Alison Bechdel's Fun Home

922 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Portrayal of gays in media

Fun Home- more like undesirable home! Victory Gardens Theater presented its audience with an impeccable musical performance named Fun Home. The inspirational story of Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir Fun Home received five tony awards for its musical performance. In this graphic memoir, we are driven into the world of Alison and her family discovering the intense impact sexual orientation has on this family. As this musical play unravels it becomes more intense with the issues of a family whose unsure of their identity. Fun Home brings you to the center life of Alison. At an early age she discovers the teeth chittering reality of life. Alison discovers while she is in college her sexual orientation, she is a lesbian. Alison's father, Bruce, commits suicide letting himself be hit by a truck. As these events unfold, we are presented with the focus of sexuality and the difficulty of revealing one's true sexual orientation. The acting in this musical performance was breathtaking …show more content…

Her musical performance is unique because she does a great job moving her whole body and making the audience laugh when she sang the verse "We got Kleenex and your choice of psalm". In addition, her musical performance is consistent throughout the play and Bruce's musical performance was nice, when he sang a scene with his family he mentions the lyrics "Everything is balanced and serene", and makes the audience believe he and his family have things under control when in reality he is facing an internal struglle to reveal that he is gay to his family. Medium Allison musical performance is amazing at the end of the play when she sings "Fly" and extends her arms like a bird resembling how free she is now that she has revealed her true

Show More
Related

  • Finding Her Father In Alison Bechdel's Fun Home

    1505 Words  | 4 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Fun Home By Allison Bechdel

    722 Words  | 2 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • Personal Essay: Themes In Alison Bechdel's Fun Home

    1511 Words  | 4 Pages

    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

    Read More

  • Mental Illness Or Borderline Personality Disorder In Fun Home By Alison Bechdel

    1621 Words  | 4 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • The Theme Of Appearance Versus Reality In Fun Home By Alison Bechdel

    1346 Words  | 3 Pages

    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

    Read More

  • Comparison Of Alison Bechdel's Fun Home And The Great Gatsby

    792 Words  | 2 Pages

    In Fun Home, Alison principally characterizes her desire for a masculine life while trying to find herself in an environment

    Read More

  • Fun Home Alison Bechdel Analysis

    1389 Words  | 3 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • Hedwig and the Angry Inch

    1986 Words  | 4 Pages

    Butler, Judith. "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory." Theatre Journal 40.4 (1988): 519-31. The Johns Hopkins University Press. Web. 11 May 2011.

    Read More

  • Homosexuality In The Glee

    1131 Words  | 3 Pages

    In this paper, I interviewed 3 different people about their opinions on the gay and lesbian representation in the Musical Television show Glee. All the three people I interviewed have at least some familiarity with the show (they all watched at least 5 episodes of the show.) The first people I interviewed was my roommate Qiu, who has been watching the show over and over again for years. I also interviewed my boss Herman, a middle age male (around 30 years old) who watched the show occasionally for fun; and my friend’s eleventh-grade sister Lily, a big fan of musical shows.

    Read More

  • The Characteristics Of Criticism In The Handmaid's Tale

    2571 Words  | 6 Pages

    The Handmaid 's Tale is set in Republic of Gilead in Cambridge, MA. The narrator/protagonist is Offred she is a handmaid for the Commander and his wife Serena Joy. Offred like other handmaids in the Republic of Gilead main obligation is to bare a child for the couples they are assigned to.

    Read More

  • Sexual Self-Discovery in Fun Home by Allison Bechdel

    1178 Words  | 3 Pages

    ...within her household. Within her own household, Alison was uncomfortable of being herself; in fact, at times she felt that she almost had no say in the selecting items such as clothes. This was also quite complex when it came to her subjectivity as well. Instances such as the time Bruce wanted Alison to wear a particular dress to a wedding, or when he insisted for her to were a particular set of pearls, would play a pivotal role in her sexual self development. Other factors such as her relationship with her girlfriend and the news she would find out following her fathers death seemed to also play an important part. Alison Bechdel’s battle in her sexual self-development was one full of anguish and pain because of all of its complexities but she now presents the confidence in herself and her sexuality to present in her eloquent and impactful graphic novel, Fun Home.

    Read More

  • What is a Homosexual?

    1010 Words  | 3 Pages

    Andrew Sullivan, author of, What is a Homosexual, portrays his experience growing up; trapped in his own identity. He paints a detailed portrait of the hardships caused by being homosexual. He explains the struggle of self-concealment, and how doing so is vital for social acceptation. The ability to hide one’s true feelings make it easier to be “invisible” as Sullivan puts it. “The experience of growing up profoundly different in emotional and psychological makeup inevitably alters a person’s self-perception.”(Sullivan)This statement marks one of the many reasons for this concealment. The main idea of this passage is to reflect on those hardships, and too understand true self-conscious difference. Being different can cause identity problems, especially in adolescents.

    Read More

  • Fun Home: A Literary Analysis

    1425 Words  | 3 Pages

    In Fun Home: A Family Tragic Comic, Alison Bechdel uses the graphic novel technique of bringing visuals and concise text to her audience to reveal the relationship with her father in a perspective that can not be modified through the readers perspective and interpretation. Bechdel employs this type of writing style to help visualize a better interpretation of how she describes the differences in both her and her fathers’ gender roles throughout the novel. This tactic helps discuss and show how these gender roles were depicted as opposite from one another. But, in this case being opposite from one another made them gain a stronger relationship of understanding and reviling that these differences were actually similarities they also shared.

    Read More

  • Nature vs. Nurture Essay

    2113 Words  | 5 Pages

    The sexual orientation of a person has been a critical debate over the past several centuries. For several...

    Read More

  • gay literature

    1585 Words  | 4 Pages

    In the face of a homophobic society we need creative and critical processes that draw out the complexity of lesbian lives and same sex choices, not a retreat into the comforting myths of heroines and unfractured, impeachable identities

    Read More

More about Alison Bechdel's Fun Home

Open Document