Family Secrets In Alison Bechdel's Fun Home

In Marcia Cohen's article "Betty Friedan Destroys the Myth of the Happy Housewife," it is evident that Friedan, despite not intending to envoke a revolution, aspired for change, emerged as a powerful role model, and made substantial contributions towards expanding prospects for women in the contemporary world. Betty Friedan was a woman who refused to plead for attention; instead, she compelled people to give it to her. As Jame Thurber says, "beautiful things don't ask for attention," and he was right, as she proved her beauty inside. She decided to make her own magazine, The Feminine Mystique, and exposed the truth behind the "picture perfect" housewife, and she would talk to women about their satisfaction with their roles. Through her questioning,

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls is a memoir about her life growing up with her dysfunctional family. Jeannette and her siblings in poverty and were very independent due to their parents. The Glass Castle should be a required summer reading for the class of 2019. The story gives reader a chance to view the world in a different meaningful perspective of a poor happy child. It also helps guide readers with meaningful advice.

Memoirs and Authenticity: Paper 2 Jack Kenny In the personal memoir Fun House by Allison Bechdel, specifically chapters one and three, Bechdel recalls her challenging upbringing and familial relationships with her mother Helen and father Bruce, as well as the circumstances surrounding her father's death or suicide. Bechdel’s memories and personal opinions on her upbringing, relationships, and her father's death or suicide are her own. Bechdel clearly holds the opinion that her father's death was no accident and that her relationship with him was both distant and cold. Bechdel examines and transitions between personal experiences from her childhood, aiding her emotionally detached and perfectionistic father's obsessive creation of an elaborate and superficial illusion of wealth and the “perfect family” at the expense of meaningful emotional

In the memoir The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, demonstrates a certain type of parenting that may be uncommon. The Walls parents have a different type of parenting style. They want their kids to learn from their own mistakes, teaching them right from wrong. The certain parenting style that relates to them would be permissive parents. Permissive parenting, have few demands to make of their children. These parents rarely discipline their children because they have relatively low expectations of maturity and self-control (Cherry, The Four Styles of Parenting). The kids had to learn to fend for themselves on their own because their parents weren’t going to hand it to them. “None of us kids got allowances. When we wanted money, we walked along

Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, documents the author's discovery of her own and her father's homosexuality. The book touches upon many themes, including, but not limited to, the following: sexual orientation, family relationships, and suicide. Unlike most autobiographical works, Bechdel uses the comics graphic medium to tell her story. By close-reading or carefully analyzing pages fourteen through seventeen in Fun Home one can get a better understanding of how a Bechdel employs words and graphic devices to render specific events. One can also see how the specific content of the pages thematically connects to the book as a whole. As we will see, this portion of the book echoes the strained relationship

We are all living in a society that is filled with social expectations of gender. From our early age, we seem to be able to response to these expectations accordingly. For example, we notice Barbies are for girls while robots and cars are for boys only. In the “Performative Gender”, “Doing Gender”, and “Nerd Box”, authors all indicate gender is learned instead of inherited. They bring out their insightful observation and critical personal experience to illustrate how the social expectations with punitive effects construct our gender unconsciously. These articles provide a great lens for us to understand the mental state and behaviors of the main characters in Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. In Fun Home, Alison Bechdel portrays how living in Beech Creek, Pennsylvania during the 1930s not only repressed both her father, Bruce, and her from coming out as a homosexual and genderqueer, but also trapped her mother, Helen, in her “women box”. Through the graphic memoir, Fun Home is able to present the struggling process that one may need to go through before admitting one’s unusual gender identity and sexual orientation.

“Even after they’d been married and had their own families and often couldn’t make it for other occasions, the four daughters always came home for their father’s birthday” (Alvarez, 2010, p. 24). We live in a culture of where

In Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, we learn about Bechdel’s parents, Helen and Bruce, and their role in her early life. Specifically, Bechdel constructs a narrative around her father’s death, allegedly a suicide. Young Bechdel lives in Pennsylvania with her parents and her two brothers. Her parents had been living in Europe, where they met, but Bruce was forced to come home after his father’s death to take over the family business – a funeral home (which the children often call the “fun home”). Alison’s father meticulously decorates and improves their old Gothic revival home.

