The Bluest Eye And Alison Bechdel 's Fun Home Essay

Women. When hearing that word alone, you think of weakness, their insignificance, and how lowly they are viewed in society. Females can be seen as unworthy or nothing without a man if they are not advocating them and are constantly being treated differently from men. However, in the book, “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison, they live up to their reputations for how they view themselves. Specifically, being focused on women like Pecola, and Claudia. They are often questioning their worth from society’s judgement of beauty. Though one character, Frieda embraces it despite being black. With having everything temporary, the desire of grasping and having something permanent increases. The women desires to be of

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.

In society the purpose of gender roles is to group people into two opposite categories, men and women. These categories however, encourage toxic masculinity and gender inequality. In movies or books characters tend to fall into one category, when in reality most people don’t fit into just one. Shakespeare explores the idea of conformity and categorization in Macbeth. In Macbeth, the characters conformity to gender roles are the root of all their problems.

Alison Bechdel’s memoir, Fun Home, is a compelling narrative in which Bechdel takes the reader through her life and gives insight into her relationship and the complex lifestyle her closeted homosexual father, Bruce Bechdel. However, her serious topic is told through the narrative of comics, images that literally put the readers into the moments of her life with her. Even though, the graphic images provide visual insight, Bechdel makes a conscious decision to include a multitude of literary allusions because, as Bechdel describes, “I employ these allusions to James and Fitzgerald not only as descriptive devices, but because my parent’s are most real to me in fictional terms.” (Bechdel, Page 67) Her continued use of literary allusions can be seen as an insight to her life. The particular works of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Oscar Wilde’s plays An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Ernest because of their content concerning facades and the lengths one person goes through to keep a part of their identity or life a secret. TRANSITION Bruce Bechdel was the master of secrecy, hiding a part of his sexuality behind his heterosexual marriage in order to keep his idea of an acceptable livelihood. It is clear that Bruce Bechdel had a few infidelities with males throughout Bechdel’s childhood, infidelities that she did not know until later in life. This creates a whole new perceptive for Bechdel. The father who she thought as a controlling, stern, literary fein

In Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, the author enlightens us with her struggles in determining her gender identity and sexuality. She does this in a very unique fashion. Alison, throughout the novel, uses specific pieces of literature and writing in order for the reader to decipher her true emotions and feelings toward her sexuality. On top of that, Bechdel writes her story in order to show how these objects play a much deeper role between not only comprehending her sexuality, but her understanding of her choppy relationship with her father. The end result is a series of connections that bring the two closer together than they ever were.

Using Judith Butler’s philosophy on gender, Cameron reinforces the idea that gender is a social construct “reaffirmed by repeated stylization of the body” and speech (Cameron. 63). She also points to how speech and language also create differences between the gendered binary (Cameron. 64). By Tim O’Brien calling his characters “actors”, he is illustrating the idea that male gender norms are made to be performed (O’Brien. 348). Masculinity and male gender roles are more heavily scrutinized and surveilled in a war zone. War is socialized to connected to hypermasculinity and men are thought to have a macho gusto in order to

Parents are the first role models that children are exposed to, making them immensely influential in the development of a child’s personality. The diverse group of parents in The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, demonstrate the consequences of bad parenting on a child. Being set in 1940’s America, the black community in the book is still not fully accepted by society, and racism plays a significant role in the character’s lives. Here, readers are introduced to the Breedloves, a dysfunctional black family that is outcast from their community. Throughout the book, the parenting experienced by the Breedloves alters their perception of love, setting them up for failure as a

It is inevitable that society has made a stereotype for the definition on what it means to be a man or a woman, it was stated and believed a long time ago and has just moved through life, generation after generation. Society believes that men are the workers and providers and essentially the strength of the family, and women take more of a nurturing and caring role. From this, a man’s physical strength is portrayed as being strong and brave at superior and horrific times, yet through literature like Shakespeare’s Macbeth, it shows that they can end up weak. There are many times in William Shakespeare’s play, Macbeth, where the acts of “reverse-gender roles” are being detected in terms of what

As Judith Butler once said, “Masculine and feminine roles are not biologically fixed but socially constructed.” Throughout history and even today, being too masculine and being too feminine affects society's views on people. Individuals can’t be too much of one thing or they will ultimately be judged. Throughout, City of Thieves, characters are illustrated as withholding subversions and conformations to the established gender roles. Consequently, David Benioff uses City of Thieves to illustrate subverting and conforming gender roles through the main characters, Kolya, Lev, and Vika.

Although Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home demonstrate pronounced differences in setting and design, both novels employ a reflective narration of the past to address common themes of trauma, unorthodox family relationships, and sexuality. Both stories utilize this retrospective narrative to expose masculinity’s stratified hegemony as a driving force of internalized shame, violence, and the death of self. As The Bluest Eye’s Cholly and Fun Home’s Bruce are examined in terms of hegemonic masculinity’s influence, the common themes in both works can be understood as a result of masculinity’s hierarchical ascendency.

It has come to my attention that “the Hideous Strength” has some important information that help me portray some gender roles. We discussed some roles these past classes, we only cover chapter 1 through 6 but hoping to finish through chapter 17. Chapters 1 through 17 would be the only concern for this essay. There was a number of questions prepared for us to discuss in our essays. I’m going towards the genders roles, there are 4 questions that I will cover to help me interpret this novel. The questions are what is the attitude toward gender roles? , who represents which gender? , what symbolism represents gender? , Are gender stereotypes reinforced?

In this essay, both male and female characters will be analyzed using a feminist lens. There were

This essay examines the ideologies of gender, which are conveyed in society to question the reality between the relationship of femininity and masculinity. This comes from recognition of gender as a social construct, and that there is an apparent difference in the expectation of how women should behave and present themselves. The focus is therefore on the construction of femininity, why is it that only women wear makeup and portray an artificial version of themselves? Consequently, masculinity, in itself, is considered true, natural and authentic. Therefore how is femininity constructed and understood and how does this relate to masculinity? In order to understand this concept, it will explore and evaluate Joan Riviere’s influential 1929 essay, Womanliness as Masquerade, which is an apt explanation of how women who desire male attention to conceal them behind a mask of femininity. This idea of masquerade is portrayed through almost anything such as their appearance to their ways of dress or even their behavior in public. Riviere goes onto examining how women mimic an image of womanliness, but that in its own turns into a masquerade – a performance to conceal one’s real self. Furthermore, this essay examines Judith Butler’s 1990 text Gender Trouble, in which she discusses how existing feminist movements are confined by how they define gender. Butler also argues that this definition is ‘outdated’ and

The middle class black society and the lower class black society, for example, are quite different from each other and are constantly conflicting. In The Bluest Eye, Morrison distinguishes these divisions and their tensions through characters like Geraldine, Junior, and Maureen Peal, who represent the privileged division of black culture. On the contrary, the less privileged division is represented by the MacTeer family and the “relentlessly and aggressively ugly” Breedlove family (The Bluest Eye 38). Tension between the divided African American society is clearly represented by such characterizations throughout Morrison’s novel.

As a playwright, William Shakespeare has formed male characters to be able to justify radical acts of violence because they are specifically male. These behaviors are often then reinforced by other characters by putting the blame of the male’s actions on another. Female characters in particular are a juxtaposition of the male role of being reckless, by saying essentially that they are unable to do such things because they are not men. Examples of these instances are in the plays Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, and Macbeth.