Image by Matthew William Peters.
by Susannah Liu
Near the end of Alison Bechdel’s 2006 graphic memoir Fun Home, she illustrates herself bent over reading her father’s copy of Ulysses while his back is turned towards her, facing his expansive antique bookshelf. This scene, one of many examples of literature being literally illustrated in her memoir, is symbolic of how both she and her father turn directly to literature to express their connection. Novels, biographies, and plays are enmeshed in the lives of the Bechdel family and consequently create the nuanced intertextuality of Fun Home.
“Intertextuality” is a literary term coined by Julia Kristeva and is often viewed as a formal embodiment of postmodernism’s values. It is when an author explicitly or implicitly references past media in their own work, using a myriad of literary devices, such as allusion, pastiche, parallel, and parody. But how do we define the relationship between these different authorial voices? When does a work become simply an echo-chamber of amalgamated texts? How can inadvertent influence be identified in contrast to deliberate intertext? These broad questions lead to conflicting propositions about different versions of intertextuality. Margarete Landwehr summarizes this historical scholarly debate, endorsing Culler’s proposition that intertextuality is a spectrum, with poles that represent its range. At each polar end of this spectrum, scholars often use metaphorical language that operates within a parent-child model to describe intertextuality’s role in literature. Additionally, regardless of their differences, these definitions thematically suggest that intertextuality’s framework inherently displaces or defies the family structure. Kristeva and Barthes, for example, argue in favor of a version of intertextuality that “replaces that of intersubjectivity,” where texts are a kaleidoscopic space constructed by “innumerable centres of culture.” By viewing postmodernist texts as an “impersonal blending … of various texts,” they argue that intertextuality “replace[s] the concept of an author that ‘fathers’ a text” (Landwehr 3). Kristeva and Barthes’s linguistic choice to eliminate “fathering” as a way of addressing authorship displaces the family model by suggesting that intertextuality, and more broadly, postmodern literature, gives us a way of talking about texts without invoking parenting. In contrast, scholars Bloom and Miller make more room for familial metaphors around writing, respectively describing intertextuality as “finite” and “dyadic,” and “a form of negotiation with the dominant social text” (Landwehr 4). These definitions rely on the friction between two distinct actors, the predecessor and the successor, focusing on a resulting “negotiation” characterized by subversive social commentary. This is further evident in Bloom’s use of a metaphorical model of lineage to describe intertextuality, where he argues that a text is characteristically competitive towards its “parent.” Bloom ultimately counters that intertextuality’s most personal interactions reflect a “confrontation of authors with their precursors in an Oedipal rivalry” (Landwehr 4).
Clearly, intertextuality’s formal features follow thematic patterns, which scholars, characteristic of the cynical postmodern attitude, use to challenge the existence of the long-standing family model. So now the question is, would you rather be the Oedipus to your father’s Laius, or not have a parent at all? Like any skilled literary thinker, Bechdel is not satisfied with these two depressing answers and instead subverts these scholarly arguments surrounding intertextuality altogether. In Fun Home, she dissolves these existing borders by completely refusing to displace parenthood via her intertextual references. Firstly, Bechdel creates the trademark “self-reflexivity” of postmodern literature through “suspen[ding] the imaginary in the real” by inheriting “[her] father’s stock in trade” (Bechdel 65) and using a beloved author of his, F. Scott Fitzgerald, to establish an inextricable bond between Fun Home’s inventive character parallels to literature and her father’s ambiguous identity (Bechdel 65). The majority of scholarship on Bechdel’s literary references focuses on creating one coherent reading of an author, such as Marcel Proust,i and applying his philosophy to Fun Home. However, I argue that Bechdel achieves a double-coded form of intertextuality, where she intertwines her textual relationships with literature with the relationship between her and her father, because her complex connection with Bruce Bechdel is itself an intertextual one. This is clear in Bechdel’s inclusion of The Great Gatsby, which reconstructs her father’s identity using parallels to Jay Gatsby and centers on the thematic element of artifice. Bechdel exemplifies how intertextuality requires an author’s simultaneous reinvention and dependence on an intertextual predecessor, but instead of merely having a “dyadic” conversation, she concurrently indicates two predecessors: Fitzgerald and her father. Furthermore, by drawing parallels between Oscar Wilde’s life and characters and her father’s life, Bechdel reinforces that her intertextuality is double-coded, because its techniques simultaneously act on Wilde’s works and trials and on her father. This subtly interweaves allusions to Wilde’s equally tragic life with allusions to Bruce’s strained sexuality and marriage, allowing Bechdel to compare the two as artists tortured by stifling societal conventions. Ultimately, by placing her family in a literary context, Bechdel uses techniques borrowed from identifiable postmodernist intertextual strategies to not only thematize parenthood, but also to bring her closer to her father. Therefore, Bechdel proves that intertextuality can remain integral to her text without displacing parenthood and the notion of “fathering,” instead using it to bring herself closer to elements of her father’s identity and life, presenting it as a form of intimacy.
