Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

“Historical restoration wasn’t his job. It was his passion. And I mean passion in every sense of the word. Libidinal. Manic. Martyred.”

This quotation paired with the visual of a shirtless Bruce hauling lumber across the yard casts him as a Christlike figure. This image will be echoed in Chapter 3 when Helen recites a poem about the Crucifixion after Bruce’s death.

“Was Daedalus really stricken with grief when Icarus fell into the sea? Or just disappointed by the design failure?”

In this quotation, Daedalus is a direct stand-in for Bruce Bechdel. By wondering whether Daedalus was grieving the loss of his son or the failure of his project, Alison is actually questioning the depth of her father’s feelings toward his children.

“This embarrassment on my part was a tiny scale model of my father’s more fully developed self-loathing.”

This is the first instance of direct comparison between Alison and her father. Here, the two mirror each other perfectly in that they are both emotionally repressed. Alison’s repression is an extension of her father’s: his difficulty around expressing affection directly shaped the way a young Alison would learn to process emotions. Bruce’s “fully developed self-loathing” is also caused in part by a lifetime of being closeted as a gay man, whereas the “embarrassed” young Alison is not yet fully aware of her own sexuality.

“It felt like a test. Maybe this was the same offhanded way his own notoriously cold father had shown him his first cadaver. Or maybe he felt he’d become too inured to death, and was hoping to elicit from me an expression of the natural horror he was no longer capable of. Or maybe he just needed the scissors.”

Here, Bechdel retrospectively wonders what truly motivated her father’s actions. Questions around Bruce’s true feelings frequently reoccur over the course of Fun Home. This expresses Alison’s discomfort with ambiguity and frustration with her father’s stoicism.

“For years after my father’s death, when the subject of parents came up in conversation I would relate the information in a flat, matter-of-fact tone... …eager to detect in my listener the flinch of grief that eluded me. The emotion I had suppressed for the gaping cadaver seemed to stay repressed. Even when it was my dad himself on the prep table.”

Here, young Alison’s attempts to disguise her emotional response to encountering a cadaver is linked to her adulthood difficulty with accessing emotions in the face of her father’s death. Her adulthood numbness is presented as an echo of her father’s acclimation to death and corpses. Likewise, when Alison tries to evoke in others the grief she cannot feel, it is a reenactment of the moment when her father exposed her to a nude corpse.

“As I told my girlfriend what had happened, I cried quiet genuinely for about two minutes. That was all.”

This moment further emphasizes Alison’s struggles to access and express emotion. It also emphasizes the emotional and physical intimacy between herself and Joan, a stark contrast to Alison’s relationship with her parents.

“In college, I needed The Myth of Sisyphus for a class. Dad offered to send me his old copy, but I resisted his interference. I wish I could say I’d accepted his book, that I still had it, that he’d underlined one particular passage. (‘The subject of this essay is precisely this relationship between the absurd and suicide, the exact degree to which suicide is a solution to the absurd.’)”

If Bruce Bechdel’s quest for aesthetic perfection was “libidinal,” so too is Alison’s hunt for the truth. Here, she pursues a quixotic hypothetical wherein she accepted her father’s gift of The Myth of Sisyphus not because it would be an act of symbolic emotional intimacy but because it might have yielded more evidence of her father’s unprovable suicidality.

“I’d been upstaged, demoted from protagonist in my own drama to comic relief in my parents’ tragedy. I had imagined my confession as an emancipation from my parents, but instead I was pulled back into their orbit.”

This passage leans on the thematic portent of fiction and literature. Alison describes her life in terms of genre (drama and tragedy). The reality of her coming out also dispels the fictional emancipation she imagined for herself.

“Gatsby’s self-willed metamorphosis from farm boy to prince is in many ways identical to my father’s. Like Gatsby, my father fueled this transformation with ‘the colossal vitality of his illusion.’ Unlike Gatsby, he did it on a schoolteacher’s salary.”

This section exemplifies the elasticity of Bechdel’s literary references. By comparing and contrasting her father to Gatsby, she is able to build a complex description of her father that connects to his interest in Fitzgerald and reflects the themes of Fitzgerald’s works.

“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.”

This quotation further expresses Alison’s dissociation from her emotions. It also mirrors and inverts her father’s preference for fiction to reality. Because Bruce relied upon Fitzgerald to define himself, Alison uses Fitzgerald as a resource to understand him.

“Dad’s death was not a new catastrophe but an old one that had been unfolding very slowly for a long time.”

This quotation suggests that Bruce’s death—implicitly, his death by suicide—was a long time coming. The “catastrophe” in question encompasses a number of factors: his dissolving marriage, his manic depression, his repressed sexuality, and his emotional repression, among other things. Bechdel presents her father’s death as a culminating process rather than a static moment in time.

“He would cultivate these young men like orchids.”

