The Role of Literary Interpretation in Fun Home

  Fun Home by Alison Bechdel is riddled with literary references, whether that be the chapter names, long discussions of different authors and their novels, or play performances. Throughout all of these examples, I found that escapism and idealization was pretty common among the Bechdel family in reading. 

Bruce’s obsession with Fitzgerald seems to center around a desire to be like Fitzgerald’s characters in his real life. Alison describes her father as fascinated with Jay Gatsby’s dedication to illusion. A perfect image of this is Bruce’s library, on the surface a center of knowledge, but in reality a fitting encapsulation of Bruce’s fraudulence: he often uses the library to flirt with male students he was interested in all while maintaining the fake image of a straight family man. Additionally, the idea itself is taken from Gatsby’s library, filled with unread books that only serve as displays to signal that Gatsby is a knowledgeable man. Furthermore, Bruce’s early love letters using quotes from Fitzgerald perfectly sums up that his love for literature largely served to help him escape from his reality as a gay man.

We see other members of the Bechdel family undergo similar processes: Alison recalls loving the Adams family as a kid in part because of its escape from reality. A key theme that seems to become more prominent to Alison as she grows up is that literature can serve not just as illusions and escape, but can mirror reality. Though Alison’s parents began their relationship through performance in The Taming of the Shrew, their relationship later comes to resemble the relationships present in the play, whether for good or bad. To me, that is one of the key distinctions between Alison and her father: while Bruce used literature as an escape to model the illusions of his life after, Alison recognized the realities of literature and how it related to her life in the first place. For Bruce, reading Fitzgerald helped him craft his artifice of a heterosexual man, while Alison’s interaction with lesbian literature was so pivotal to her coming-out-story and eventual embrace of her identity. This key difference between the two drives much of Fun Home’s events and Bruce’s eventual tragic end. On a meta-level, Alison Bechdel writing a book like Fun Home which candidly depicts the events of her life through literature helps her further come to terms with reality and understand her father’s death. 

Comments

  1. LiliApril 11, 2023 at 9:11 AM

    I think this is a really interesting concept that I hadn't thought about before. I think it's interesting that each reference refers to escapism and how that is their preferred form of literature. I'm sure it is a reflection on their lives as Bruce is trying to escape his sexuality.

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  2. Nyla Kyles April 20, 2023 at 8:57 AM

    I never thought about this but I think you make a really good point. Its very interesting how Allison relates her life to fiction/literature finding the parallels between the two while Bruce almost tries to become a fictional character I don't have much to add, great post!

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  3. MitchellApril 23, 2023 at 11:36 AM

    This is a really interesting, core distinction between this element that Alison and Bruce have in common (the tendency to understand life and relationships through the lens of fiction and literature)--but also a crucial distinction between their aesthetics. I wrote about this a bit on my own blog, but I look at the author Bechdel's use of _Ulysses_ (a book I am pretty deeply familiar with, so I appreciate the nuances of how she uses it in chapter 7) and consider how she really didn't vibe with this book at all when Bruce was alive and was urging her to get deep into it, BUT she's clearly read it very closely in the ensuing years, and she USES the book as a way to contemplate and analyze their relationship using the nontraditional "father-son" motif at the heart of Joyce's novel. This is, as you say, the polar opposite of how Bruce uses fiction to present and polish his facade, or to give him models for how to perform heterosexual masculinity--Alison uses the fiction to get at her idea of truth. But at the same time, I think of how proud Bruce would be if he could read this chapter and see how well she's studied her Joyce! She completed his "assignment," just later than expected. The damn college class just about ruined the book for her!

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