Fun Home’s metatextual interweaving of literature and family presents reality and fiction as co-existing in an intermediate space, allowing Bechdel to use the trademark techniques of postmodernism to construct her double-coded model of intertextuality. In her 2002 study of literature, the visual, and intertextuality, Landwehr writes that “postmodern fiction depends on intertextuality” precisely because “it focuses attention on and manipulates the tension between fact and fiction, between the constructed and the real” ( Landwehr 193). Bechdel exploits this very ambiguity, writing: “my parents are most real to me in fictional terms” (Bechdel 67) when addressing F. Scott Fitzgerald’s influence on her father’s life, notably placing her chosen texts and her father on the same plane of existence. Bechdel speculates that Bruce’s “reverence” (Bechdel 62) for literature leads him to mirror the mystique and “noblesse oblige” (Bechdel 64) he sees in Fitzgerald’s characters instead of fulfilling the more conventional expectations of a father. Her narration itself is a recreation of her father’s mastery for the craft of constructing life using fiction: she depicts him lending a copy of The Great Gatsby to the Bechdels’ babysitter, Roy, who reclines on a chair, with a decanter full of sherry and a glass in his hand, replicas of the decanter and glasses in the film adaptation of Gatsby that Bechdel recalls (Bechdel 64-65). This direct visual parallel underscores the transformative effects of “the colossal vitality of his” (the “his” referring to both Gatsby and her father) “illusion” on her father’s life, troubling the diegetic boundary. This phrase is notably directly quoted from The Great Gatsby. Bechdel’s memory of her father is therefore disturbed and “destabliz[ed]” by the “tension between fact and fiction,” the “constructed and the real” (Landwehr 7). On the one hand, Bruce is presented literally in Bechdel’s hand—his face, silhouette, and words as ink etched on paper. On the other hand, she grapples with the fact that her father’s very existence is entangled with his own love for literature and fiction, which infringes on the borders of his identity.
Instead of drawing away from parts of her father’s identity that seem unreal or unreliable, Bechdel leans into the interconnectedness of her family and fiction. Postmodernism’s cultural values center on a questioning of absolute realities and stable metanarratives, so, according to Landwehr, intertextuality’s “[manipulation of] the tension between fact and fiction” makes it an important literary technique to the canon itself because it destabilizes a text’s ability to contribute an absolute “truth” and instead points to the artificial nature of narration (Landwehr 7). When applied to Fun Home, Bechdel’s conflation of fact and fiction ultimately allows her to capture this exact metatextual “double-coded” awareness that “constitutes a central feature of postmodern literature.” Bechdel depicts Robert Redford, who plays Gatsby in the 1974 film rendition, writing that “Perhaps it seems like a colossal illusion on my part to compare my father to [him]” (Bechdel 64). Her chosen phrase, “colossal illusion,” plays again on the same allusion to Fitzgerald’s text, except this time, her narration is not unlike Bruce’s habit of conflating life and fiction. This indicates an awareness in Bechdel’s intertextual narration of her role as both a novelist and a daughter. Landwehr writes that “postmodernist works simultaneously acknowledge their dependence on established forms of representation, what Barthes calls ‘doxa,’ and disturb or even subvert these forms of representation and, consequently, modes of knowledge within a culture” (Landwehr 6). In a sense, Bechdel is simultaneously dependent on both her father and literature, as both are “established forms of representation,” leading her to address them as one. This makes Bruce’s voice equally important to those of the authors found in Bechdel’s text, and in consequence makes parenthood central to intertextuality in Fun Home.
The majority of scholarship about Bechdel’s intertextuality in Fun Home makes a distinction between theme and structure; scholars take the opportunity to use Bechdel’s referenced authors, such as Proust, to draw conclusions about larger philosophical messages found in the text through a close reading of Bechdel’s intricate literary structure. These kinds of literary analyses separate theme and structure, one being abstract and the other concrete. Bechdel’s formal features can consequently be viewed as a sort of “toolbox” to convey the overarching themes and emotions of her text, with no purpose taken purely on their own, like a skeleton without flesh. However, her formal techniques themselves adopt an inherently thematic pattern, because her use of intertextuality is an inheritance of her father’s love for literature. As such, Bechdel’s formalism transcends Fun Home’s diegetic world to comment on the complex intimacy of her relationship with her father, and therefore, these two elements do not take their usual opposing roles.
