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Under Construction Alison Bechdel's

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
Robin Lydenberg
Published online: 30 Apr 2012.

To cite this article: Robin Lydenberg (2012) Under Construction Alison Bechdel's Fun
Home: A Family Tragicomic , European Journal of English Studies, 16:1, 57-68, DOI:
10.1080/13825577.2012.655158

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13825577.2012.655158

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 Robin Lydenberg

UNDER CONSTRUCTION
Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family
Tragicomic

Among various attempts to define the characteristics of the comics medium, one fruitful and
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often-quoted analogy is Art Spiegelman’s comparison of comics structure to a building.

Several major comics artists have created works that feature buildings and houses not just as
metaphors for the structure of comics but as narrative embodiments of personal, cultural and
historical change. This paper will focus on Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family
Tragicomic (2006), a graphic memoir featuring the author’s family home as it undergoes
meticulous architectural restorations under the direction of her closeted gay father. Her
father’s obsessive renovations both reflect and disguise the on-going construction of bodies,
sex and gender identities, and familial relationships taking place within its walls. Unlike
her father, Bechdel ultimately escapes the constraints of her family’s Gothic Revival house
by engaging with the more liberal house of fiction and writing her own coming-out memoir.

Keywords house renovation; gender identity; lesbian; gay; graphic novel;

memoir

In the past two decades graphic narratives have attracted the interest of an increasingly
large popular as well as scholarly audience.1 In their efforts to define the
characteristics of this medium, comics theorists have variously described its structure
as cinematic, hieroglyphic, even musical; but perhaps the most fruitful and often-
quoted analogy is Art Spiegelman’s comparison of the comics form to a building: ‘My
dictionary defines COMIC STRIP as ‘‘a narrative series of cartoons.’’ A NARRATIVE
is defined as ‘‘a story.’’ Most definitions of STORY leave me cold. Except the one
that says: ‘‘A complete horizontal division of a building . . . [From Medieval Latin
HISTORIA . . . a row of windows with pictures on them]’’’ (Spiegelman, 1978: n.p.).
The comics artist Chris Ware has expanded on this architectural trope in his
description of reading graphic narrative as a spatial (architectural) experience: ‘[One
way to experience comics] is to pull back and consider the composition all at once, as
you would the façade of a building’ (quoted in Raeburn, 2004: 25). Several major
comics artists, including Spiegelman (Breakdowns), Ware (Jimmy Corrigan) and Will
Eisner (The Building), have created works that feature buildings not just as metaphors
for the structure of comics, but as concrete representations of personal, cultural and
historical change.2 This paper will focus on Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family
Tragicomic (2006), a graphic memoir in which a house-in-progress is used to address
complex questions about identity, gender and desire. This prize-winning work

European Journal of English Studies Vol. 16, No. 1, April 2012, pp. 57–68
ISSN 1382-5577 print/ISSN 1744-4233 online ª 2012 Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13825577.2012.655158
 58 EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES

features the author’s family home as it undergoes meticulous historical restorations,

