Hidden Literary Allusion in Fun Home

Throughout the graphic memoir Fun Home, Alison Bechdel uses literary allusion to highlight specific details, and make comments upon her life. She begins the work with mention of the Icarus and Daedalus myth, that is there forward laced within her narrative. Joyce becomes an important part of Bechdel’s story, as does Proust, Fitzgerald, and Camus, seeing as their lives and works stand eerily parallel to hers at times. Still, underneath this given layer of literary allusion, Bechdel presents another layer that lies within her ornately illustrated frames, not outside of them like most of her lengthy meditation on other works. Books lie about the pages and are often being read by characters in a fashion that is easily glazed over. If the reader has not read the books that Bechdel throws into these frames without mentioning them, then a little part of the story is left unsaid. Regardless, Bechdel’s talented use of the graphic memoir genre is showcased by these little asides, as they tell a narrative within themselves, and Fun Home becomes much deeper than a traditional comic book.

On the first page of Bechdel’s narrative, the text Anna Karenina by Tolstoy lies on the intricate old fashioned rug beneath her and her father. The placement of this text immediately foreshadows the dysfunctional familial structure in Fun Home. In Anna Karenina, the Oblonsky family is torn apart by an adulterous father. The family is forced to stay together through all of their troubles, just to keep up appearances. The father refuses a divorce and makes the family stay together. Alison says the same of her father Bruce where she writes, “He used his skillful artifice not to make things, but to make things appear to be what they were not. He appeared to be an ideal husband and father, for example. It’s tempting to suggest, in retrospect, that our family was a sham. That our house was not a real home at all but the simulacrum of one, a museum” (16-7). These lines almost uncannily parallel the main plot of Anna Karenina, and the fact that Bruce has his house decorated in the fashion of the period when this novel was written even makes the connection stronger. Also, in Tolstoy’s novel the father gets caught because he is not only having an affair, but he is having it with the governess. While the governess may be a woman in Tolstoy’s work, it is extremely similar to Fun Home in that Bruce is not only having affairs with young men, but with the family babysitters who he specifically picks out from his classes to do the job. By simply placing Tolstoy’s novel on the rug next to Bruce on the first page of Fun Home, Bechdel is quickly exposing her father and his sins, but only to a select audience. Surely only a fraction of the memoir’s readership would be familiar enough with Anna Karenina to be able to figure out the rest of Fun Home’s plot.

Standing in immediate juxtaposition to the dense text of Anna Karenina, Alison’s father is shown in leisure on page 7, while reading a copy of Architectural Digest in front of his twelfth-grade English class. While the class looks incredibly disinterested, Bruce appears to not only be in concentration with the text, but in a state of leisure as well, with his foot propped up on a desk. Contrary to the dense works Bruce is often reading at home in his spare time, Architectural Digest seems to be much lighter reading. The magazine may also be a sort of wall between him as his classmates, because there is not too much you can assume of Bruce upon his reading of this text, other than he is interested in architecture, which is a very masculine field. He may want to appear as intelligent in front of his class, but at the same time he does not want to give anything away about his personal life. Even in restoring his home, we see Bruce’s femininity coming out, such as on the same page where he is pictured putting new wallpaper up in Alison’s room. Alison says, “This is the wallpaper for my room? But I hate pink! I hate pink flowers!” Meanwhile her father replies, “Tough titty.” Where it seems like Bruce is more feminine than his own daughter, the following frame where he is reading Architectural Digest suggests, just as Anna Karenina previously did, that he is simply keeping up appearances in front of the small town in risk of being caught as a homosexual man who specifically likes his young students.

Amidst a strong narrative moment on page 15 of the text, Bechdel stands at a young age playing war as her father lies on a chaise lounge concentrating heavily on The Nude by Kenneth Clark. This text also makes a sly appearance on page 99, as if it has remained one of her father’s favorites over the years that have passed between the two of these frames. Clark’s work meditates on the beauty and perfection of the nude human body, using a feminist perspective in paradox with the male Westernized view of the nude. On page 15, Alison is shown at a young age as a complete opposite of the ancient artistic perfection of the nude womanly body, as she looks like a little boy in her army helmet with short hair, holding the gun as a sort of ironic phallic symbol. On page 99, the same dichotomy lies within the illustrated frame. The Nude rests on a shelf while Alison, wearing the same clothes as her father and still sporting a very short haircut, reads and comments upon Esquire magazine. Alison says, “You should get a suit with a vest,” while her father observes the seemingly perfect picture of the male form and replies, “Nice. I should.” The parallel between the two pages where The Nude is a seemingly unimportant fixture in a frame, grows even stronger within Alison’s prose. She writes, “Between us lay a slender demilitarized zone—our shared reverence for masculine beauty. But I wanted the muscles and tweed like my father wanted the velvet and pearls—subjectively, for myself. The objects of our desire were quite different” (99). It is ironic that she describes the distance between her and her fathers relationship as a “demilitarized zone,” because of the stance she is in as a young child playing war on page 15. While Bruce wishes that Alison become more of an idealized womanly beauty, such as portrayed in The Nude, his concentration on the picture in Esquire, as well as his seemingly perfect Polaroid of the family babysitter Roy that looks eerily similar to the one in Esquire, shows his general obsession of the perfection of the human form. This obsession surely translates over to his house, as shown in his reading of Architectural Digest, and the fact that he wants to keep his family looking ideal, such as in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina.

