Fun Home: A Literary Analysis

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.

Therefore, Fun Home: A Family Tragic Comic demonstrates that this novel is a memoir of her growing past relationship with her father which was not recognized in the beginning, only throughout the book that actually show their relationship grow.
In contrast, to the whole concept of Bechdel using her graphic novel to reveal her relationship with her father and how they both differ in the whole gender role norm, it is stated, “Fun Home's structure is recursive rather than linear, returning again and again to' the same sites of emotional pain: the author's coming out, her father's suicide, the pressures of compulsory heterosexuality, the always-impossible search for lost time.” (Tolmie 1) While Tolmie discusses that Bechdel’s memoir is more pointed to this concept, it does not further discuss the relationship she had built with her father throughout the story. It did discuss the matter of the pressure of compulsory heterosexuality, but this just goes more in depth on the she evolves in her concept of how she identifies with her own gender role and sexual orientation throughout the story. By this point, it really avoids the major aspect of how this novel focuses heavily on her relationship with her father. The readers also gain a better visual on how they are similar because of the matter that they both go against the gender role norms society has already set. There are many different scenes in the book that hint at the fact that both go against those gender roles such as how Bechdel describes her father in her illustrations as having a more feminine side which consists of being fond of flowers, decorating, and being very fashionable. While she is illustrating herself as a tomboy who does not care for “girly things” such as dressing up in dresses or jewelry, engaging in overly feminine activities. This memoir that Bechdel created was to show these major differences and how at the end of the novel she realizes that both her father and herself were very similar and are going through same situations but in a more opposite reality.
In particular, the major scene that goes about explaining both her and her father’s differences in gender role is the scene where they were both getting ready to go to a wedding. In this scene, Bechdel discusses how she is wearing the “least girly dress in the store” and her father is wearing a suit out of “velvet” (98). In society norm, the female would want to dress extravagantly for an event like a wedding while the male counterpart would just wear a normal presentable suit. From this, she also points out when her father gets all into gardening and doing any other hobby that involves flowers and is least interactive when he is playing baseball with her and her brothers. In these scenes, you can tell that Bechdel points out how she dislikes the gardening activities with her father and is more active when she plays baseball with her brothers later on (90-91). In these scenes, the societal norms would have been incorporating the father as very active in playing baseball with his children, which comes from the interpretation in where it is a father’s duty to play catch with his children. As for Bechdel’s depiction of herself in a societal norm, people would think little girls would love anything to do with flowers or gardening, which was broken when she had more fun interacting in baseball than the gardening activities. From these different scenes that she depict in her novel they support the how they interact in the different gender roles.
With this in mind, Bechdel employs how her father would try to express his feminine side through her, which open her eyes to how they both are inversions of one another. She points this out by saying, “Not only were we inverts. We were inversions of one another.” While I was trying to compensate for something unmanly in him…he was attempting to express something feminine through me.” (98) This statement explains that at that point she figured out that both she and her father are expressing different gender roles either by themselves or even using one another they are also experiencing similar situations which are shown in her novel. This is well explained in the scene where her father always nagged her about not wearing her barrette and also threatens her by saying, “Next time I see you without it, I’ll wale you” this shows that feminine side that is expressed through her. But, that moment she goes off to play with her older cousins that call her “Butch” as a nickname, which is very masculine and helps understand how they see her as a part of their masculine group of guys playing basketball (96-97). From these scenes that help depict how both she and her father express themselves through each other trying to either compensate for something masculine or feminine that is simply different from their own gender roles.
That is to say, Bechdel discussed the impact on how different she and her fathers’ perception of their own gender roles lead to understanding each other in the end. There are many hints that her father was also trying to give her more information later on in the book to help her in her identification as a lesbian. From these little hints, she also realized how her own father was also struggling with his own identity of being either a straight male and at the same time knowing he also identifies himself as gay. In the car scene where she discusses with her father why he help her by giving her the Colette book. In that instant he said, “It was just a guess. I guess there was some kind of – identification.” there he then started to discuss on his first moments of how he began to identify as a gay man. He then went on talking about similar things Bechdel has done when she was younger and with that she depicted this scene as an overwhelming relief that they both had become even closer then hiding the fact they were very similar in the end. By getting to this point in their lives, they shared those similarities and express themselves like a giant weight has been lifted.
To conclude with, Bechdel’s novel Fun Home: A Family Tragic Comic demonstrates that this memoir main point was to discuss and depict her own relationship with her father.

This novel went into how she and her father both were similar in how they expressed and experienced their own identification in gender roles. Either it being shown in their own way or even it is being through one another, they did not realize how close they were until she understood herself at the end. This then became the opening to them discusses their life experiences that involved identifying with another gender, which made them gain a better understanding about each other. The reason why the readers gain this perspective was how she used this graphic novel technique to become concise and obtain a mutual understanding in what she was expressing and explaining throughout the novel. With this mutual understanding of how she made this graphic novel, then the readers can focus more on how in the beginning they thought they were very different people, but later on grew to understand that both choose different gender roles. This gave them many similar outcomes, which help them grow even closer than they were before. With that Bechdel stated at the end, “ He did hurtle into the sea, of course. But in the tricky reserved narrative that impels our entwined stories, he was there to catch me when I leapt.”, which suggest that even if he is gone in real life he is still a part of her life’s

history.