Fun House, Not So Fun

Tyler, Anne. "Teenage Wasteland." Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing. Ed. X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. 12th ed. Boston: Longman, 2012. 188-95. Print.

Bechdel’s fight for her gender identity was a constant in Fun Home, as was Bruce’s attempts to force femininity onto her, driven by his need to express his gender identity vicariously through her. Bechdel’s writing explains the obvious expressions of gender identity such as page 14 when Bruce decorated Bechdel’s room femininely despite her protests, prompting her to claim that her house was going to be made of all metal. But the illustrations depict the less obvious manifestations of gender identity. On page 95, we see Bechdel calling herself a, “connoisseur of masculinity,” with a Western film playing while her father is in the background arranging flowers (Bechdel, 95).

He finally realizes the truth about his daughter, which I believe eternally, hurts him. Why is Bruce so upset over this realization? Bruce does not want to see his daughter suffer through the same fate as he has encountered throughout the years. He has lived a life filled with lies; therefore, his life is filled with regret and unfulfillment. He wants what every father wants for his daughter, to be successful with a family of her own. For example, we can see throughout Fun Home that Bruce makes his daughter wear jewelry and feminine clothes, despite her complete distaste to the feminine style. There are three occurrences where Allison and her father are fighting about jewelry to wear (97). Allison refuses to wear pearls to the, but her father insists because there is an internal alarm going off in his head (99). As a child Bruce dressed himself as a girl, now as an adult he wants to prevent his daughter from cross dressing (221). Essentially when we arrive at the car scene Bruce was trying to prevent his daughter from becoming like him. The ultimate realization of his daughter’s sexuality unfolds and to him, he has failed his job of preventing this from happening. Understanding the movement and background we can understand the actual conversation between the two characters. This is crucial to understanding the larger predicament of the situation.

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

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is an autobiography written by Alison Bechdel. The graphic novel takes its readers through Alison Bechdel’s childhood using engaging diction and detailed drawings. One of the big themes of Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is the discovery of one’s sexual orientation. Over the course of her life, Alison Bechdel eventually comes to the realization that she is a lesbian. Ultimately, Alison Bechdel uses this novel to recount her experience of events that helped to shape her personal identity, which resulted in a transformation of the way she sees herself. In the end, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is a wonderful narrative that shows its readers the complexity of personal identity, and how things like love, the values of

On October 27, Robert Gipe gave a reading from his graphic novel, Trampoline. In the introduction given by Marianne Worthington from the University of the Cumberlands, she emphasized the importance of telling Appalachian stories for themselves. After years of outside authors stereotyping Appalachian culture in their work and these messages being spread, many authors in the region are beginning to reclaim Appalachian stories, telling them for their real work. In fact, Worthington even described Gipe as a protector of Appalachian culture and language. Another important part of Gipe’s graphic novel that Worthington emphasized was the importance of the female narrator, Dawn Jewell, as one in the long tradition of Appalachian female characters. In Gipe’s reading, Dawn certainly has an interesting home life and personality. Dawn’s mother is a drug addict and her father has also left the family. Dawn has a bitter tone and a dark sense of humor. This is particularly seen in an example of her working in the copy shop

In the following essay, I shall be exploring the representation of identity in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, mainly through a postcolonial feminist lens. My analysis will focus on Bruce and Alison’s interactions with each other and how Bechdel deconstructs the stereotypical ideals of gender roles and sexuality, via intertextual references.

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

In Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Alison Bechdel composes a graphic memoir to inform readers about her journey of coming out as a lesbian to her parents. To add to this note, Bechdel also gives details about her family and how she discovers her father’s true sexuality – he is attracted to males. She builds the story around the tragic event of her father’s mysterious death.

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

“Caption: My father killed himself and I became a lesbian cartoonist.” That opening line captivated my peers and me and brought us into the wild ride that was Fun Home the musical. Based off of Alison Bechdel’s comic-style novel by the same name, the musical became a Broadway sensation. Only labeled as “Based on,” the musical does an incredible job staying true to the novel. While alike in a significant number of ways, the musical’s focus is more towards the side of Alison’s growing up and learning about her sexuality than her father.

He was the glue that held the whole dysfunctional family together and it was his mysterious and depraved manner that compelled me to turn each twisted page. Bechdel also mentions her family again in the acknowledgments at the end of her book, “Thanks to Helen, Christian, and John Bechdel for not trying to stop me from writing this book”. This brought up the question, what does her family think about her writing her autobiography? Alison exposes many intensely personal family secrets in her

Rose doesn’t fully understand why her mother is depressed, why slut shaming is inappropriate, or why she herself feels dissatisfied with her vacation. She is being introduced to new scenarios, those of which can be very perplexing for a young person who has not dealt with them before. This graphic novel is not meant for children of a young age, but instead serves young adults who may be confused or curious about their new found interest in sexuality, or who are in need of a character to relate

This pepper identifies and analyses some of the highlights found in the culture narrative of a visual comic memoir titled “The Complete Persepolis” by Marjane Satrapi, and a culture storyline, “Code White” by Debra Anderson. Starting with “The Complete Persepolis” the book is about Satrapi’s experience as she transitions from a young woman into adulthood in Rasht, Iran and Vienna, Australia during and after the Islamic and culture revolution between the periods of 1979-1995. The first published in France, in French language in 2000, and English version 2003 in New York. As for “Code White” it’s a fiction cultural narrative about a Queer woman Alex who finds herself in a mental health hospital in Toronto, Canada. Analyzing these books, and the, concepts such as ideological practices, stereotypes, and feminism, as well as terms of ability, ablebodiness and feminist power gives insight about ways in which systems of oppression related to race, class, gender, ability, feminist sexuality are culturally re-enforced within a society. But also through feminist these cultural ideologies can be deconstructed with the goal to gain economic and class equality among all people. This essay focus in Marjane Satrapi and ways she resists to the culture narratives of the veil in relation to gender class and sexuality. The second part pays a closer attention to the Code White and the representation of the character of Alex and her tactics to resist to mental illness, and stereotypes attached