As the narrative progresses and the oddity of the father/daughter relationship becomes more and more apparent, a scene on page 19 where he is laying in bed reading a pristine copy of The Stones of Venice by Ruskin only strengthens Bechdel’s prose. The Stones of Venice is a three volume work highlighting Ruskin’s obsession of Venetian architecture. Just as Bruce tries to replicate these old architectural styles and designs within his own home, his very being is taking on similar traits. Venetian architecture is large, beautiful, and made out of perfectly carved stones, whereas Bruce behaves like a stone, in such a cold manner that his own young daughter cannot even properly say goodnight to him. Where Bruce has worked so hard on perfecting every minute nook and cranny of the exterior persona of his family, just as the buildings in Venice were constructed, he has not worked at all on the interior. What remains is a mere framework and foundation of a family, perfectly molded out of cold, hard stone, but nothing else. There is no emotion or personality trait that is ever very readable within Bruce or his wife. The buildings in Venice are also separated by waterways and bridges, so that it is more difficult to get from one place to another, but there is still beauty in the water and gondolas regardless of the almost useless structure of the city. This beauty is much similar to that which Bruce creates by being fixated on elaborate chairs and chandeliers, but not the actual structure of his family. His children have to maneuver in odd and uncomfortable ways to reach him. This also gives an ironic twist to the way Alison’s father died; crossing the street. In fact, Alison’s gesture towards her father where she is only capable of kissing his fingers seems to be what Bruce may have been going for. He is merely an untouchable figure of royalty because of his ability to build this aesthetically perfect house, but he is not a father. The Stones of Venice, just like the other texts that Bruce reads throughout Fun Home, strengthens the character traits that Alison gives us and creates an even deeper understanding of the dysfunctional territory that she grew up in.

Upon a seemingly hysterical image of Bechdel’s father drinking a small glass of sherry on page 116, he is also reading a copy of The Worm Ouroboros by E. R. Eddison, that shows the layers of metaphor that lie beneath this page. The Worm Ouroboros is a fantasy novel focusing deeply on old mythology. The meaning of the worm, or snake is that it swallows its own tail and therefore has no beginning or end, such as the story does not. Just like Alison’s use of The Stones of Venice, within this frame where Bruce is reading The Worm Ouroboros, Alison is awkwardly trying to tell him “Good night,” and this shows how many of the issues within Bechdel’s narrative are coming full-circle, just like the image of the snake. Whereas she never mentions The Worm Ouroboros, she writes in the next frame, “And in a way, you could say that my father’s end was my beginning. Or more precisely, that the end of his life coincided with the beginning of my truth” (117), obviously alluding to the work. The snake in The Worm Ouroboros is just like the one Bruce supposedly sees that makes him jump back into the road and meet his fate, just as it is similar to the one Alison saw on her camping trip that seemed to mark a turning point in her life. The snake is also an ironic metaphor in terms of Bechdel’s narrative because, as she says, “It’s obviously a phallus, yet a more ancient and universal symbol of the feminine principle would be hard to come by” (116). Not only does Bruce seem to be living in a fantasy world such as the one that exists within The Worm Ouroboros, but details within his life seem to function similarly as well, if portrayed correctly by Alison. Everything seems to move cyclically.

In one of the most intimate scenes between Bechdel and her mother, on page 185, her mother is reading a copy of Margaret Drabble’s The Waterfall as she is informed of Bechdel starting her period. The Waterfall is a novel about a recent mother that is left by her husband and starts having an affair with a married man. Other than commenting upon her mother’s unmentioned dilemma of both maternal and sexual love, this text seems to yet again comment on her father’s affairs, while also commenting on the overall topic of menstruation. While a waterfall is both clean and a source of life, menstruation is the latter, but obviously not seen as the former, especially within contemporary society. Even the way Alison and her mother discuss the subject shows that menstruation is approached in an awkward and uncleanly way. Her mother’s hands start shaking and she has to start smoking to get rid of the stressful situation. This relates to a similar moment in the narrative where her mother decides to start sitting in on Alison’s bath time to try to start some sort of relationship, but still has her head buried in a book while doing so. Where Fun Home seems to be more of a meditation on the uncanny parallels and paradoxes between Alison and her father, these rare interactions between Alison and her mother shows an even stranger relationship between the two of them than Alison and he father. Quickly following the frame where Alison’s mother is reading The Waterfall, the conversation moves and is shown in speech bubbles outside of the house, on page 186. This shows the utter disconnect between Alison and her mother, that may even be worse that that between her and her father. Their interaction is so rare that when doing so it is almost outside themselves, and outside the walls of the house. It is otherwordly. On the contrary, through Alison and Bruce’s later letters and conversations, it seems like they have a lot in common, whereas her mother is rarely even in the picture. Perhaps this is because rather than taking time to realize that her own daughter is going through the tough time of puberty, her head is literally stuck in her own affairs, just as it is in the book in front of her.

Even though Bechdel uses literary allusion on the surface of her narrative, moving quickly from Greek mythology to Modernism, if Fun Home were anything else than a graphic memoir, it would be impossible for her to do what she does with these given texts. Anna Karenina, Architectural Digest, The Nude, The Stones of Venice, The Worm Ouroboros, and The Waterfall all relate heavily to the meaning and depth of Fun Home, but merely lie within the illustrated frame and remain only slyly alluded to, if at all, outside of it. Whereas The Worm Ouroboros is indirectly described in Bechdel’s prose surrounding the frame that it lies within, all of the other texts remain left to the reader to either assume something of or read. This sets Fun Home on a different plane than other graphic memoirs, as it urges other texts to be read and then multiple readings within itself. If it is not the magnum opus of the genre, it certainly is Bechdel’s as it not only bends the concept of literary allusion and genre, but that of the novel as we have previously understood it.