Bechdel's Life as a Text

Alison Bechdel analyzes the inter-connectivity of her life with literature in Fun Home. We experience this as early as the auto-graphic's first page, as Bechdel sets up the retelling of her life in parallel with the myth of Daedalus and Icarus, showing an image of her "flying" above her father, as Icarus (3). On the next page the first panel reads, "In our particular reenactment of this mythic relationship, it was not me but my father who was to plummet from the sky" (4). On this first page where we see Alison and her father in the Icarus-Daedalus position (playing "airplane"), there is a copy of Anna Karenina on the floor of the panel. This specific inclusion of the novel is a direct nod to the events that would happen to Bruce, Alison's father: while Anna jumps in front of a train to end her life, Bruce (potentially) jumps in front of a bread truck to end his.

While we later witness the sun motif of the Icarus-Daedalus myth, not only in the Sunbeam bread truck but in Alison's premonition dream, Bechdel introduces many other literary references as means of making sense of her own life. She draws connections between her father and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and imagines her mother as Isabel Archer, of Henry James' The Portrait of a Lady (71). Even the scenario in which her parents met, in the performance of The Taming of the Shrew, Bechdel highlights the problematic relationship model that her parents would later embody. With her parents best understood to her as fictional characters --something Alison mentions in the text-- perhaps Bechdel even sees or experiences herself as a literary character or at least byproduct of literature.

Proust and Camus are other strong literary undercurrents throughout Fun Home, which Bechdel employs to make sense of her family life. I am most intrigued by the references to Camus, though, which Charles touched on in his post.

I believe that Alison experiences her life as a text, analyzing it with a critical and well-read eye, with the help of family photographs and literature-- both of which she puts to use to compile an organized, remastered representation of her life that we experience literally translated in this graphic work.


P.s. I can't help but wonder if Bruce would be pleased to know that the story of his life in connection to her daughter would become a book on the shelves of other libraries. Less-lavishly furnished libraries, maybe, but libraries all the same.