her successful recognitions allow for the questioning as to why these accomplished female authors are not given the acknowledgment to which they are entitled. This inquiry is also conveyed in the work of Carol Shield’s, Unless. Unless effectively conveys the progression of anger, which is blamable for Norah’s breakaway from reality. This break from reality causes Reta’s melancholic feelings to transform
Hidden sexuality is one that hides their own personal sexuality. Embracing sexuality makes an individual a better person than hiding one’s sexuality simply that one may be supported as Alison is in Fun Home. Fun Home written by Alison Bechdel is a tragicomic about the main character Alison and her dysfunctional family living in a “Fun Home.” Whereas hiding one’s sexuality is lying, embracing sexuality makes one a better person given that Alison was accepted when she “came out,” while her father kept it a secret and was not the ideal father for it.
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.
As a wide-eyed (shocked to see a gay couple with a kid) but jaded (wrote a short story about sucking her Editor) twenty-two year old, she ventured out into the world to try to forge her own identity separate from the "Jenny” that was projected onto her. The best way she saw to achieve autonomy and spiritual independence was to bulldoze the false personas of Jenny already cemented. She accomplished this by breaking cultural and religious taboos (extramarital affair, same-sex unions, shouting
Anderson’s novel discusses the harsh aftermath of an unwelcomed event and the travesty it wreaks on a young girl’s life. The struggle Melinda faces when trying to rebuild and restore herself because of a loss of innocence in “Speak” is relative to Anderson’s message of the importance of purity in children. “Night” also supports a similar message by showing the tribulations and troubles a kid faces early on in life when he has no time to come into his own. Anderson and Wiesel both build their stories on the basis of pain and isolation to express their message of the importance of simplicity and ignorance throughout the course of a child’s adolescence. Both authors show how innocence and purity are things that irreplaceable and the permanent change a young child faces when they are not shedded of these things against their own
Images inspired by Diamant’s work flooded my conscious. Perhaps I was experiencing flashes of my rememory, my collective unconscious coming to life on the paper in front of me. However, it was not just The Red Tent providing me with stimulation, but other works such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf, Mary Oliver’s “The Fish,” Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party” and The Book of Genesis. Each work embodied themes of childbirth and motherhood to self-love and social standing, in which I could find connections that affected me creatively. Aesthetically, I intended my visual art to be full and consistent in texture and fecund in my use of sensuous lines. My hope is to celebrate women and the strength that comes from battling adversity, challenge, victimization and in actualizing the power of childbirth. In all of these works, a connection is made: these are stories of women that need to be remembered and cel...
Alison feels that she has a connection to her father’s death because she feels that her decision to come out to her parents as a lesbian may have provoked his plans to kill himself. On page 59, Alison says that her father’s death came “so hard on the heels of this doleful coming-out party, I could not help but assume a cause-and-effect relationship”. I don’t believe