Fun Home I

Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home discusses the complex and compelling relationship of her family beginning from her childhood. The narrative also discusses deeper issues of sexuality and gendered relationships in families. Some more obvious than others, the book illustrates several allusions to sexuality and gender within the autobiography. For one, Fun Home “maps the splits in cultural views and practices that characterized the post-World War II US, torn between the norm of compulsory heterosexuality that had long coded same-sex desrire as “inversion”, and a repressed, smoldering consciousness of polymorphous sexuality that erupted in the “gay revolution” of the late sixties…” (Watson). Although this book wasn’t written during the period of ‘Gothic Literature’, we see death as an important subject to discuss.

Isolated Family structures 

            For one, the book refers to Camus regarding thoghts surroundings death. An excerpt from his book reads, “Yet one will never be sufficiently surprised that everyone lives as if no one “knew” This is because in reality there is no experience of death” (48). Just as the book deals with challenges in an American home, we also see contradictions in what our stereotypical representation of what a “happy home” is. In a world where we are taught that death has a spiritual meaning, Bechdel questions what meaning life has at all. Interpretations of religion tell us that there is an afterlife, or “place” where we go after death, yet Camus argues these assumptions are quite baseless. There is no “experience” we can base this claim on. Death is not experience an individual feels during his/her demise it is simply—the end. Issues such as these were quite prevalent during the rise in Gothic Literature. Bechdel responds to her father’s burial by commenting on the tombstone. She says, “The granite is handsome, crisp, and well, lifeless”(30). This observation is far from what our “typical” response would be after seeing a family member’s tombstone. Yet, Bechdel portrays this account so realistically and so emotional despite her cold feelings towards the death.

            A second, probably more “obvious” Gothic undertone is the Gothic Revival style of her childhood home. The house almost mirrors the deception her family suffered from. Rather than a paternal, loving home, the author’s embellished house is detailed with “gilt cornices, the marble fireplace, the crystal chandeliers…” (5). Despite the artistic skill of her father, he could not make “could not make things appear to be what they were not” (16). In order words, he could even try not love her. Disguised by her father’s stark façade, the narrator learns about her father’s secrets, the “boys, one time he almost got caught. And then there was the thing with Roy”, only well into her adulthood (79).

            For now, we cannot conclude why Bechdel decided to include the Gothic undertones, but I am interested to continue reading her autobiographic book.

Gothic-style home

Watson, Julia. “Autographic Disclosures and Genealogies of Desire in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home”