Identity In Alison Bechdel's Fun Home

In Fun Home, Alison Bechdel uses images of her father’s distant relationship and obsessive behaviors which lead to the repression of her identity. Bruce, her father, represses his entire family with his obsession with perfection in his life, beginning with the renovation of their gothic home. Within that home, there is rigidity in keeping their home in a perfect state at the cost of Alison and her siblings’ freedom. When Bruce begins to fall apart, he begins to push his obsessive behaviors onto his daughter, restricting her expression of dress and identity. In Fun Home, Alison Bechdel showcases her father’s denial of his femininity as an explanation for living vicariously through his daughter, in ways that he cannot himself.

Bruce has hidden

Bruce represses his femininity while simultaneously repressing Alison’s own desires of masculinity by controlling what she wore. In the drawing, Bechdel shows Alison in a dress as Bruce is fixing his tie in front of the mirror, meanwhile Helen, her mother, peaks from the right side of the drawing (98). As Alison stares at her father in annoyance and asks, “Why can’t I wear my sneakers” to which Bruce responds by stating that “it’s a wedding! I wish we had some sort of straw hat for you” (98). In the same drawing, Helen appears staring blankly at Bruce as she tells him that he was “going to upstage the bride in that suite” (98). Around the same image, there are captions that explain that Bruce’s suit was made of velvet and that Alison was wearing the least girly dress in the store. In this scene, Alison had been forced to wear a dress, picking it due to being the least “girly.” This signifies how despite trying to push away femininity, she is still forced by her father to appear more feminine. When she asks her father if she could wear sneakers and he doesn’t allow her because they’re attending a wedding, I feel that the wedding was not the only reason for prohibiting her. He represses her by restricting her to dressing femininely and even wishes there was a straw hat she could wear to make her appear more feminine. I feel that this idea of wanting Alison to appear more feminine reflects his own desires of wanting to appear more feminine. Helen’s mention of Bruce upstaging the bride depicts the importance he holds to looking perfect and beautiful, and despite not seeming conventionally feminine, he still wants to be viewed in that way. In her captions, Bechdel writes that “while I was trying to compensate for something unmanly in him… he was attempting to express something feminine through me” (98). Bechdel shares this idea of her trying to be what he lacked– masculinity–