Here, Bechdel describes her father’s serial grooming of young men with a florid simile. This line compounds the symbolic portent of the flower motif: Bruce is not only symbolically a flower himself and a literal gardener, but here he is also a symbolic gardener.

“Not only were we inverts. We were inversions of each other. While I was trying to compensate for something unmanly in him… …He was attempting to express something feminine through me.”

This passage is a thematic lynchpin for Fun Home. It encompasses the intricacies of her and her father’s queerness as both an unspoken shared experience and a point of direct conflict.

“In fact, the picture is beautiful. But would I be assessing its aesthetic merits so calmly if it were of a seventeen-year-old girl? Why am I not properly outraged?”

In this section, Bechdel interrogates a contradiction in her feelings toward her father’s pederasty. Though she knows grooming a teenager for sex is immoral regardless of their gender, she is less disturbed by her father’s pursuit of boys than she would have been if he had targeted girls. Alison regards her father’s pursuit of teenagers as a product of his closeted sexuality rather than something more sinister.

“Would I have had the guts to be one of those Eisenhower-era butches? Or would I have married and sought succor from my high school students?”

This quotation continues Bechdel’s interrogation of her father’s pederasty and secrecy. She wonders whether she would have been as openly gay and gender nonconforming in the 1940s and ‘50s (when her father was young) as she has been in the 1970s and 80s when she came out. This further emphasizes her sympathy for her father’s illicit activities.

“If this was a premonitory dream, I can only say that its condolence-card association of death with a setting sun is maudlin in the extreme.”

This is one of several moments throughout Fun Home where Bechdel admonishes herself for being too emotional. This allows her to share her most extreme emotions while paradoxically emphasizing her difficulty to express them. It also allows her a certain academic distance from the rawness of her professed traumas.

TEXTBOX: “My numbness, along with all the mealy-mouthed mourning, was making me irritable. What would happen if we spoke the truth?”

PASTOR: “The lord moves in mysterious ways.”

ALISON: “There’s no mystery! He killed himself because he was a manic-depressive, closeted fag and he couldn’t’ face living in this small-minded small town one more second.”

TEXTBOX: “I didn’t find out.”

PASTOR: “The lord moves in mysterious ways.”

ALISON: “Yes. He does.”

ALISON [thought bubble]: “I’d kill myself too if I had to live here.”

This sequence highlights Alison’s desire for earnestness and truth. Conversely, it also presents a moment in her life when she gave in to the deceptive propriety her father prized during his lifetime.

“Our home was like an artists’ colony. We ate together, but otherwise were absorbed in our separate pursuits. And in this isolation, our creativity took on an aspect of compulsion.”

This quotation emphasizes the neurotic introversion that pervaded the Bechdel household. While creativity and virtuosity are admirable traits, in the context of Bechdel’s childhood, her pursuit of artistic self-expression paradoxically impeded her ability to express herself directly.

“The hearings had been mostly a nuisance to me. But now even I began to take notice as the truth wormed its way, like a larval cicada, toward daylight.”

Just as Bechdel alludes to literature to explain her family, she also employs contemporary events. Here, the emergence of the 17-year cicadas coincides with the breaking of the Watergate scandal. Both events are presented as symbols of suppressed truths surfacing, just as the truth of Bruce’s sexuality threatened to do that summer.

“The real accusation dared not speak its name.”

Here, Bechdel presents the courts’ choice not to accuse Bruce of gay sex with minors as analogous to “the love that dare not speak its name,” a euphemism Wilde used in court to refer to homosexuality. By contrast, Bruce’s official charge, “furnishing malt beverages to a minor,” takes on a similarly euphemistic cache.

“There’s a certain emotional expedience to claiming him as a tragic victim of homophobia. But that’s a problematic line of thought. For one thing, it makes it harder for me to blame him.”

This quotation coalesces naturally with quotes #15 and #16. While Bechdel is aware that her father’s circumstances are more complicated than victimhood, she is still compelled by that line of thought.

BRUCE: “You’re the only one in that class worth teaching.

ALISON: “It’s the only class I have worth taking.”

This exchange is an example of father and daughter exchanging and discussing literature as a surrogate for actual affection and emotional intimacy. Books are a point of contact between the two; they are drawn together by a love of reading, but the books they share also stand as a barrier to emotionally honest conversation between them.

“Instead of at last confiding in me, he took the novel approach of assuming that I already knew—although at the time he wrote the letter, I did not. What, reduced to their simplest reciprocal form, were my dad’s thoughts about my thoughts about him, and his thoughts about my thoughts about his thoughts about me? He thought that I thought that that he was queer. Whereas he knew that I knew that he knew I was too.”

By using language from her professor’s lecture on Ulysses—namely, the characters of Stephen and Bloom—Bechdel connects the reoccurring issue of her father’s lack of forthcomingness to his love of James Joyce.