providing a shifting framework for the more disorienting and on-going construction of
bodies, identities and relationships taking place within its walls.
Fun Home tells the story of growing up in the rural Pennsylvania town of Beech
Creek, in a family dominated by the author’s father, Bruce Bechdel – a high school
English teacher, part-time funeral director, obsessed house renovator and closeted
homosexual. The dramatic events of Bechdel’s discovery and announcement of her
lesbianism and the subsequent accidental/suicidal death of her father are staged amidst
the familiar details of daily life in small-town middle-America. Fun Home interweaves
the author’s life story with that of her father, juxtaposing his struggles within the
repressive cultural atmosphere of l940s and l950s America with Bechdel’s eventual
coming out in the more liberated 1970s. The family’s home, a Victorian Gothic
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Revival ‘fixer-upper’ that is the object of Bruce Bechdel’s loving attention, functions
as a main character in this domestic saga. The ‘fun home’ of Bechdel’s title derives
from the family’s joking shorthand for the funeral home business Bruce Bechdel has
inherited from his father, but it refers with equally bitter irony to the family’s less
than cheerful residence as well.
In the history of the novel, this trope of the house as an embodiment of the
psychological and physical states of its inhabitants is particularly well developed in the
nineteenth-century realistic novel. For example, the centrality of houses and house-
keeping as a motif in Charles Dickens’ life as well as his work is explored by one critic
in the novelist’s often frustrated efforts ‘to contain family scenes and family secrets’ in
carefully designed interiors (Bodenheimer, 2007: 127). The renovation and decoration
of a series of family homes keeps Dickens’s hoped-for haven always just out of reach,
perpetually under construction. Fun Home presents Bruce Bechdel’s renovations of the
family home as similarly haunted by the uncanny ghosts of repressed desires.
This Victorian association of housekeeping with the containment of private desires
and fears can still be found in contemporary popular culture. The success of a series of
home-makeover television shows in the US is just one manifestation of this deep
investment in the house as a site where national, familial and individual identities are
secured. Cultural critic Judith Roof analyses the televised renovation drama as a
‘metamorphic spectacle’ (Roof, 2006: 2), a miraculous transformation of disorder
into order and clarity. Dramatized transformations of house or body, she argues,
appeal to our unconscious desire to see rigid classifications of gender and sexuality (in
the body makeover) and of traditional heteronormative family structure (in the house
makeover) miraculously realized. Viewers are reassured by ‘the calming hypnosis of
competence’, the satisfying display of ‘how things fit together’ (ibid.: 3).
As Roof points out, the securing of binary systems of gender and hierarchical
family structure, however, is always threatened by ‘a different scenario in which
genders are not binary but multiple, dynamic, shifting, mobile, flexive’ (ibid.: 33).
This alternative model forms the central drama of Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir.
Fun Home dramatizes Bruce Bechdel’s on-going home renovations as the backdrop to
the struggles with gender identity and sexuality experienced by father and daughter
alike. The motif noted by both Bodenheimer and Roof of housekeeping as a defensive
containment of sexual secrets is central to the world of Bechdel’s memoir.
Bechdel introduces her father to the reader as a miraculous ‘artificer’ whose work
of restoration is ‘his greatest achievement’ and his ‘passion (in all the senses of that
 ALISON BECHDEL’S FUN HOME 59