My argument most closely resembles Fox’s commentary in “Queer Futurity and the Metamodernist Memoir,” where she comments, for example, that, by stating her parents are “most real to [her] in fictional terms,” Bechdel also “hints at [a] unique form of autobiographical metamodernism, which melds fact and fiction to reveal rather than conceal” (Fox). Whereas Fox focuses on queer temporality as an integral component of Fun Home’s destabilized biographical reality because Bechdel rejects ordinary time and realities, I argue that this blurry diegetic boundary refutes any “oedipal” notions of parenthood. Fox views Bechdel and her father in the more competitive and dyadic context of their shared queerness, highlighting how Bechdel’s “journey from that of her father” uses queer temporality and “kinship that offers affinity in place of filiation” (Fox). With literature underscoring the “convergence and divergence” of their narratives, Fox argues patriarchal competitiveness fuels their relationship, but intertext in Fun Home’s is an equally important common ground for father and daughter. I argue that the intimate literary conversation between Bechdel and her father is a defiance of the usual Oedipal relationships that constitute intertextuality.
Bechdel’s reference to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby is a central tool for examining how Bechdel produces a version of intertextuality that maximizes its literary potential while demonstrating a clear connection to themes of parenthood. Bechdel’s transposition of her father’s idolization of fiction onto a parallel with Jay Gatsby is a double-coded commentary on the novel’s similarities to her father but it is also an example of Bechdel’s adoption of Bruce’s art of imitation. Overall, she brings new depth to our reading of the novel while acknowledging Bruce’s flaws and, using her own literary knowledge, both distances herself from him and admires him. Bechdel combines Jay Gatsby’s character, who undergoes a “self-willed metamorphosis from farm boy to prince,” with her father’s own creation of his identity, his own “self-willed metamorphosis,” except done, in Bruce’s case, “on a schoolteacher’s salary.” As seamless as this intertextual inclusion seems at first glance, Bechdel’s reinterpretation of this material in terms of relationships between fathers and daughters is a significant break from most readings of Fitzgerald’s novel: Gatsby is usually discussed for its value as an allegory for the failure of the American Dream. Sarah Churchwell summarizes this version of the novel’s historical and social significance in an article from The Guardian:
The phrase the American dream was first invented, … to describe a failure, not a promise: or rather, a broken promise, a dream that was continually faltering beneath the rampant monopoly capitalism that set each struggling against all; … The impending failure had been clear to Fitzgerald by the time he finished Gatsby – and the fact that in 1925 most Americans were still recklessly chasing the dream had a great deal to do with the initial commercial and critical failure of The Great Gatsby, which would not be hailed as a masterpiece until the 50s, once hindsight had revealed its prophetic truth (Churchwell).
Bechdel adjusts Gatsby to her family’s scale and social context to explore a similar inevitable “failure” and a “broken promise,” but in a way that both completely reinvents the novel’s most integral symbols and allows her to convey her complicated emotions regarding the failure of her father’s familial artifice.
One of Bechdel’s most inventive intertextual allusions to The Great Gatsby is her comparison of Gatsby’s house to the Bechdel family home, importantly incorporating themes of artifice from the novel in her characterization of her father. Gatsby famously buys a mansion with a green light at the end of the dock, directly facing the shore where Daisy Buchanan, his love interest, lives. Daisy’s idealized characterization as the “golden girl” whose voice is “full of money” produces literary interpretations where she symbolizes the American Dream and its money-centered superficiality. Thus, Gatsby’s colossal house is a physical representation of his dreams to reinvent himself and acquire her love, and thereby fulfill the American Dream, similar to how the Bechdels’ “gothic revival house” (Bechdel 8) embodies Bruce’s desire to appear as a perfect husband and father. Decorations like antique gilded mirrors and gaudy chandeliers (Bechdel 14), all of which Bruce meticulously cares for more closely than he does his children, make their house “all but the simulacrum of [a real home], a museum” (Bechdel 17), substituting Gatsby’s performatively high-class ideals with artificial and antiquated familial ones. As devastating as this parallel is, considering that Gatsby’s lonely life and bloody death are among the most tragic episodes in American literature, Bechdel’s narration indicates a further level to her chosen intertext. The term “simulacrum,” meaning an image and representation of something, directly includes a third actor in her parallel: Bechdel herself. She is representing her father’s life using fiction to criticize Bruce’s attempts to liken himself to an educated, ideal father and literary benefactor, and both father and daughter use the Bechdels’ house as an active tool in achieving their goals. Therefore, her use of intertextuality balances subversion and reliance, because it balances reinventive literary with parallels with a metatextual portrayal of Fun Home’s narration itself as an artificial creation not unlike that of Gatsby’s and her father’s dreams.
