Alison Bechdel

Considering Fun Home as a mystery novel, Bruce Bechdel’s death serves as the inciting incident which spurs Alison Bechdel to look through the “clues” -- memories, letters, photographs, etc. -- to formulate a judgment about her father’s life. Throughout the novel, it’s clear Alison’s relationship with her parents is tumultuous. Due to her father’s uptight, perfectionist nature, Bechdel finds it difficult to attain his approval and criticize him; moreover, she describes showing him affection “an even dicier adventure [than criticizing him]” (19). She often views her parents in a fictitious sense versus a realistic one; in fact, her “parents are more real to [her] in fictional terms” (67). Seeing her father as a mythic character -- hence, the…

tragicomic Fun Home, author and cartoonist Alison Bechdel writes about her dysfunctional family, struggles with her sexuality, and her relationship with her father. In the fourth chapter of her book, Bechdel illustrates the similarities between herself and her father, Bruce Bechdel. Her discovery of her Dad’s hidden photos reveals the underlying secrets that she and he both share. This discovery also identifies the characteristics that translate from Bruce to Alison Bechdel such as…

However, the support Alison was able to develop on her own, and receive from her extremely liberal college allowed her to lead a life where she found a happy balance between the two restrictive socially imposed regulations on life. However, her father, because he never found a balance, he either was shamelessly and destructively indulging his desires, or aggressively repressing them, was lead to his death. He couldn’t grow out of the world he surrounded himself by as a youth, he kept it with him…

The Child of Fun Home Put simply, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home is an autobiographical graphic novel about what it means to reject “the Child”: the unwilling heir to family and society that we project our future onto. To continue the legacy of the Child is to turn the eternal wheel of heteronormative succession, a subservient maintenance of a status quo embedded deep within society. Diametrically opposed to “the Child” then is queerness, the simple act of refusing the reproductive and reductive…

I believe that if Alison Bechdel’s memoir would have proceeded in a chronological order then reading it would not have had the same effect on the reader. Up until page 17, the reader can sense that something isn’t quite right with Bruce Bechdel. He could hardly be bothered to engage in a facile game of “airplane” (3) with his ten-year-old daughter. On page 6, Alison calls her father, “an alchemist of appearance, a savant of surface, a Daedalus of décor” because all of Bruce’s time and energy…

Both the graphic narrative and the film do an incredible job depicting family life. In the graphic novel by Alison Bechdel one thing I immediately picked up on was Alison’s relationship with her father. It was almost as if she used her relationship with her father to grab my attention as a reader and draw me in. I can truly say that it worked because I could immediately relate to her very early on into reading the story. As the story progressed the author delved very deep into her family life.…

Fun Home is a graphic novel by Alison Bechdel, depicting her fictionalized life as a younger self among her family. Many themes and important passages occurred throughout the text such as, the concept of double identity and how both Alison and Bruce Bechdel, her father, handled their sexuality and expressed it. “I had recently discovered some of Dad 's old clothes. Putting on a formal shirt with its studs and cufflinks was a nearly mystical pleasure, like finding myself fluent in a language I 'd…

In Fun Home, Alison Bechdel writes, “Our family was a sham… That our house was not a real home at all but the simulacrum of one, a museum.” (17) Throughout the graphic memoir, Bechdel presents her family as living in an artificial world: a façade of a perfect and united family mainly perpetuated by Bruce Bechdel’s disconnection from the family. As Bechdel reflects upon her unique upbringing in her graphic memoir, she explores the cause of her father’s distant presence. Bechdel specifically…

Often times, the female characters exist only to support the male characters or as romantic or sexual objects. In order to combat sexism like the objectification of women, cartoonist Alison Bechdel drew a comic about women’s roles in films, which eventually brought about the Bechdel Test (Bechdel, A, 1985) (See Appendix B for comic). This test has three requirements: (a) Are there two named characters? (b) Do they speak to each other? (c) Do they talk about something other than a man (Bechdel,…

For my argumentative CLEW I read Fun Home by Alison Bechdel and analyzed the characterization in the story, through my analyzation, I am trying to prove that the actions of the parent (Alison’s dad in this case), may influence the actions and lifestyle of their child and through the story the author reveals this by showing how in some ways the father acts like a woman and how he is trying to push gender roles onto his daughter, whereas she acts more like a boy. If you pay attention, throughout…