Fun House, By Alison Bechdel

In the article Skin Deep written by Nina Jablonski and George Chaplin, they discuss and look deeper into the diverse differences in skin color. Our skin color has developed over the years to be dark enough to prevent the damaging sunlight that has been harming our skin and the nutrient folate that it carries. At the same time out skin is light enough to receive vitamin D.

“Your life does not get better by chance, it gets better by change.” Jim Rohns quote highlights the basis of Debra Oswald’s play Gary’s house, and also Miroshav Holubs poem The Door. This essay will explore the notion that change causes people to shift their thinking and actions after significant catalysts. Gary’s House illustrates many of the issues and predicaments confronted by the characters and how their alteration in behaviour can have a beneficial outcome for them or others around them. The concept of "The Door" is based on the idea of taking risks and embracing change. The poet uses persuasive techniques to encourage and provoke the audience to take action.

Dorothy Allison’s essay, Panacea, recalls the fond childhood memories about her favorite dish, gravy. Allison uses vivid imagery to cook up a warm feeling about family meals to those who may be a poor family or a young mother. Appeal to the senses shows this warm feeling, along with a peaceful diction.

On page 6, she describes a female deer as having antlers. She doesn’t know any better, and this contributes to her childlikeness. Her thoughts give an in-depth look at how she behaves and sees her world. She is very sheltered. Coming from an upper-class family, she has these misconstrued thoughts about poor people. She believes if she ever met a poor person, they would treat her like royalty (9). This resembles how a younger child would act. Children don’t really have a concept of what things are like outside of their own lives, how things actually are, so they assume and make up things about other people. If readers were not told how old Alison was, they would go the entire story thinking she was much younger than 14. Saunders does this intentionally, I think, to make readers react to Alison in such a way as to provoke a very strong sense of pity for her. After the ordeal, Alison is having nightmares about what happened. She is impacted long after the event is over, even though her dreams do not match reality. We can deduce that from her dreams she might wish that the little boy would have really killed him, but she doesn’t admit this outright. We as readers feel the most for Alison. We almost ignore that her age is given because how childish her thoughts and actions are before the event. Afterwards, Alison no longer has these childlike thoughts or things play out in her mind. She seems to grow up in the blink of an eye, and this makes the reader’s

On the surface, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home seems simply to be a memoir of her journey towards discovering her own identity, and in the process, uncovering her father’s. However, the novel is far more complex. The graphic novel is not linear in the least, and mimics memory as it moves backwards and forwards in time, or returns to specific situations repeatedly. This is layered with the numerous references to previous literary texts in an interesting manner; combined, it provides emotional and informative layers to the novel. Bechdel starts to especially question binaries and pushes the boundaries of what it means to be a female and male in a relatively patriarchal society with no middle ground around the rules; as the novel shows, this affects not only Bechdel’s own pursuit towards her identity but has a significant, and ultimately fatal, impact on her father, Bruce.

Monkey Beach by Eden Robinson gave me incredible insight into the world of Aboriginal people. While you often hear stereotypes about these people, it is often difficult to really understand what their lives are truly like. I believe that because the aboriginal communities have had such a large impact on the history of Canada, especially in the northern communities, we should receive more information and education in our schools about their history. Many textbooks do include brief stories about residential schools, but they do not allow us to see what the impact of those schools has had on their communities as a whole, and how it effects many generations. Adding stories like Monkey Beach into high school curriculum would allow a broader understanding

On page 134 of Fun Home, Bechdel writes, “It was a vicious circle, though. The more gratification we found in our own geniuses, the more isolated we grew.” Illustrated along with this text is a large panel presenting the Bechdel household with circular panels drawn on the side of the house to detail the separate goings on inside each room. Each figure is also painted in a silhouetted form, creating a dissociated and an impersonal impression for which to view the Bechdel family. “While Bruce Bechdel is shown to have an explosive temper and be prone to the occasional violent outburst, it is the distance he creates in the household that seems to cause the most harm.” (Helvie) The separate, circular and interior panels could be representing

In Alison Bechdel 's Fun Home, there is a focus on a sculpted perception of gender roles produced by society and a great emphasis on how Bruce and Alison challenge these strict gender specific characteristics. Through Bruce’s femininity and Alison’s masculinity along with their homosexuality, they are able to go against the norms and the collection of rules set by society. It is also through their struggle with gender roles that one is able to understand their sexual orientation. Although Bruce and Alison seem fairly different from one another, there are elements that pull them closer together revealing their similarities.

The meaning of the poem “city park merry-go-round,” by Eli Mandel, is about how freedom is not truly what most people believe it is. Peoples view of freedom needs to be corrected with the way they have been viewing their every day life. Mandel suggests that there is only the illusion of opportunity to have freedom. The poem its self is representing the meaning with in its structure and usage of lines.

There are many things about the Bechdel family that set them apart from the average American household. The most the obvious difference is that they run a funeral home. Her childhood memories are of her and her brother being the home and among the caskets. One of the most important moments with her father, in fact, was when there was a body in between them and her father asked her to hand her scalpel. Their actual home however was also quite extraordinary due to her father's consistent and almost compulsive modifications to their home. Later on she will realize that her own sexuallity makes her unusual and her family has to deal with that as well. Alison is no stranger to the feeling of being “the other” however in her family, these feelings

Through my understanding of the book, Homeward Bound by Elaine Tyler May explores two traditional depictions of the 1950s, namely suburban domesticity and anticommunism. She intertwines both historical events into a captivating argument. Throughout the book, May aims to discover why “Post-war Americans accepted parenting as well as marriage with so much zeal” unlike their own parents and children. Her findings are that the “cold war ideology and domestic revival” were somewhat linked together. She saw “domestic containment” as an outgrowth of frights and desires that bloomed after the war. However, psychotherapeutic services were as much a boom then as now, and helped offer “private and personal solutions to social problems.” May reflects her views on the origin of domestic containment, and how it affected the lives of people who tried to live by it.

Throughout the novel, A House in the Sky, by Amanda Lindhout, the audience can identify the theme of emotion versus logic. Within the novel, the main character Amanda makes a lot of life changing decisions, which are based more towards her emotions than logic itself. This strongly impacts not only her life, but also those close to her. Amanda Lindhout’s A House in the Sky is an exemplary depiction of the ideas of feminist criticism, new historicism, and moral criticism. Although Lindhout describes the consequences that come from her decisions throughout the novel, she also stresses the aggravation that comes with being female. The novel, A House in the Sky, portrays the complications of female development and identity through the main character.

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.

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

There are many scenes where Alison has different hair colors and looks, and at one point she even takes on another identity. Her alter ego was a girl named Vivian Darkbloom, and Alison made Vivian into everything that she wanted to be, but wasn’t. There is one scene were Alison is talking to Hannah and she says “Sometimes I like pretending that I’m somebody else, haven’t you ever tried it?” (King, 2010). When Alison says this to Hannah, she says it in a tone of voice that makes the audience believe that Alison believed it was normal to take the place of another.