Additionally, by likening her father to Gatsby, Bechdel herself parallels Nick Carraway, the narrator of Gatsby, because she “narrates” Bruce’s life in the same way that Nick narrates Gatsby’s. Bechdel’s own attitude towards her father thus becomes more nuanced and intricate because Nick’s admiration of Gatsby’s noble pursuit even while detesting the ideals he chases parallels her own conflicted feelings for her father. Nick relays his cynical, begrudging admiration and criticism for Gatsby from the first of the parties he is invited to all the way until Gatsby’s death. The phrase that Bechdel lifts from Fitzgerald, the “colossal vitality of his illusion” (Bechdel 64), echoes Nick’s attitude and is contextualized as follows in the original novel:
There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams – not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion … He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion … No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man can store up in his ghostly heart (Fitzgerald 102).
In this scene, Gatsby finally meets with Daisy after his five-year enlistment, only for Nick to observe his disillusionment and watch his American Dream unravel. But Gatsby’s passion and “extraordinary gift for hope” (Fitzgerald 2) are sources of Nick’s admiration despite his “[disapproving] of him from beginning to end.” Like Nick watching Gatsby, Bechdel watches her father’s artifice unravel: his coldness towards his children, his tumultuous struggle with his sexuality, and his disastrous affairs and death produce a brutal downfall. Bechdel’s comparison of this fall from grace to Icarus “hurtl[ing] into the sea” is a tragic image that rivals that of Gatsby’s bloody end, where he plunges, bullet-ridden, into his mansion’s pool. Yet, Bechdel’s narration remains a homage to and expression of her love for her father, never failing to see him as a mentor and a passionate artist despite his unconventionality. In this way, by invoking The Great Gatsby, Bechdel implicitly invokes Nick’s simultaneous disgust and admiration for Gatsby to mirror her coexisting disapproval of her father’s artifice and her willingness to see him as a noble dreamer with a “creative passion” (Fitzgerald 102). Overall, Bechdel achieves her expression of these complex emotions for her father by reworking the symbolism of Gatsby and leveraging intertextuality to invoke themes of parenthood; the elements of inheritance and subversion contribute equally to Bechdel’s identity as an author and daughter, completing her intimate familial reading of Fitzgerald.
Gatsby’s story is an address from Bechdel to her father as a daughter and begrudging admirer, but she also creates another facet of their relationship using intertextuality that focuses on marriage and sexuality. Bechdel uses both Wilde’s disastrous martyrdom and the themes of his plays, such as The Importance of Being Earnest, to allude simultaneously to both her father and Wilde, fusing fiction and life again in a postmodern fashion. Ultimately, her inclusion of Wilde creates a political commentary on the stifling societal conventions that surround both him and her father, portraying both of them as a sort of “tortured artist.” The Importance follows two men, Jack and Algernon, who foolishly deceive Cecily and Gwendolyn into thinking they are both named Ernest, because, being superficial, both of the ladies arbitrarily wish to be married to a man named Ernest. They frivolously stress the importance of the act of proposing over marriage itself. This intertextual choice is a break from the patterns established in her use of Gatsby because it is Bechdel’s mother, playing the irascible Lady Bracknell in a “local production” of The Importance (Bechdel 154), that brings Wilde into the narrative. This commentary is thus an invention of Bechdel’s own, one that is free of her father’s direct influence in her reality. The lines Bechdel selects are from the summer she rehearses Lady Bracknell’s lines with her mother, where Bracknell evaluates if Jack is fit for marriage. The lines in Fun Home from The Importance particularly display the double-coded nature of Bechdel’s intertextuality, and are bitingly ironic in the context of her father’s death:
The first line – “Now to minor matters. Are your parents living?” – is said directly from mother to daughter, and in the case of “parents,” this alludes to Bruce’s death as well. Obviously, Wilde intended a sarcastic tone, and its themes hint at Bechdel’s own grappling with grief following her father’s death. The second panel (in which “all the actors except Mom fluffed their lines at least once” is followed by an example: “All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s hers. His.”) addresses the impacts of inheritance. If all daughters, like Bechdel, imitate their mothers, how does she reconcile Bruce’s queerness with her own? Is it a tragedy to be divided by sex from a parent whom she heavily takes after? The fact that Bechdel’s mother is directly performing in a cast of characters serves as satirical commentary on the triviality of marriage, enhancing the metafictional layer of Fun Home, because the Bechdel family is placed in these characters’ shoes to serve the same purpose. Therefore, Bechdel implicitly conveys her speculation about the validity of gendered expectations in family and the validity of her role as a successor to her parents’ marriage.
