Fun Home

One thing upon finishing the book that has kept me thinking is Bechdel's reticence to place her father within the same category as all of the great authors and thinkers that she alludes to. It's as if she sees her father as having the potential for heroism, which is extinguished by his choice to commit suicide. When I was an undergraduate I took a Comparative Literature class, during the course of which we looked at the literature of Ancient Greece and compared it to Victorian literature. We discussed the Trails of Oscar Wilde through the lens of the Ancient Greek tradition of pederasty, aimed at the teaching of civic duties to budding citizens of the Polis. We also read Foucault's The History of Sexuality, which posits that the construct of sexuality is attributed to one's identity. In WIlde's time the implications of his predilections (to borrow a word from Colette) were that they reflected on his character. Committing the act of "sodomy" prompted suspicions of sexual deviancy during a time when homosexuality was considered an affliction. Naturally, the discrepancy between the way in which sexuality (a word that can only really be used in a modern context) as we now understand it and pederasty led to Wilde's condemnation. Of course I'm oversimplifying things. The "accusation" that Bechdel alludes to on page 175 may have constituted an equivalent of the accusation of "sodomite" (166) levied at Oscar Wilde by Douglas's father, but Bechdel's father's trial did not inspire the degree of courtroom enthusiasm that Wilde's is famous for. Bechdel's father never takes ownership of his sexual identity. Although he alludes to being gay in his letter to Alison, he never explicitly states it and remains closeted throughout his life. Alison harbors resentment towards her father, which is illustrated by her regret that he does not leave a death note. Her hope is that he would have expressed his homosexuality upon death, which would signal his acknowledgement of the fact, and in doing so, would validate his own daughter's sexuality. Alison implies that she finds her father cowardly throughout her memoir for this very reason.

Though, Bechdel definitely sees parallels between her father and herself. I have to wonder, also, if the image on the final page of the book indicates that despite all of the resentment and disdain that Alison has for her father, she has learned some kind of lesson from him as a result of their "entwined stories" that has enabled her to achieve greatness and that sets her apart from her father.

As a student of literature, I thought it was funny that Alison in her college years finds interpretation of literature a "suspect activity" (206), and describes the impulse to interpret in terms of "forcing." I think she describes her English teacher's interpretation of whatever they were reading as contorted. I think it's interesting that Bechdel ultimately turned to memoir, because while there is still lots of room for interpretation in Fun Home and the lines between fiction and reality are oftentimes blurred, memoir, I think, is less about subtext than other genres, as it usually entails a conscious search for truth. Bechdel's quest to find out the truth about her father, which Alison realizes is futile to an extent due to the lack of substantial proof concerning the circumstances of his death or his affairs, is fraught. On page 67, she says, "I employ these allusions to James and Fitzgerald not only as descriptive devices, but because my parents are most real to me in fictional terms." Later on, "But in a way Gatsby's pristine books and my father's worn ones signify the same thing- the preference of a fiction to reality" (85). Alison's obsession with objective truth throughout her childhood is very telling (I'm thinking specifically of the symbol that she makes up as a shorthand for 'I think'.)