Fun Home

"With similar perversity, the sparkling creek that coursed down from the plateau and through our town was crystal clear precisely because it was polluted. Mine runoff had left the water too acidic to support life of any kind. Wading in this fishless creek and swooning at the salmon sky, i learned firsthand that most elemental of all ironies. That, as Wallace Stevens put it in Mom's favorite poem, "Death is the Mother of Beauty." (129)



http://www.drcphotos.com/CatLandscapes/LandscapesList.html

The deceit of beauty

From first glance, it seems that the entirety of Mr. Bechdel's life is about deceit - about using lifeless things to create a mask of beauty. Real life is not a sham, so it is messy and complicated and complex, with no need to hide the truth. But like the mine poisoning the creek of runoff water, Alison's father is poisoned by his secret. The burden of his shame, of knowing he was a 'bad person', drives him to strange measures to cover it up. His lack of self respect and confidence due to the fact that he cannot live without indulging his impulses and cheating on his wife and family with underage boys drives him to create a different life. A second life to mask his true one, though everyone thinks that the mask is the true life, and the sordid underlife is the secondary one. Perhaps both are equally true and/or untrue. From the surface, Bechdel has created the perfect family, the most beautiful family. His most masterful creation. But really, the art is lifeless. His family is falling apart at the seams. They are all emotionally detached from each other and from their lives, throwing themselves into their own creative outlets (or overcumpulsive obsessions) and not exactly interacting as a family. The art that Mr. Bechdel has created is dead and lifeless, because the people that compose his family are people, not cardboard cutouts. What he sees is not exactly what is there.

"The exterior setting, the pained grin, the flexible wrists, even the angle of shadow falling across our faces -- it's about as close as a trnaslation can get." (120)

"It was not the sobbing, joyous renunion of Odysseus and Telemachus. It was more like fatherless Stephen and sonless Bloom...having their equivocal late-night cocoa at 7 Eccles Street. But which of us was teh father? I had felt distinctly parental listening to his shamefaced recitation. And all too soon we were at the theater." (221)



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7 Eccles Street

The above two quotes indicate the theme of inversion in this tragicomic. Alison is a translation of her father, the lesbian daughter to a gay man. She is masculine where he is (in her own words) a sissy. She is female to his man. She is stripped down and utilitarian where he is decorative and embellished. When they finally have a moment of connection, she feels like the father, when her father is the one doing the confessing. It is an entire reversal of roles, and this confusion between stereotypical family and gender roles and the actual roles each person plays is a source of complexity that colors the relationship between father and daughter. It is this confusion that each must sort out and understand in order to understand who exactly they are.