Bechdel, never overlooking literary details, finds further intertextual value in The Importance’s historical significance, as it opened on the same day Wilde’s trials began. This allows Bechdel to use Wilde to combine her commentary on marriage with an effort to contextualize her father’s repressed queerness. The deliberate parallels Bechdel draws between the indecency found in her father’s narrative and Wilde’s complicate Bruce’s image. Fox writes that Bechdel’s use of Wilde “connect[s] the personal and the political” in Fun Home: “Reflecting on her childhood, Bechdel confesses, ‘the covert references to homosexuality eluded me’ (166), and she allows this line to figure within the context of her father’s life as well. [The Importance] and [Wilde’s] trial offer parallels to her father’s court case: Bruce Bechdel was accused of purchasing beer for minors, but as Bechdel notes, ‘the real accusation dared not speak its name’ (175)” (Fox). By conflating father and author, Bechdel again enacts her metatextual social commentary, but this time to demonstrate the covert encoding of queerness in her family’s life, of which she only catches “a whiff” (Bechdel 180). The stifling of homosexuality in society and art has continued throughout history, all the way from Wilde’s martyrdom at the hands of cruel and arbitrary Victorian social conventions to Bruce’s outrageous and problematic affairs with underage boys. Bechdel consequently uses these “covert references” found in Wilde’s work and her father’s affairs to understand his stifled queer identity. Fox’s reading of Bechdel’s use of Joyce describes a similar pattern: “Bechdel turns to Joyce as a means of comparing herself to and differentiating herself from her father; she enacts these oedipal tensions in the memoir by conflating Joyce and her father … As Freedman contends, ‘through returning to Joyce, Bechdel is returning to her father’ (135). And thus, Bechdel’s fraught relationship to Joyce is a synecdochical representation of her fraught relationship with her father, for Ulysses was Bruce’s favorite book” (Fox). Fox characterizes this tension as “oedipal,” creating a competitive tone in Bechdel’s intertext, but I would argue against reading this as competitive, as her simultaneous address of Wilde and Bruce actually brings her closer to understanding and justifying the validity of her father’s (albeit tattered and questionable) social image and his sexuality. By comparing her father to Wilde, she invites us to see him as a similarly tortured artist, whose scorned identity and troubling sexual relationships exist alongside equally ridiculous social conventions.
Taken as a whole, Bechdel’s use of intertextuality through these references to Fitzgerald and Wilde in Fun Home demonstrates intertextuality’s capacity to operate not as a rejection or challenge to family but as a way of understanding and embracing it, because it is intertextuality that brings Bechdel closer to her father while still retaining the complexity of her emotions about him. The literary techniques she uses are magnified by her archetypally postmodern conflation of reality and fiction, which enables the double-coded intertextuality of Fun Home. In her uses of both The Great Gatsby and The Importance of Being Earnest, she weaves together intertextual themes, characters, and historical contexts to simultaneously allude to both her father and fiction, balancing subversion with reliance on both her literary predecessors and her father to create her own version of her family’s narrative. In response to scholars who declare intertextuality a contradiction to the family model, Bechdel clearly demonstrates that the two can not only coexist but can enhance each other in form, narrative, and theme. In response to her grief and the unique and beautiful chaos of her relationship with her father, Bechdel ultimately poses the possibility that parenthood is enmeshed in literature, instead of restricted by its techniques. In the words of Virginia Woolf, Bechdel’s family itself is a window into viewing the “whole world” as “a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself” (Woolf).
Works Cited
Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home. Houghton Mifflin, 2007.
Churchwell, Sarah, et al. “The Great Gatsby and the American dream | F Scott Fitzgerald.” The Guardian, 25 May 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/may/25/american-dream-great-gatsby. Accessed 1 June 2026.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. Penguin UK, 2013.
Fox, Meghan C. “Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: Queer Futurity and the Metamodernist Memoir.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 65, no. 3, 2019, pp. 511-537. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2019.0032.
Landwehr, Margarete. “Introduction: Literature and the Visual Arts; Questions of Influence and Intertextuality.” College Literature, vol. 29, no. 3, 2002, pp. 1-16. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25112655.
Wilde, Oscar. The Importance of Being Earnest. Oxford University Press, 2008.
Woolf, Virginia. Moments of Being. Edited by Jeanne Schulkind, Grafton Books, 1989.