word: libidinal, manic, martyred)’ (Bechdel, 2006: 6–7). In a mock-heroic tone, she
praises his expertise: ‘he could spin garbage . . . into gold, . . .transfigure a room,. . .
conjure an entire finished period interior, . . .[he was] an alchemist of appearance, a
savant of surface, a Daedalus of décor’ (ibid.: 6). Bechdel stresses the creative bricolage
of her father’s renovations; his decorative additions are ‘not so much bought as
produced from thin air’ (ibid.: 5). When Bruce steals plantings from public land to
perfect his garden with ‘the most beautiful shade of pink in the world’, his daughter
asks nervously ‘[i]sn’t this illegal?’ (ibid.: 93). Bruce Bechdel, a modern-day Daedalus,
is oblivious to such constraints, obeying only ‘the laws . . . of his craft’ (ibid.: 7).
Bechdel dramatizes the family’s exasperated responses to Bruce’s ‘craft’, as when
a carefully selected period light fixture provokes the comments ‘it’s hideous’,
‘whorehouse’, and ‘[i]t looks like skulls’ (ibid.: 14). In the narrative captions, Bechdel
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looks back on her father’s aesthetic dedication to the perfecting of the house as a form
of deception: he used his ‘skilful artifice not to make things, but to make things appear
to be what they were not’. She finds the ‘embellishments’ in which he was so
intensely invested not only non-functional but ‘morally suspect’: ‘[t]hey were lies’
(ibid.: 16).
Alison is eager even as a young girl to define herself in opposition to her father:
‘I was Spartan to his Athenian. Modern to his Victorian. Butch to his Nelly.
Utilitarian to his Aesthete’ (ibid.: 15). She asserts her own plans for a home that
would be ‘unadorned and purely functional’ (ibid.: 14). Both father and daughter
are drawn to the idea of a house that camouflages (even as it inadvertently reveals)
their secret desires. Bruce Bechdel constructs a heteronormative family home within
which his interior design obsession nevertheless exposes him, in the young Alison’s
judgment, as a ‘sissy’ and a ‘pansy’ (ibid.: 90 and 93). Alison attempts to fortify
herself behind a façade of ordinariness (‘it’s just a house’ [ibid.: 5]), and is
ultimately driven to conjure up a living space defensively soldered shut, ‘all metal,
like a submarine’ (ibid.: 14), isolated against the potentially disturbing influx of
artificial and natural forces alike.
Although the family’s home is denounced by the narrator as ‘a sham, . . .not a real
home at all but the simulacrum of one, a museum’, she also acknowledges that these
‘period rooms’ housed a lived-in reality (ibid.: 17). One panel shows the family
spread out in the cluttered living room amidst toy cars, an erector set, the parents
perched in front of the TV eating out of a tub of takeout chicken. This scene of casual
domestic disarray is rare in the narrative, where more often the reader sees an ornate
orderly interior rigidly maintained to her father’s specifications.
Rather than presenting the reassuring spectacle of masculine competence and
order as we see it on TV makeovers, Bruce’s labours always hint at something missing
or amiss, a suggestion of masquerade or cover-up that hides some gender ‘deficit’ or
transgression. Bechdel represents her father shirtless and in cut-off jeans, with tools in
his belt and lumber on his back, ‘smelling of sawdust and sweat’ but also ‘of designer
cologne’, an incongruity that perhaps signals something hidden beneath the
stereotypically masculine role of the construction worker. Bruce exercises his
masculine persona in his role as the stern father, tyrannically enlisting his children as
‘free labor . . . extensions of his own body’ (ibid.: 13). Childhood play for the Bechdel
children is repeatedly undermined by the threat of failure and punishment if such
chores are not carried out to perfection.
 60 EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES

