Artificial Identity In Alison Bechdel's Fun Home

Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home is a postmodern story about her relationship with her father, a gay man who made his family miserable because he denied what he was. Her memoir questions her relationship with her father and analyzes how their family was not as they appeared. The interior reality of her family is different from its exterior perception. Fun Home references the Icarus myth when Alison balances on her father’s feet. Imprisoned by King Minos, Icarus’s father constructs wings made of wax so that they could escape, but Icarus ignores his father’s warning and flies to close to the sun. His wings melted, and he crashed to the earth and died. Bechdel states that it was actually her father who fell from the sky and not her (1619). Her father later commits

suicide.

Perhaps, like Icarus, he did not listen to his internal warnings to be true to himself. This artificial identity (family man and heterosexual husband) led to his destruction. She also compares her father to Daedalus when it comes to remodeling and decorating the family home and his disregard for another’s feelings (1626). Bechdel’s writing embodies New Sincerity because of Bechdel’s authentic portrayal of her father. She honestly admits to her father’s failings and her family’s dysfunction. She lived in a home that reminded her of Jimmy Stewart’s fixer upper in the movie It’s a Wonderful Life, and she openly admits to her father’s tendency to behave like a half-bull, half-man monster when things did not go the way he wanted (1627). She exposes her family for what they were and did not how they should be. Bechdel writes that “[h]e used his skillful artifice not to make things, but to make things appear…impeccable” (1631). Her family life was far from authentic. Her father was lying about his sexuality and hiding behind the false front of the ideal family. Bechdel’s account her father’s life shows a man who hides

behind a lie.

The video montage of the Fun Home musical reminded me of another musical that has a similar theme. Next to Normal deals with a family struggling with mental illness. As with Fun Home, this family tries to appear normal and the effect it has on her family.

I noticed that the producers did a good job selecting characters that look like the illustrated characters. It must be difficult to make a graphic novel into a play, and I wondered if there were extra scenes added to the play that weren’t in the novel.