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Allison Bechdel's Fun Home

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In her graphic memoir Fun Home, Allison Bechdel puts forth the experience of shared homosexuality as the major connection that binds her to her father, concluding her meandering analysis of the man and his relationship to her with a chapter centered around an episode in which they both acknowledge their queerness. This connection is absolutely a valid one. However, in framing this episode as the culminating event in the father/daughter relationship Fun Home portrays, Bechdel fails to offer overt acknowledgment of the ways in which her text supports alternate readings of this dynamic: namely that both Alison and Bruce share the common affliction of mental illness and a common need for control. Bechdel's decision not to emphasize a connection …show more content…

The Obsessive Compulsive Symptoms (OCS) that she manifests during 1971 are clearly meant to tie symbolically into the feelings of uncertainty, locational constraint, and impending collapse that permeate Chapters 5 and 6, where they accompany her father's confinement in the geographic space of Beech Creek, her family's “autistic” nature, her mother's stressful master's thesis, her father's arrest, the unfolding Watergate scandal, and a storm that fells several trees around her family's house. However, amidst all these interlinked elements she never directly links her own psychiatric issues to those of her father as he consults with his court ordered psychiatrist. This would have been an easy connection to make, as both her episodes and his psychotherapy occur in close proximity to one another in Fun Home's free-associated narration. Her decision not to highlight these parallel experiences has much to do, no doubt, with the historical framing of her father's mental illness. It is clear that Bechdel believes or has believed her father to have been mentally ill in some capacity, given her imagined outburst at his funeral in which she refers to him as a “manic-depressive, closeted fag” (Bechdel 125). However, the circumstances surrounding Bruce Bechdel's experiences with a psychologist inextricably link any

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She proceeds to explain the contributing factors of the narrator succumbing to her “disease” of hysteria which was isolation from social interaction and the restriction of her own thoughts. She points out that the narrator is confined to a simple square room with nothing to offer in terms of mental health therapy. The narrator’s lack of the ability to interact with anything or anyone leads to infatuation with the wallpaper, which turns out to be “the

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Alison Bechdel’s “Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic” is an enthralling memoir about a young girl’s peculiar childhood, which involved her family’s funeral business, infatuating trips, family turmoil, solitude, and her befuddling relationship with her masterful artificer of a father; in which similarities ranged from obsessive compulsive disorders and literature to sexuality. The most profound being homosexuality. Bechdel utilized duo-specific, speech bubbles, as well as, subject-to-subject paneling to illustrate the complex father-daughter relationship where Alison and Bruce Bechdel perpetually attempted to compensate for each other’s eccentric gender behaviors. Initially, both Bechdals yearned for different genders, imposing expected behaviors upon the other.

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The narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” deals with inner turmoil as well as fighting the patriarchal system she lives in, because her husband tells everyone “that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression-- a slight hysterical tendency” (64). Society is represented through her husband. Everyone believes there is nothing wrong, which leads to her inner turmoil that causes her to hallucinate and fight to get out of her mind and the oppressive society she lives in. In contrast, Aunt Jennifer submits to the system and escapes through the creation of her tigers. According to Smith, the problem is that “the tigers that she created were her only means of escaping the oppression, but she died oppressed” (73).

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Throughout this novel, Bruce appeared to want to live through his daughter’s life. For instance, Alison and Bruce’s life have always been about femininity versus masculinity, “It was a war of cross-purposes” (Bechdel 98). As Bruce was trying to expose his feminine side by using Alison as a proxy, Alison was trying to make up for the lack of masculinity her father showed. She noticed that her father’s taste are much more effeminate than her own. Thus, ties back to his obsession of beautifying the house.

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Mental Illness affects an immense amount of individuals no matter their race, culture or age. It is everywhere we go, yet still an issue some choose to ignore; whether it is the person facing the illness or those around them. People handle their sickness in a variety of ways. Some by using violence as their only answer, others run away from their issue and majority choose to accept and make the best of it. After reading the novel The Secret Life of Bees, it would be easy to think that the main theme is discrimination or family, but in reality it is actually focused on the toll that mental illness takes on a family.