That reluctantly shared household labour, in fact, constitutes the narrator’s most
vivid and intimate memories of her father: ‘[h]e really was there all those years, a
flesh-and-blood presence steaming off the wallpaper, digging up the dogwoods,
polishing the finials’ (ibid.: 23). In one of the rare scenes of intimacy in the book
(Figure 1), father and daughter are depicted from an aerial perspective that makes
them appear to merge into one body as they drive the lawnmower together; but in the
very next frame they are shown in self-enclosed concentration in different parts of the
garden, isolated even in their common endeavour.
In mourning her father’s death, the narrator recognizes something familiar in her
feeling of loss: ‘his absence resonated retroactively, echoing back through all the time
I knew him. . . . I ached as if he were already gone’ (ibid.: 23). This confusion of
presence and absence occurs in visual representations of the domestic space, where
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family members are often shown in close physical proximity but emotionally
estranged.
Bechdel uses the architecture of the house ingeniously to reinforce the isolation
that characterized life in her family home. Drawing the house from the perspective of

Figure 1. Chapter 1: Old Father, Old Artificer (p. 23).

 ALISON BECHDEL’S FUN HOME 61

someone outside looking in, Bechdel shows family members framed in separate
windows, even when they occupy the same room (ibid.: 86 and 139). In one panel,
Alison and her father play ‘chopsticks’ together at the piano; the following panel,
however, shows them framed by the same window, but in separate panes (ibid.: 225).
In a composite image that is both a family portrait and a portrait of the house they
occupy (ibid.: 134), the visual impact of the comics medium’s use of framing and gaps
between panels is combined with the architecture of the house to reflect doubly on
the emotional isolation of its inhabitants.3
Ironically, it is Bruce Bechdel’s obsession with the family home that distances him
from familial intimacy or community; the narrator complains that ‘he treated his
furniture like children and his children like furniture’ (ibid.: 14). Driven to achieve an
interior décor that (unlike his all-too-real progeny) might be at least ‘slightly perfect’
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(ibid.: 6), Bruce Bechdel attends to the most minute authentic details. The cumulative
effect of such precision eventually makes his projected fantasy of societal norms of
domesticity, gender and class ‘fully operational’ (ibid.: 61–2).
The energy with which that transformation is accomplished, unfortunately, often
takes the form of her father’s indifference, an attitude Bechdel associates once again
with the figure of Daedalus: ‘Daedalus, too, was indifferent to the human cost of his
projects’ (ibid.: 11). When Alison’s father chooses to paper her room in the pink
flowers he deems appropriate for a young girl’s environment, her resistance to this
imposed feminization (‘But I hate pink!’) is bluntly countered by his retort ‘tough
titty’ (ibid.: 7). When her father enlists her help in hanging a mirror in her room, the
image is arranged so that the mirror reflects an image of him and not her (ibid.: 14).
As one critic points out, in the panel following this one the young Alison’s text
balloon (in which she expresses her determined resistance to her father’s imposed
taste) is placed so that it momentarily obscures his face in the mirror (Fantasia, 2011).
Within the comics context, where Bechdel exerts control, the panel makes room for a
mirroring of her thoughts, desires and anxieties.
Mirrors in Fun Home provide an element of interior décor that resonates strongly
with the narrative’s concern with issues of identity and identification. During the
narrator’s attendance at a production of A Chorus Line in New York, she hears one
actor describe the epiphany of self-recognition he experienced in front of a mirror:
‘[o]ne day I looked at myself in the mirror and said, ‘‘You’re fourteen years old and
you’re a faggot. What are you going to do with your life?’’ . . .It was probably the first
time I realized I was homosexual’ (ibid.: 191).
When Bechdel incorporates mirror scenes in her narrative she never uses them to
stage such moments of defining self-recognition but to suggest the ways in which
identity, like the house itself, is continually under construction. For example, mirrors
in the Bechdel home often reflect the conflicts between Alison and her father over
gender norms. The narrator recognizes an inverse structure in these clashes: ‘[w]hile I
was trying to compensate for something unmanly in him . . . he was attempting to
express something feminine through me’ (ibid.: 98). The accompanying image shows
Alison and her father side by side in a large full-length mirror, glaring at each other as
they prepare for a wedding. In explanatory boxes added to the image, Alison’s outfit
is labelled the ‘least girly dress in the store’, and Bruce’s attire is identified as a velvet
suit that, as his wife wryly comments, will ‘upstage the bride’ (ibid.: 98). The gender
battle continues years later, reflecting father and daughter in a more cramped mirror,
 62 EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES
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Figure 2. Chapter 5: The Canary-Colored Caravan of Death (p. 134).

their hostilities more pronounced. Bechdel’s use of mirrors intensifies these scenes by
literally doubling the hostilities, but she also depicts the father and daughter in another
panel with their heads intimately inclined toward each other, savouring the images in
a men’s fashion magazine. Their common struggle over gender identity puts father
and daughter alternately in conflict and in cahoots.
Alison’s mother Helen remains a somewhat shadowy presence in this family
drama, but even she attempts to bring her daughter into line with conventional gender
expectations. Standing behind Alison in front of the bathroom mirror that reflects
their doubled figures, the mother suggests, ‘[s]ee? This is how you’d look if you had
long hair and pulled it back in a ponytail’, a style the mother herself wears (ibid.:
116). Even when she is present in the mirror scenes mentioned above, the perspective
of the drawing leaves Alison’s mother unreflected. This erasure is perhaps most
striking in the image of Helen preparing her stage makeup for a community theatre
production in front of a vanity that reflects only a blank emptiness (ibid.: 151). In a
family in which the only other female member is resisting a socially enforced feminine
 ALISON BECHDEL’S FUN HOME 63

