Old Father, Old Artificer '

The chapter “Old Father, Old Artificer” in Alison Bechdel’s “Fun Home” creates a depressing and sad image of her father. All of her life her father Bruce was hiding behind a well designed “gorgeous” house and a seemingly perfect family. In reality, he was very controlling and bitter. From the beginning, Bechdel reveals to us who her father really was; the images expressed showed an unhappy man who looked “dead”. A theme that is clearly on display in this is the underlying struggle between appearance and reality. Bechdel’s father never could let go of how highly he held the value of appearance. Everything seemed to be proper, until you get deeper into the story and find out more. The amount of time he spent focused on his home’s appearance was an …show more content…
He pretended to have perfection. His family, however, was not inside his world. With a lot of focus on what others think of him, Bechdel’s father ignored and neglected his family, as well as his own emotions, losing control of himself, and not really knowing his true self, as if he was living in a fairy tale. Bruce's insecurity creates constant tension around the house, and his children never know whether to expect anger or kindness from him, He tries to control his family, in doing this his children got pushed away. By trying to create a perfect world, he overlooked the love that Alison Bechdel had for him and it hurt his children. “I grew to resent the way my father treated his furniture like children, and his children like furniture.” Bechdel’s father cherished the presentation that he gave, he was obsessed with it. And his children were objects in that perfect presentation. To him, they were just objects that could be manipulated, they had no deeper value . He was perfect at creating an image, but the image had no value, since it was artificially put together. He lost track of the importance of doing things for himself, his family, and for personal