Outstanding Scenes in Fun Home

 Post by Sarah H

Fun Home is Alison Bechdel’s exploration of her childhood and her complicated relationship with her father, Bruce. Our parents help form the people we become, oftentimes to our benefit. For many people, though, it is important to analyze and dissect these complex family relationships to gain a deeper understanding of ourselves and the people who were integral to helping shape us as individuals.
Alison’s analysis of her childhood has taken the form of her graphic memoir. Alison is a consummate storyteller, and many fascinating scenes depict her childhood in vivid detail. She entertains and informs her audience, and in the process, she helps make sense of her world.

Chapter 1- Old Father, Old Artificer
In Chapter 1, we are introduced to Alison and her father, Bruce. We learn about her father’s love of historical restoration, as well as his exacting expectations that made him often seem like a monster to young Alison. In this chapter, we discover that Bruce’s perfect appearing family seemed to a facade, an artifice that covered his secret life of homosexuality. However, as Alison argues, her family life was real, even if it did cover dark secrets.
In the scene below, the audience is first appraised of the fact that Bruce is gay, and that he engages in sexual relationships with teenage boys.


Alison also establishes the lack of physical and emotional affection displayed in her family.

She also elucidates the unpredictability of her father’s personality.

These early scenes are integral to communicating both the volatile atmosphere of Alison’s home and the family secrets that were hiding beneath its polished and flawless surface.

Chapter 2- A Happy Death
The first scene in Chapter 2 lays out for the audience Alison’s opinion of her father’s death. She believes that it was suicide although, she also comments that it was her father’s “consummate artifice” (p. 27) because no one could ever prove his death was intentional; there could only be suspicion. The circumstances surrounding her father’s death is a recurring theme throughout the memoir. A Happy Death is a reference to the Camus novel that Bruce Bechdel was reading when he died.


Alison theorizes that perhaps all her years spent in close proximity to death (her father was the local funeral director) might have made her more immune to death, but when it involves the death of her father, she concludes that her experiences only makes things seem more unfathomable.


Chapter 3- That Old Catastrophe
Alison finds her father’s death to be Queer- in all senses of the word, including the definition that is missing from her dictionary: homosexual.
Alison told her parents in a letter sent four months before her father’s death that she is gay. She later gets a call from her mother saying that her father has affairs with men and boys. Instead of the attention being on Alison and her revelation, the focus shifts back to her parents and their complicated marriage. She wonders if her father might still be alive had she not told her parents about her newly discovered sexual identity.


Although Alison tells her parents that she is a lesbian before she has a relationship with anyone, it isn’t long before she meets her first girlfriend, Joan.

 
Chapter 4- In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
Alison thought that her father was a sissy for his love of flowers. Her nickname, given by her cousins was "Butch". She knew it was the opposite of sissy. She and her father were both alike and complete opposites at the same time.
On a trip with her father, Alison sees a “Bulldyke” for the first time in her life and she recognizes someone like herself.




In this scene, as Alison looks at photos of her father, she finds a picture of him in a woman’s bathing suit. She also discovers pictures of her father and compares them to herself at around the same age. She had been photographed by her female lover and she wonders if her father had similarly been photographed by his male lover.


Chapter 5- The Canary Colored Caravan of Death
In this scene, Alison imagines the things that she would like to have said to the people who expressed the usual platitudes at her father’s funeral. Like most people, she doesn’t articulate her true thoughts and adheres to society's norms. Alison considers the more authentic life that her father could have led had he not stayed in this conservative, provincial town.


Below, Alison reveals that the stress of her turbulent childhood caused her to develop OCD at the age of 10. Her exacting rituals were time-consuming and, perhaps, were performed to compensate for the lack of physical affection from her parents.




Chapter 6- The Ideal Husband
In this scene, Alison speaks about the convergence of several events: Alison getting her period, Richard Nixon’s probable impeachment, her mother’s troubles with her thesis, and her father’s upcoming court date (for cruising and giving alcohol to underage boys) and the possibility that her family may have to move as a result.


In the end, Richard Nixon resigned, and at Bruce’s court hearing, the judge decided to mandate counselling for Alison’s father; they would not have to move.


Chapter 7- The Anti-Hero’s Journey
At the beginning of this chapter, Alison demonstrates the change in the relationship between herself and her father. She becomes someone with whom Bruce can discuss literature and Alison senses growing respect from Bruce.



In this pivotal scene below, while home from college, Alison broaches the subject of her and her father’s sexuality. Her father confesses his first homosexual experiences to her.



Fun Home is a story of a father and daughter who have grown up a generation apart and, therefore, each is the child of different societal expectations. Although Alison’s father Bruce is gay, he was expected to marry, settle down with children and live a “respectable” life. Alison, born a generation later, was able to live an authentic life as a lesbian, without having to hide her identity from a disapproving society. Through Alison’s exploration of her father’s life, she comes to accept her father as the product of his repressed society. There are many outstanding and deeply personal scenes in Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir, Fun Home.

Below the illustrator, Nicole Georges describes through her own comics, her interview with Alison Bechdel and their discussion of Fun Home.
https://thenib.com/the-nib-interview-alison-bechdel

Sources Consulted

Bechdel, A. (2006). Fun home: a family tragicomic. New York: Houghton Mifflin.

Georges, N. (2019, March 4). The Nib Interview: Alison Bechdel. Retrieved from https://thenib.com/the-nib-interview-alison-bechdel.

Post Created by Sarah H