Who Is Alison Bechdel's Ethos In Fun Home

The most difficult time in a child's relationship with his/her parents is mainly during its teenage years. These are times of rebellion, disagreement, strong emotion, psychological changes and sexual experimentation just to name a few. In Mary Gaitskill's short story "Tiny, Smiling Daddy", the main theme "of how people seek intimacy but don't know how to achieve it" (Gaitskill, 289) is conveyed by the author through the characters, symbolism and setting and imagery.

Fun Home is set up as a comic book, in white and blue, describing the relationship of the author, Alison Bechdel, with her father. By drawing scenes from her life, Alison tells the story of how her father’s reality of being a father, a husband, and a high school English teacher was deceiving, bringing to light truths that he spent his life trying to hide. Photographs begin every chapter and are scattered around the book, giving context and revealing details that cannot be described otherwise.

Alison Bechdel’s comic book Fun Home clearly portrays the importance of gender roles in the society. She mentions in her book incidents which illustrate as to how gender plays a major role in forming a person’s identity. Throughout the book, Bechdel suggests how the society has divided people into different genders on the basis of appearance, duties and behavioural expectations. The society as a whole needs to re-asses these gender roles so that people don’t end up ruining their life thinking about what the society thinks.

In the image, it looks like a stereotypical suburban family’s house. The property includes a driveway, a car, a house, a wall covering the house, and lots of flowers and bushes. In just the quick glance, it does not look like anything spectacular. However, after reading Harris’s interpretation of the 1950’s stylistic ways of living, it makes more sense as to the layout of the property. In the beginning of the reading, Harris has a main theme of privacy. She describes the

There are numerous documents (photographs, maps, letters, novels, etc...) that are painstakingly recreated throughout Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, which are used in order to re-evaluate her own personal history. Bechdel introduces the notion that her parents are most real to her in terms of the fictional. Therefore, it is reasonable to examine Fun Home as an attempt to render her father as a fictional entity that she can then process more clearly. In the same way she has always processed the literature she has consumed since childhood, Bechdel begins her task my examining the texts that her father found the most solace in. Through her memoir, Alison Bechdel conducts an investigation through which it seems as though she aims to review and revise

In the book Fun Home Bechdel use memoir to explain her parents creativity and compared her life to her mother and father. Talents such as turning old things into new things. For example in chapter 1 page 6 her father would take old furniture and restore it back to brand new. Her father was an English teacher as well, he had a library stored in their home with books he loved to read. Alison mother would go around the house studying and reciting her lines like the actress she was, and whenever she had a show she would invite the family. Alison as a young girl a young girl would look at her and her parent’s life,

Alison Bechdel’s comic book “Fun Home” is narrated by none other than herself who builds the narrative around her family and her life growing up. Then, years later, her father dies in a car accident, and despite not knowing if it was really an accident or a suicide, she occupies herself with finding a justification for his death. Now imprisoned with the task she put herself to, the narrator blames her father 's shame and lack of happiness due to him being a homosexual, which she also discovered herself being at the age of 19. The story touches on several themes including happiness, identity and honesty. More specifically, “Fun Home” suggests that happiness is unattainable if one conforms to society 's norms by suppressing their true identity. This is demonstrated through the comparison made with the character Jay Gatsby from "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Bruce Bechdel, as well as the narrator’s depiction of herself.

In Fun Home, Alison Bechdel explains her family, mostly herself and her father, Bruce. Bechdel explains her family by comparing them to mythology or the family from, “It’s a Wonderful Life.” The movie, might seem like a perfect family by the title of it, but every family has their issues. When Bechdel starts talking about the movie it is just “Hello, Darling” and “Hello, Daddy,” conversation. The conversation is nothing like her family, since any kind of affection is not normal. What the movie is like her family is when Jimmy Stewarts comes home and starts yelling at everyone, her father would yell at them for little things they could not handle. Second way they are related is that the family in, “It’s a Wonderful Life,” buy and fix up their

Chad Blenz Deniz Perin ENG 121 08 December 2014 It’s Obvious, You Know Published in 2006, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is a graphic memoir that brought great success to Alison Bechdel and her work. Fun Home explores the relationship between Alison and her father, Bruce Bechdel, to shed light on ideas such as gender, coming out with your sexuality, and the complex dynamics within their family. With further analysis we can see that these key ideas are facilitated through discussions of death, life, and literature–provoked by Alison’s efforts to illustrate a truthful portrait of her complicated connection with her father.

Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic illustrates the plight of a lesbian growing up in a household filled with secrets in every nook and cranny. The subtitle, A Family Tragicomic, reveals the tone of the story for the audience by insinuating the existence of adversary in Bechdel’s family dynamics. Through the use of nonlinear chronology, the author reconstructs her childhood and early adulthood around the roles of her parents, Helen and Bruce, and more specifically, the death of her father. Bruce’s affinity for interior design results in him spending ample time on decorating the family home, to the point that it serves as a symbol of Bruce’s repressed desires and in turn, Alison’s liberated desires.

Because Bruce focused all of his energy on the house, and subsequently on upholding the fake façade of his life, his time and impact on Alison’s life were minimal and destructive. Ultimately, Bechdel’s first telling of the Icarus sets the stage of Alison’s early view on her father, but also sets a baseline wherein Bruce can only improve in Alison’s

In the waiting room of the Intensive Care Unit of Miami Children’s Hospital Abby Berenger’s doctor was talking to her father, had been perhaps for some time, but Lavelle Berenger heard him only distantly, distorted by an odd echo effect in his mind. It was like being trapped in a very deep well and hearing someone call down. His mind had gone midnight dark, and the darkness served as the background for a kind of scrapbook slide show. An old snapshot of Abby smiling bashfully for her mother, the photographer, while showcasing a painting she gave to her dad on Father’s Day. Pink-ribboned pigtails hung from both sides of her head. A freeze-frame of mom and three-year-old daughter standing on the beach in cut-off jean shorts, smiling brown faces glistening with sweat, looking at the water.

How do graphic novels allow for explorations of parent-child relationships and/or the idea of family? This essay will look at the question of how graphic novels allow for the exploration of parent-child relationships and the idea of intergenerational family relations using primarily the works Maus by Art Spiegelman and Persepolis by Marjani Satrapi. The primary relations are key to exploring this concept of family.

Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006) constructs the narrative around the tragic event of her father’s death in conjunction with the development of her lesbian identity. The extract is from Chapter Six The Ideal Husband, where Alison feels obligated to record her secretion in her diary. However, upon seeing her younger-self’s diary entries, Alison becomes indifferent to recording her experience of adolescence in her diary. The extract is suitable for exploring how it relates and disrupts the theme of memory work. Annette Kuhn defines memory work as: “[exploring] connections between [things like] structures of feeling, national identity, and gender…” (5). A theme that Bechdel accentuates in the extract through her use of critical consciousness (where a person reflects on their life and others around them) (Kuhn, 2) explores how literature and social/historical events at the time in the extract impacts Alison’s sexuality.

It became not only a place of living, but also a place that celebrated creative work and innovative thinking. Living without walls opens the door to many possibilities. It is much easier to connect with your children, as was important to Schroder. She felt her children had been neglected while living with their father since every time she left they were then taken care of by a housemaid; she thought this must have been horrible for them and wanted them all to live together. She also wanted to have space in her house in order to celebrate created work. This was accomplished through the design of the upstairs. It itself was a gallery of ideas -- ever-changing each time it was experienced. This atmosphere was very stimulating and put forth a sense of happiness, which was important to her in how she wanted raise her children. Schroder wrote about this atmosphere she wanted to create in one of her letters stating, “This house exudes a strong sense of joy, of real joyousness. […] And that’s absolutely a question of proportions, and also of the light; the light in the house and the light outside. I find it very important that a house has an invigorating atmosphere, that it inspires and supports happiness.” Using open space, natural light, and a modest scale she created a space that embodied happiness and made her children feel comfortable. Also, she felt the way that her children can move and change the space in order to suit their needs gives them the sense that it is their home. The act of designed the space and making it unique to them made them feel