An Examination of Themes in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home

Post by Jaymee F

Fun Home revolves around various themes, continuously supporting Bechdel’s journey to make sense of her world while sharing Bruce’s story. 

Themes

Core themes evident in Bechdel’s Fun Home include an exploration of family, love and mourning, secrets, suicide, mental illness, and LGBTQI+ awareness while promoting acceptance of self.

Family, Love, and Mourning

Family: Fun Home recounts daily family life in the Bechdel home. Al details her relationships between herself, her mother, her brothers, and her father. The memoir proves the notion that ‘no family is perfect’ and that all families have secrets. The memoir explores various examples of love.

The Bechdel family dynamic is complicated. Although everyone lives together under one roof, Al references the Bechdel home as more of an “artists’ colony” (p. 134), where everyone retreats to their individual artistic interest as a form of escape. 

There are moments where the Bechdel's proceed with a seemingly normal life. This includes camping trips and vacations away, but nothing is ever depicted as just wholesome family fun. Normally, one of Bruce’s handy-men like Roy or Bill tags along. 

Moments, like when the family binds together on the night of the big storm, showcases instances where the Bechdel's need each another. The children and Bruce pick up around the yard, while Helen is forced to retype her entire thesis due the next day. 

Bruce and Helen share a complex husband-wife relationship. Mother and father to three children, they once ventured on a marital path together. Tender and physical moments between the two are so rare Al can only remember one time where Bruce gave Helen an awkward “peck” and once when Helen rested a hand on Bruce’s back (p. 68). Often, the two are depicted as fighting, yelling at one another, ignoring one another’s existence, and living in two very separate worlds. Helen also rarely joins on family trips, often she stays home or goes on a trip of her own.

Bruce and Al share a complex father-daughter dynamic. Early in Al’s childhood, the two are often at ends arguing about appearances and perception of self-identity. Bruce wants Al to be more feminine while Al wishes Bruce were more masculine – we later interpret these wants as self-reflection. As Al grows up, the two share an intellectual bond like no other. Al and Bruce can talk about books and suggest readings for one another, sometimes underlying the actualities they wish they could talk about openly.  

Finally, Al, John and Christian are siblings. Together, they share all of these moments, but each of them processes the experience as individuals. As children they had each other as play companions, always getting into mischief and playing around. Later, they have one another, though each of them is grieving in their own way after Bruce’s death. 

Love: Love is evident in Fun Home in a wide range of the term. There is familial love as evident between family members, although it is complex and never nuclear. There is the estranged love shared between Bruce and Helen. Al and Joan’s love is depicted as another escape from Al’s real world, but they are always there for each other. Bruce’s love, or lust, for younger men like Roy, Mark, and Bill, is risky, not because Bruce is a closeted homosexual, but because the men are underage, and he is knowingly cheating on Helen. Fun Home also encourages self-love, as Al realizes that Bruce’s death could have possibly been prevented if he had grown up in a more open-minded society and moved away to another town. 

Mourning: Al recounts her process of mourning her father’s death. The memoir itself can be viewed as a cathartic form of mourning in the remembrance of Bruce. Al highlights how the process was different for everyone in the family, and how, for her, it presented itself in various forms. Al showcases moments of hysteria, including laughing when telling people about Bruce getting hit by the Sunbeam truck. Al acknowledges that life moved on almost immediately following his death. She admits to crying to Joan but only for about two minutes. She showcases moments of anger and wanting to explode at the funeral and elsewhere. 

Secrets, Suicide, and Mental Illness

Secrets: Fun Home reaffirms the notion that everyone and every family has secrets. A few examples include; Bruce hiding the fact that he’s gay, resulting in his suicide, Alison’s mother keeping her unhappiness a secret, resulting in her filing for divorce, and Alison keeping her period a secret until months after the fact. Helen eventually shares many of Bruce’s secrets to Alison shortly after Al's coming out and sharing her sexual awakening. Fun Home proves why people choose to keep secrets, and the hurt these secrets can cause when they come to surface.

Suicide: Al insinuates that her father’s death was most likely as a result of suicide. Fun Home paints an image of a homosexual man trapped in a heterosexual marriage; the father of three children. Bruce is too afraid to admit his true identity but instead, promiscuously carries on hidden sexual relations with men. The memoir suggests that after Al’s coming out letter, and after her final discussion with Bruce before his death, Mr. Bechdel jumps in front of the Sunbeam bread truck. Al later suggests that Bruce’s death could have possibly been prevented if he had decided to move out of small-minded Beech Creek. 

Mental illness: Mental illness in Fun Home is presented in various capacities including:

1- Probable depression – Although Al doesn’t immediately use the term ‘depression’ in Fun Home, it’s probable in the depiction of Bruce and Helen’s unhappiness. As a result, Bruce committed suicide, and Helen took care of everyone else and constantly buried herself in work.

2- OCD – Al shares her initial OCD tendencies, and how her pact to stop, also became an obsession.

3- Anxiety – Al discusses her lingering anxiety, even after self-therapy to reduce her OCD.

4- Risky or manic decision making – Although Bruce must have understood the consequences of sexual relations with younger men and cheating on his wife, Bruce often displayed risky behaviour or manic decision making.

As a whole, mental illness is more openly discussed today than in the 80s. Support is more readily available, and Fun Home proves the importance of seeking help and talking openly about mental illness. 

LGBTQI+ Awareness and Acceptance of Self

LGBTQI+: A hugely evident theme in Fun Home revolves around homosexuality awareness. Bruce is a closeted homosexual, and as a result of not being able to accept himself, he commits suicide. Al, on the other hand, learns the term ‘lesbian’ at the age of thirteen and self-admits her sexual identity by nineteen. In turn, Al shares, “My father was gay and I was, and we both grew up in the same little Pennsylvania town and he killed himself and I became a lesbian cartoonist” (StuckinVermont).

For those interested in further LGBTQI+ information, Rainbow Health Ontario has some incredible information – please click here:

https://www.rainbowhealthontario.ca/glossary/#L

References

Bechdel, A. Fun Home. (2006). Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Boston, NY: Houghton Mifflin Company. 

Rainbow health Ontario glossary. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.rainbowhealthontario.ca/glossary/#L

StuckinVermont. (2008, December 17). Alison Bechdel [SIV 109] [Video file]. Retrieved fromhttps://youtu.be/nWBFYTmpC54

Post created by Jaymee