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This dialogue directly shows how the narrator, with a mental illness that confines her logic, imagined many women “creeping” around her private front

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The market is saturated with memoirs written in prose. Alison Bechdel, however, puts a spin on the dysfunctional family memoir in her graphic novel Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. By using the graphic novel narrative form, Bechdel tells the tale of her family tragedy through words and graphic images. Fun Home tells the story of young Alison’s life of dysfunction with a father who is a closeted gay man, a family that lives in isolation and her own struggle with anxiety and OCD. The chapter “The Canary-Colored Caravan of Death” focuses on her father’s death by suicide, and her own isolation and mental struggles.

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Lastly, In the story her husband never lets her talk about house she feels, so she keeps it all bottled up in her head which eventually drives her crazy. As “The Yellow Wallpaper” States “It 's hard to talk to john about my case, because he loves me so. But I tried to last night” (777 Gilman). This show another great example of women cruelty because back then women were not allowed to state there own opinion and also

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570 Words | 3 Pages

Her descriptions of the room, with the furniture seemingly being nailed to the floor and the windows being “barred” show an underlying understanding that her thoughts and personality is being confined. The irony present in this description, due to her belief that the room used to be a nursery, shows her early denial of her husband’s dominance over her. As the story progresses and she begins to see the woman behind the wallpaper, the reader is exposed to the narrator’s realization that she is the one that is actually being suppressed. The descriptions of the wallpaper, showing how confining it is for the symbolic woman behind it, shows how the narrator is being trapped by those bars in both her marriage and in her mental illness. Thus when she says, “At night in any kind of light… it becomes bars,” the reader is shown how restricted the narrator feels, reflected through the wallpaper.

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In the short story “the Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the narrator, Jane who has just given birth becomes progressively more ill and depressed. Her husband John, who is a physician prescribes that she get lots of rest and fresh air so Jane and John rent a colonial mansion for the summer. Throughout the story John is one of the main causes for Jane’s deepening depression.

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Exploring Psychology by David G Myers (2014) says that a psychological disorder is a syndrome marked by a “clinically significant disturbance in an individual’s cognition, emotion regulation, or behavior” (American Psychiatric Association 2013)(p. 506). In the movie Mommie Dearest directed by Frank Perry we see Joan Crawford played by Faye Dunaway. The character Joan portrays many different psychological disorders, which affects how we see her role in the movie. Multiple disorders were evident throughout the film, but three major disorders that were noticeable were obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), bipolar, and borderline. Mommie Dearest is a story about Joan Crawford (Faye Dunaway) who is a great Hollywood actress.

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Psychoanalytic reading of The Yellow Wallpaper In Charlotte Gilman's short story The Yellow Wallpaper, the speaker seems to be suffering from postpartum depression or "temporary nervous depression." (648). Accordingly, her husband makes the decision for her and takes her to a country house because he believes that it would be good for her. The narrator is not allowed to take care of her own child as she was imprisoned in her room where she should do nothing but "rest."

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814 Words | 4 Pages

How she describes her surroundings and her interactions with her family evolves as her condition worsens. By the end, the reader can truly see just how far gone the narrator has gone. The narrator’s fixation on the yellow wallpaper had gone from a slight obsession to full mental breakdown. As it is with most good stories, the presence of strong symbolism and detailed settings is a very important aspect of the story that helps to draw the reader into the story.

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The story “The Yellow Wallpaper” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1892 shows mental illness through the narrator first hand. The theme in this story is going insane verses loneliness as well as being trapped. These themes are shown through the main character (the narrator of the story) as she works through her own mind, life, and surroundings. First, the theme of the woman’s state of mind is the main focus in this story.

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Excluded from the sibling relationship, the narrator is allowed to survive and flees from the House to the storm raging outside. Stripped of its patriarchal ties to humanity, the House crumbles, swallowed by the “deep and dark tarn” (Poe 25). By effectively conflating Madeline’s absence with insanity, the existing prejudices against women during the Victorian era are used to stigmatize mental

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