The way Bechdel decides to depict the characters through her art is a major factor in how the characters are developed, and can be a major factor in how the story is perceived. At a first glance, the depiction of Bechdel’s persona, Alison, in “Are You My Mother?” appears to have very masculine features. An uninformed reader may at first assume that the story is about a man. However, through the dialogue and narration it is quickly revealed that the drawings are depictive of a homosexual woman. Bechdel’s portrayal of herself in the graphics as having very masculine features says a lot about her self-perception. She creates her own persona, so the character seen in the cartoons is Bechdel in her own image and likeness. Clearly, Bechdel illustrated her comic so that the character bared a strong resemblance to her own self-image. Later on in the story, starting on page 83, Alison is depicted wearing glasses and she bears a much stronger resemblance to actual pictures of Bechdel. In several scenes throughout the story, including the opening scene, Bechdel has dreams of herself as a child. These scenes showed a young Alison, dressed in what would widely be considered boys clothing (Bechdel 73). The illustrations as a whole are very sexually ambiguous. This may be perceived as an allusion to Bechdel’s struggles with her own sexuality. However, the refrences to Bechdel’s struggles go beyond the art.

For example, “As a youth, I am told, I was willful, self-absorbed, intermittently reckless, moody. I disappointed

Picking up the book Fun Home, one would imagine that the novel would embellish some sort of comical life story of a misunderstood teenager. Although the short comic-book structured novel does have its sarcastic humor, Alison Bechdel explains her firsthand account of growing up with the difficulty of living of finding her true identity. Alison was a teenager in college when she discovered that she was a lesbian, however, the shock came when she also discovered her father was homosexual. I feel that the most influencing panel in Fun Home is where Alison and her father are in the car alone together. Not only does this panel explain the entirety of the novel in a few short speech bubbles, but it is the defining scene that connects

That shows how her father was afraid to tell her family about who really he was, and his relationships with other men. Alison was different than her father by being more honest with her

An emphasis on family is one of the central facets of Native American culture. There is a sense of community between Native American. Louise Erdrich, a Chippewa Indian herself, writes a gripping bildungsroman about a thirteen year old boy named Joe who experiences all forms of family on the Native American Reserve where he lives. He learns to deal with the challenges of a blood family, witnesses toxic family relationships, and experiences a family-like love from the members of the community. In her book, The Round House, Louise Erdrich depicts three definitions of the word family and shows how these relationships affect Joe’s development into an adult.

Alison Bechdel’s memoir, Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama, focuses on Alison and her relationship with her mother. Her relationship with her mother affects the way she relates to people, especially her mother. Bechdel begins this portrayal of Alison’s relationship with her mother on the cover of the book. The red, wood-like background of the cover of the book, is behind all of the other objects. This background is most likely a desk or table of some sort with several objects sitting on top of it. Firstly, I notice the mirror. Mirrors are typically seen as a symbol of self-indulgence and vainness. The mirror is golden and the title of the book, Are You My Mother? is placed in the mirror itself. Secondly, I see the red beaded necklace. The beads are not completely on the book cover. Beads, jewelry, and the color red are often seen as signs of affluence and richness. Next, I see the black and white picture. What appears to be two females are present in the picture. One is older than the other. The woman in the picture looks like she is sitting and appears to be smoking and reading some sort of book, magazine, or newspaper. There is a girl off to the left side of the woman in the picture, clasping her hands, smiling, and watching the woman from a distance. Finally, I notice the lipstick on the cover. The lipstick is in a white container with a gold band. I can clearly see that it is a red shade of lipstick. Again, red lipstick is usually seen worn on someone of importance.

Part graphic memoir and part psychoanalytical study, Alison Bechdel’s, Fun Home, is a charming story about a girl’s search for identity within an unconventional family. The novel style autobiography frames Alison’s childhood and adolescence as she struggles with themes of sexual confusion, gender identity, and convoluted family dynamics. These ideas are explored through the examination of Alison’s relationship with her father, and their shared passion for literature.