Image by Natalia Trofimova, via Unsplash.
by Anne Armstrong
Knowing and understanding the family dynamics a person grew up with are essential to understanding who they are as a person. Parental figures specifically are vehicles of worldviews, past traumas, engrained values and conceptions of morality, which greatly shape the identities of children as they mature. Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel Fun Home investigates the connection between ancestry and self-hood, portraying them as inextricably linked. Moreover, she accomplishes this through her experiences in her memoir, examining particularly the impact her family has had on her perception of beauty, appearance, and illusion. Focusing on her father, with the background of her patrilineal family, Alison[1] describes their role in molding her identity and sense of self, especially from an aesthetic view. The Bechdel family business largely dealt in the aestheticization of death, providing the morbid context of her father Bruce’s obsession with appearances. Alison is both a foil to, and reincarnation of, her father, yet in either case her identity does not exist in a vacuum; Bruce was integral in shaping both her understanding of herself, and her appreciation of beauty. This is evident in her self-expression in clothing, aesthetic preferences, and love of literature, each stemming from a seed that her father planted and cultivated.
Alison’s family set the stage for her relationship between appearances and reality in quite a morbid way – through the Bechdel Funeral Home. The “Fun Home” (36) operates entirely on the beautification of death, and catering to a specific atmosphere that requires aesthetic evaluation. As the mortician, Bruce must dissect and reconstruct the bodies of the deceased, as well as make them look less dead/gruesome, by analyzing their facial structures and accentuating features with makeup (48). He even uses a paintbrush and palette-like device, reinforcing his position as a sort of painter.
However, unlike an artist, he does not begin with a blank canvas, so his main priority is not to create, but to cover up signs of decay. Furthermore, while flowers typically have a visual appeal, Alison asserts the flowers arranged next to the open caskets were “ugly … their quick, damp scent masked the odor of formaldehyde” (91). Despite them being ugly, Bruce still took the time to alter or rearrange them, demonstrating the ceaseless effort he spent on pursuing his aesthetic vision. Even more significant is the utilisation of flowers for concealment, emphasizing the funeral home as a business dealing in illusions and specifically curated experiences that privilege appearance over reality. Additionally, the company is inseparably entwined in the Bechdel name, both legally and ancestrally. Founded by Alison’s great-grandfather, Fun Home is transferred patrilineally by inheritance, as the fifth panel demonstrates on page thirty-two. Both Alison’s great-grandfather and grandfather can be seen, however the grandfather is positioned a little closer to indicate his proximity to Alison’s time/life. As well, though both figures are present, the real focus is the first Bechdel hearse, cementing the Bechdel legacy to be death and the business. Inheriting Fun Home from his father, Bruce tries to pass it down to Alison by showing her a dead body (44) and subjecting her to the process of altering bodies for presentation. This perpetuates the familial structure that is so invested in illusions, making her a part of the internal mechanism (Fun Home) to organize external displays. In this context, Alison’s family is steeped in patriarchal structures, death, and orchestrating false perceptions for aesthetic motives.
Alison’s father played the dual role of facilitating her aesthetic admiration of masculinity, but also discouraging the physical expression of it on herself. Resultingly, Alison portrays children as outlets for their parent’s unsatisfied childhood urges, but also recipients of their internalized fear and guilt. At the live performance of A Chorus Line, Alison and Bruce are the only two discernible faces watching, even learning forward with interest to the monologue concerning homosexuality in a homophobic society (190-191). Alison’s engrossment was “like green dishwashing liquid bathing a cuticle”, just like the green-blue colour soaks the pages of the graphic novel. Thus, the reader experiences Alison’s feeling of being surrounded by something unconsciously accepted, but not addressed. Additionally, however often Bruce discusses masculine attire with Alison, he disparages her own expression of masculinity. For instance, when sitting in a diner, they both spot a masculine-presenting woman, who Alison recognizes “like a traveler in a foreign country who runs into someone from home” (118). In her moment of self-realization, after seeing a way of life she did not know she could follow, her father also “recognized” her, asking, “Is that what you want to look like” (118)? By emphasizing “that”, he dehumanizes the woman, and also implies his future dehumanization of Alison if she follows that path. Moreover, his recognition of Alison’s epiphany stems from his own experiences as a child. During their conversation in the car, Bruce admits “When I was little … I’d dress up in girls’ clothes” (221). Evidently, he was not able to continue, and therefore discourages Alison from appearing like a boy because of the shame he was forced to internalize, wherein men and women dressed according to socially gendered clothing. Springing from his unsatisfied yearning, he adorns Alison in dresses, pearls and barrettes. This heteronormative image is not a natural representation of her however, as seen when she stares, naked, at a sailor dress her father bought her (97). Throughout the graphic novel, Alison’s duvet cover exhibits triangles that point towards the end of the bed, yet in this panel the triangles are pointed the opposite way. This attracts more attention to the left side of the panel, where Alison and the dress are, but also signifies how uncomfortable she is in that clothing. The inverse of the bed covers mirrors how feminine clothing is an inverse of who she is, and the panel also reveals the biggest difference between Alison and her father. While Bruce concealed his desires, and spent all his energy trying to resemble a typical heterosexual and masculine man, Alison would rather wear no clothing – as a more accurate expression of herself – than succumb to fear, and the desire to conform that her father inflicted within her.