identity, nothing reflects the mother, and she can only appear in the unambiguously
female roles she plays on stage.
In Fun Home, mirror scenes not only fail to reflect a consolidated identity, but
even extend that uncertainty to the space of the home itself. The narrator explains
how the convoluted embellishments of the Victorian house, enhanced by her father’s
strategic placement of mirrors and other ‘props’, ‘were expressly designed to
conceal’; the décor’s ‘mirrors, distracting bronzes, multiple doorways’ had a
disorienting impact on visitors who often ‘got lost upstairs’ (ibid.: 20). The
convoluted space of these ‘meticulous period interiors’ contributes to Bruce Bechdel’s
concealment of his homosexual identity, a secret that nevertheless infuses the very air
they breathe: ‘[h]is shame inhabited our house as pervasively and invisibly as the
aromatic musk of aging mahogany’ (ibid.: 20). An explicit connection is made here
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between her father’s repressed homosexual desire and the housekeeping obsession
meant to mask it. As one reviewer notes, Bechdel’s book is among other things ‘a
comment on the architecture and ornament of emotional obfuscation’ (Bellafante,
2006).
In Fun Home, as in Roof’s analysis of the TV makeover, house renovation functions
in part as a cover-up for transgressions of normative gender and sexual identity. The
normative heterosexuality Bruce tries to project is entwined with an idealized model
of class identity to which he also aspires – and both are embodied in the house itself.
One period photograph shows the original occupants posed outside their newly
constructed Gothic Revival house, reflecting simultaneously their class position and
their traditional nuclear family. Bruce Bechdel’s staged photographs of his own family
(Bedchel, 2006: 16–17) are ‘exhibitions’ carefully constructed to suggest a similarly
seamless family unit. The narrator describes one Christmas ‘photo op’ as a ‘still life
with children’ (ibid.: 13).
Despite the family’s modest finances, Bruce Bechdel is able to play the squire in
his library, where he has recreated in detail the refinement of another time, another
class. Bruce Bechdel tries to achieve through his house renovations a ‘self-willed
metamorphosis from farm boy to prince’ (ibid.: 63) similar to that accomplished by
Francis S. Fitzgerald’s Gatsby. In his case, this transformation converges with his
metamorphosis from closeted homosexual to pater familias. One critic describes Bruce’s
performance of the role of ‘ideal husband and father’ as a ‘masquerade’, and analyses the
renovated house itself as similarly ‘in drag . . . over-accessorized, overdressed’ (Tison,
2007: 28). For Bechdel’s father, the house itself embodies, or must be made to embody,
the heterosexual upper class family life he imagines as an ideal.
For Alison, the family home has a more contemporary and more ambivalent
analogue in a collection of Charles Addams’s comic strip The Addams Family. She
recognizes there the features of her own family setting: ‘[h]ere were the familiar dark,
lofty ceilings, peeling wallpaper, and menacing horsehair furnishings of my own
home’ (Bedchel, 2006: 34). Bechdel juxtaposes a panel reproducing the cartoon
family posed rigidly in front of their Gothic staircase with an image of the Bechdels
actively engaged in work and play on an identical staircase, lending the Gothic interior
a more homey atmosphere.
In a later image, however, the eerie quality of the Addams cartoon invades the
narrator’s home as Alison and her brothers huddle at the top of those same stairs
listening to their parents argue (ibid.: 69). The narrow space of the staircase, further
 64 EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES

accentuated by the verticality of the comics panel, reinforces a sense of constraint and
potential violence. In another frame, one of Bechdel’s inserted informational squares
points to the ‘permanent linoleum scar’ left on the kitchen floor by one of her father’s
angry outbursts (ibid.: 21). Despite his meticulous renovation of the house, Bruce
Bechdel’s behaviour also leaves evidence of the turmoil lurking just beneath its
carefully maintained façade.
The ubiquitous threat of violence lurking within the literal and psychological maze of
her home (‘impossible to tell if the minotaur lay beyond the next corner’ [ibid.: 21])
contributes to the anxiety disorder Alison begins to develop around age 10. She senses an
‘invisible substance’ that seems to hang (like the ‘musk’ of her father’s shame) ‘like swags
of drapery between all solid objects’, requiring of her an ‘unrelenting vigilance’ (ibid.:
135–36). The architectural details of the Victorian interior present particular difficulties
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for her escalating Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), ‘crossing thresholds became a

time-consuming procedure since I had to tabulate the number of edges of flooring I saw
there’ (ibid.: 135). In her effort to avoid all odd-ity, Alison develops a compulsion to
encounter only even numbers (Figure 3).
In a sequence of panels the reader is first given the child’s perspective looking
down at the threshold and the tips of her sneakers; the second panel zooms in for an
enlarged view that obliterates everything but the three edges of flooring (rug, wooden
floor, tile). A superimposed magnifying glass reveals the ‘small grooves in the metal
strip’ that evens out the edges to four. The same convoluted and multi-layered
interiors that serve her father’s need for concealment threaten to paralyse Alison at
this troubled stage of her development.
Eventually, when she comes out as a lesbian in the late 1970s, Bechdel is able to
cross boundaries her father never dared to transgress when he came of age in the
1940s. Describing the turning point of her acceptance of her sexual orientation
Bechdel explains, ‘[i]t was as if I’d crossed some invisible boundary’ (Bechdel, 1998:
38). Bruce Bechdel does everything he can to keep boundaries intact, to disguise any
deviance from the norm, extending his control to the outdoor porch and the garden

Figure 3. Chapter 5: The sneakers and doorway threshold (p. 135).

