Alison Bechdel’s Fun
Home operates as a grieving process for the narrator in both her father’s
(potential) suicide and hidden identity. While one more than one occasion
Bechdel claims that she and her brothers felt unperturbed by the event and that
the grieving process was unneeded (50-53, 227), it seems that this memoir takes
the place of the physical, mental and emotional disturbances the occur after
the death of a close family member.
Throughout the memoir, we get a sense that Bechdel and her
father, Bruce, have an odd relationship. It seems that they are fairly close,
particularly in the narrator’s college years. We see the two exchanging letters
and phone calls fairly consistently, and although there is this secret that
Bruce has kept from Bechdel for practically her entire life up to that point,
the two act as though they have an understanding of one another much more than
the relationships between narrator, her mother, and her brothers. This to me
made me question the Bechdel’s honesty about her apparent no-need-to-grieve
attitude—was the small out lash at the funeral director the only consolation
that she needed? Was laughing really the healthiest way for her to grasp the
idea of her father’s death, and take it to heart? I think, in some ways, that Bechdel
articulates pretty clearly that this was all she needed, and the fact that she
actually wrote this memoir centered around her father shows her overall reconciliation.
I find it so interesting that Bechdel claims she and her
father are “inversions of one another” (98). This phrase in the memoir can
operate a million functions, however I think this can be related to the
narrator coming out to her parents, and the death (potential suicide as Bechdel
thinks) of her father. She definitely outwardly claims the relationship between
these two acts as very close at hand, not only from the purposes of time but
from the concept of ‘there can be no life without death’ (this occurs somewhere
near the end of the book, and I swear I’ve been looking for the page number and
just cant seem to find it). This concept can also be related to the myth of
Icarus that Bechdel uses to begin and end the memoir. I wonder, then, if we
apply the myth of Icarus to the relationship between Bechdel and her father, is
it possible that instead of being Icarus, the narrator is the set of wings that
melt and cause Icarus to fall into the ocean? Is it possible that Bechdel is
the invention of her father in some crazy way, which either helped him fly or
failed him (I like to think the former)?
The double-paged panels (220-21) seems to point in that
direction. These were my favorite pages both for content and drawing style:
there are ten panels that have absolutely no chatter between the two of them,
driving in a car at night, while the other panels discuss both Bechdel and
Bruce’s sexuality. It seems that the narrator’s father confided in her in a
much different way that he had in the past with other people, perhaps even his
wife. In this way, I think that Bechdel comforted Bruce, and that this memoir
is meant to acknowledge that and come to terms with his death and hidden identity.
Lucille,
ReplyDeleteit's great to hear your ideas and i'm particularly drawn to the line of thinking placing Allison's role in a nurturing position (sometimes servant) to her father. Although she parallels them as if they were equivalent or complementary, it's true that she was always striving toward him and he constantly disappointed her
e
Lucille,
ReplyDeleteThanks for your contemplations here. I have to disagree with you when you suggest that Bechdel seems to suggest that she did not need a grieving processes to mourn the loss of her father. I think this memoir is reflexively as you suggest in the opening of your entry, one of the mechanisms through which she approaches her grief. I think her struggle with this is clear through her reliance on allegories to tell her own, her family's and her father's stories. I don't think it is just a "descriptive device" (67) that she is using to demonstrate her literary prowess. In many ways she is unable to approach the emotional weight of what she bears and these allegories carry some of that weight for and with her. The distance demonstrated is again reflexively part of how she is grieving.
Further, I believe the key to this journey is found at the end of the piece when she asks: "What if Icarus hadn't hurtled into the sea? What if he'd inherited his father's inventive bent? What might have been wrought?" (231) Bechdel in coming to terms with the loss of her father, and the crumbling of the artifice that her father structured his life through, is undergoing a recovery, and is in a sense restoring something dead in the way in which she chooses to live her life in an integrated and out manner.
Grief, too, is a strange thing and is so individualized. Sometimes a person goes through grief quickly; other times, it may takes years to finally process it. I felt Allison was grieving for her father through this piece, and it was taking years for her to find the right outlet to do so.
ReplyDelete