Bruce’s obsession for immaculate spaces and perfect arrangements became tyrannical and violent over time, acting as a source of distress and anxiety for Alison that culminated in her rejection of all things decorative or elaborate. In this way, his inexhaustible eye produced Alison’s partiality for the “unadorned and purely functional” (14). Moreover, Bechdel portrays these aesthetic tendencies as reflections of generational trauma, and as the medium through which Bruce can express his suppressed desire for the feminine. Bruce would often hit his children for not positioning decorative items in the right manner, thus establishing the association between beauty and pain (11, 18). Additionally, Alison made similes between her father and the Greek inventor Daedalus, as well as between her house and Daedalus’s labyrinth, revealing Bruce’s adoration for the ornate as calculated and malicious. When thinking about her father as Daedalus, Alison wonders about “those famous wings. Was Daedalus really stricken with grief when Icarus fell into the sea? Or just disappointed with the design failure” (12)? Through this, parent-child love is eroded and instead Alison paints her father as purely concerned with mechanics and design. Consequently, she becomes “the utilitarian to his aesthete” (15), and the layout of the panels on page fifteen exemplifies the chronology of her disdain for detail and accessories. In each panel, she grows more and more submissive to her father’s wishes, but also increasingly frustrated – starting with agency and freedom as a play-soldier, to polishing the intricate furniture she despised. Bruce similarly is irritated in each panel, and the page is set up so that each instance is in a uniformly sized and shaped box, indicating the clash of their personalities occurred consistently. Moreover, Bruce’s treatment of Alison was a byproduct of his mania for interior decoration, manifesting from his internalized shame for being homosexual. Alison described his passion as “Libidinal. Manic. Martyred” (7), and the panel exhibits Bruce carrying a decorative porch pole in a way reminiscent of Jesus bearing the cross. His drive for decorating is a survival/coping mechanism; it is a burden because he must sacrifice his true self or else be ostracized by the highly homophobic time that he was born into. As well, Alison’s use of the word “libidinal” fuses sex with interior decorating, painting his pursuit as not just something he loves to the point of lust, but as a safe haven where he may express his sexuality. As a result, his trauma seeped through generations towards Alison, causing her to reshape her aesthetic preferences for the plain and utile in her own trauma response.
Similar to his passion for interior decoration, Bruce’s love for literature and writing is both a salvation and a means to engage with his sexuality. Above all, it is a way for him to communicate, as well as understand himself and others, which he passes on to his daughter. Prose functions practically as well as aesthetically, which Alison exemplifies in the novel through various panels containing nothing but dictionary definitions. For example, Alison describes her father’s death as “queer”, and provides a drawing of the dictionary page defining that particular word in a large panel taking up half of the actual novel’s page (57). The next panel features Alison squinting intently at a dictionary while drinking, which gives more context to the panel before it. In the first one, the reader is in the perspective of Alison, drunk and confused, pushing their face closer to the words as if it will help things make more sense. Alison replicates the definition panel when she reveals her growing awareness of her identity as a lesbian, with the text above the panel saying “I first learned the word due to its prominence in my dictionary” (74). Alison thus compares her consciousness to a dictionary, conveying how often she thought about her sexuality. Notably, she disclosed this information through a picture of words. Even when she came out to her own parents, she chose to send a letter that the reader never gets to see in whole, but is able to look at the main words on the paper. Therefore, the written language not only serves as Alison’s most desirable means of delivering information, but the visual aspect of it indicates her aesthetic disposition. Despite its modest appearance, these panels still require artistic consideration. Both have the blue watercolour backgrounds rather than the default white, and the words themselves are both bolded and italicized in specific ways, rather than being merely written in. The beauty of literature is so enticing that it becomes erotic for both Bruce and Alison, as Bruce allowed his students to borrow books in a “very likely sexual” exchange, and Alison masturbated to textual works, both erotica and otherwise (61, 76, 207). That is not to say this sort of narratophilia is genetic, but rather, the methods of communication families develop can encourage certain tendencies. Moreover, these forms of language define the way children understand themselves, the world, and how to effectively interact with information/others.
Although families are often pictured as uniform units, they are actually more like webs. Although appearing to exist in harmony, each strand has a distinct history, disposition and behaviour pattern. In this way, they can easily become tangled and complicated, as each life profoundly alters the ones around them. In her graphic novel Fun Home, Alison Bechdel unravels the origins of her identity and perceptions of beauty by deciphering not only her relationship to her patrilineal ancestry and father, but their own experiences with appearance and concealment of reality. She discovers her family’s past to be submerged in illusions and masking unpleasantness, providing context for her father’s own deceit. Such lies nestle upon layers of trauma and unfulfilled childhood desires, resulting in Bruce lashing out if his children did not comply with the heteronormative vision engrained into him. Aesthetics was inherent to that image, causing Alison to associate anything elaborate with deception or oppression. Lastly, Alison portrays the way a person communicates as the product of the way their parents communicated with them, as is evident in her and Bruce’s shared predilection for writing.
Endnotes
[1] Since most characters and the author have the same last name, Alison will henceforth be referred to by her first name
Works Cited
Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home. Mariner Books, 2007.