 ALISON BECHDEL’S FUN HOME 65

beyond. Both her father’s protective architectural labyrinth and her own OCD rituals
and incantations prove to be inadequate defences against the forbidden desires she will
accept and he will continue to deny.
That denial requires constant attention to the order of the house: the ornamental
furniture and knickknacks must be dusted, fragile objects kept precisely in place, the
garden protected against storms. All efforts at control, architectural and otherwise,
are ultimately undone by the forces of nature in which those repressed secrets and
desires are let loose. The screech of locusts in heat, ‘EEREEREEREEREER’, is
magnified in thick dark letters over a drawing of the Bechdel children busy with their
assigned garden tasks (Fun Home: 156). This work of cultivation is dramatically
disrupted by a tornado that destroys trees that had ‘sheltered’ the house for a century.
When Alison comes out as a lesbian and is confronted with her father’s
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homosexuality, the sheltering façade of the house is further damaged: ‘[h]ome, as I

had known it, was gone. Some crucial part of the structure seemed to be missing, like
in dreams I would have later where termites had eaten through all the floor joists’
(ibid.: 215–16). The potential nightmare of this disintegration is mitigated by the fact
that it opens up the possibility of escape from a labyrinth of repression, both
architectural and emotional, that had seemed inescapable to her as a child.
Unlike his daughter, Bruce Bechdel remains trapped within the architectural
fortifications he has laboured to construct. The photograph of her father with which
Bechdel introduces the first chapter of her memoir shows him literally framed by the
‘straight’ lines of the entranceway of the house. He is imprisoned not only by the ‘model’
home and family that protect his secret, but also by the constraining geography of the area,
the ‘peculiar topography [of the Appalachian mountains that] really . . . discouraged
cultural exchange’ (ibid.: 126). A final map charts this topographical prison and the
claustrophobic circle of Bruce’s life: ‘born, lived, died, buried’ (ibid.: 140).
Bruce Bechdel’s final home, of course, is the cemetery, where an obelisk, the
symbol of life he once collected, serves as his gravestone. As in life, he is aesthetically
out of place in death, his marker more in keeping with the Victorian stones in the
older section of the cemetery than where it rests among the more recent gravestones.
This chapter of the memoir concludes with an image of Alison stretched out in the
shadow of her father’s obelisk, their bodies parallel, temporarily united. Her nearby
bike contrasts her mobility with his definitive stasis, about which she quips with
characteristically painful wit, ‘stuck in the mud for good this time’ (ibid.: 54).4
As a Bildungsroman, Fun Home reflects the narrator’s complex and ambivalent
relationship to her father, including her tense opposition to him as well as moments of
intimacy such as those depicted in the cemetery and lawnmower scenes. Bruce
Bechdel’s preoccupation with architecture and interior design, his own confessed
over-commitment to ‘things’ (ibid.: 224) – aspects of his personality that alienated his
daughter – are countered by a love of literature that his daughter comes to share.5 The
Bechdel family house is a major character in this memoir, but Bruce’s library is its
‘emotional center’ (Wolk, 2007: 364). This home is, in fact, a repository of texts:
books of fiction, history and art criticism; dictionaries, private letters and diaries;
newspapers and official documents. In the midst of a tension-filled domestic life, the
activity of reading often provides family members with a solitary refuge. A shared love
of books, however, also enables father and daughter to achieve moments of intimate
(if indirect) connection in which literature becomes the ‘currency’ of their
 66 EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES

communication (Bedchel, 2006: 199–200). The house of fiction provides occasions

for connection that the material architecture of their home discouraged.
Bechdel ultimately recognizes and honours her father’s dedication to
architectural historic preservation, but she also honours the passion and authenticity
of his relationship to books. In contrast to the volumes in Gatsby’s library which
remain uncut, those on Bruce’s shelves bear the marks of use: ‘the hardback ones
with their ragged dust jackets, the paperbacks with their creased spines – had
clearly been read’ (ibid.: 84). One page from James Joyce’s Ulysses that Bechdel has
reproduced in Fun Home includes Bruce’s underlinings and marginalia as well as her
own commentary in text boxes that partially obscure some of what lies below
(ibid.: 226 and 228). For both Alison and her father, reading is not a passive
activity but an active collaboration with the text. Some comics theorists have argued
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that the reader’s active involvement in bringing a graphic narrative text to life is
one of the defining characteristics of the medium (McCloud, 1994: 65). Bechdel
shows us literally in the architecture of this palimpsest page the complex and active
relationship between readers, writers and texts, as well as her own complex
relationship to familial and literary precedents.
Referring to the 25-year run of her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, Bechdel
explains that it is the dynamic ‘reciprocity’ she enjoys with her readers that produces
the necessary ‘energy to keep the story going’ (Bedchel, 1998: 207). Fun Home is one
manifestation of that on-going story in which Bechdel keeps her literary house in a
deliberate state of disorder, perpetually under construction, open to exchange and
finally free of secrets. The final scene of the memoir takes us outside the confines of
the house that felt like a dangerous labyrinth in her youth, to an outdoor swimming
pool where the young girl takes a leap of faith into her father’s waiting arms. With Fun
Home Alison Bechdel as author/artist takes a leap of faith beyond the security of rigidly
constructed houses and identities toward an expanding community of grateful readers.

Acknowledgement
All illustrations from Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel. Copyright 
2006 by Alison Bechdel. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing
Company. All rights reserved.

Notes
1 For an overview of critical approaches to graphic narrative see the following collections
of essays: the special issue of Modern Fiction Studies 52.4 (Winter 2006); Clark and
Bloemink (2002); Magnussen and Christiansen (2000); and Varnum and Gibbons
(2001). Single-author studies exploring comics theory and history include Groensteen
(1999); Hatfield (2005); McCloud (1994); Sabin (2005); and Wolk (2007).
2 On the role of architecture in Chris Ware see Thomas Bredehoft’s astute analysis of
Jimmy Corrigan (Bredehoft, 2006). For a strong theoretical exploration of the way our
habits of reading time and space are challenged by the comics medium in Moore’s
Tomorrow Stories in particular, see Cortsen (2011). For an ingenious comparison of the
 ALISON BECHDEL’S FUN HOME 67

role of interior design on character formation in Bechdel and Walter Pater see Fantasia
(2011).
3 For a reading of Fun Home that is particularly insightful on Bechdel’s use of the comics
medium see Chute (2006).
4 Karim Chabani explores the tension in Fun Home between mobility and stasis in relation
to Bruce Bechdel’s desire (‘his insistence that everything should be in its place, and . . .
his desire which is never where it is supposed to be’ [2007: 4]), and in relation to the
techniques achieved by the comics medium (in the image of Alison jumping into her
father’s arms, ‘caught in the air, i.e. in motion but suspended in time’ [ibid.: 14]).
5 On the importance of books and reading in Fun Home see Freedman (2009) and Moon
(2006). Space does not permit an elaboration of this theme here, but I address it fully in
a separate essay.
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Robin Lydenberg is Professor of English at Boston College. She is author of GONE:

Site-specific Works by Dorothy Cross (Boston: McMullen Museum and University of
Chicago Press, 2005) and Word Cultures: Radical Theory and Practice in William S.
Burroughs’ Fiction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987); and co-editor of Feminist
Approaches to Theory and Methodology: An Interdisciplinary Reader, edited by Sharlene
Hesse-Biber, Christina Gilmartin and Robin Lydenberg (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1999) and William S. Burroughs at the Front: Critical Reception, 1959–89, edited by
Robin Lydenberg and Jennie Skerl (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,
1991). Address: Boston College, English Department, Chestnut Hill, Mass., 02467 USA.
[email: robin.lydenberg@bc.edu]