Fiction and Reality - Fun Home
The Bechdel family from Fun Home is built on a framework of lies and secrets, each family member embodying their own compelling fiction that takes over their life. The title of the book itself is a fictional and ironic wordplay of the Bechdel family’s reality. With her father's "curatorial onslaught" and his bursts of rage, Alison's home in Fun Home is anything but fun. These rages often seem to stem from his difficulties with his architectural pursuits in which he's "indifferent to the human costs of his projects", hitting his kids and growing enraged over the simplest mistakes. In this way, Alison describes him as the half-man, half-bull minotaur. From Alison’s perspective, the minotaur, represented through Bruce's monstrous side, could be waiting around any corner. This side of Bruce is a result of his own fiction as a Victorian era aristocrat, decorating and fancifying the house in order to project himself as this extravagant version of himself. The fictions that the characters portray serve as a method to hide their truth from others. While Bruce may show himself as a somewhat strange heterosexual family man, the reality is that he continually cheats on his wife with younger men as a result of his hidden homosexuality.
I believe that this fiction is also the reason that the Bechdel family is so torn apart. Without putting their truest selves forward, they never really connect with each other. We only really see a few examples where Bruce breaks his fiction and reveals himself to his family. There's the one instance in the car towards the end of the book where Alison asks Bruce if he knew what he was doing when he gave her the Colette book (the one about the lesbian scene of Paris in the 1920s). Although Bruce doesn't directly say anything when he gives her the book, this might be his own way of unconsciously or consciously reaching out. After Alison asks this question, Bruce starts to open up, making this one of the only times in the book where we see them connect over something. After Bruce reveals that he wanted to wear girls clothes as a child, Alison even tries to further their conversation by saying that she wanted to wear boys clothes in a similar way (unfortunately, Bruce doesn't say anything back).
Alison also engages with this idea of fiction, thinking of her family as fictional characters in a fictional world. She even creates this fiction surrounding her family where her father's death wasn't accidental but was actually a result of her coming out. In her eyes, the fact that she had enough courage to face her truth while Bruce had to continue engaging in a fiction may have led him to suicide (these situations aren't exactly comparable though given the different time periods). Alison might even be subconsciously wanting this fiction to be reality as this would be the ultimate difference between their lives.
Although Alison seems to conquer her truth by the end of the novel, she was certainly mixed up between fiction and reality in her childhood. Her "I think" compulsion from her diary extends past just writing. It's representative of how she's unsure of any kind of objective statement, whether it be about her father's sexuality, her own feelings, or even her father's death. In this way, she starts to doubt her own validity and the truth of the factual world because of how Bruce immersed her life in fiction and facades. At one point in the novel, she even writes things like "I think we watched the Brady Bunch" or "I think Mother and I went to church", completely unsure of what's fiction and what's not. While the ongoing fictions in Alison's life may have caused her to doubt her own reality, understanding these fictions and possibilities led her to some sort of understanding of her father. She may never know the absolute reality (as in the case with her father's death), but gathering and comparing all these possible truths gives her a way to figure out the real truth and actually connect with her father's emotions and past.
I think you make a lot of good point I read another blog post that kind of touched on this they said that Allison compared her life to fiction and could draw lines between how realistic fiction can be. And Bruce uses fiction as an escape he makes his life as close to fiction as possible in order to escape. I agree with you though in some regards Alison also uses fiction to escape her reality.
ReplyDeleteI do agree that Alison doesn't seem to be totally true to herself to her family, but I think that is partly because Bruce consistently shut it down in the past. Thus, Alison took a bit longer than she might have otherwise before she truly discovered her own identity. And, unlike Bruce, Alison ends up being a bit more confident in herself. So, she doesn't use escape into fiction to nearly the same extent that Bruce does.
ReplyDeleteI like your take on the odd "I think" compulsion that Bechdel writes about, characterizing her compulsive younger self and reflecting a truly surprising degree of skepticism toward what would seem to be pretty simple and uncontroversial facts. She has "outgrown" this tendency to a significant degree by the time she writes the book, as an adult--but you're right that many of the most central "facts" of the book are shrouded in speculation and uncertainty. She writes about her father's suicide as if it's an undeniable fact, even though the official record lists no such cause of death--we could add a silent "I think" after so many of these reconstructed scenes, and the book as a whole is largely "about" the challenge of trying to understand a complex person when they are no longer living. All she has to go on, for so many of the important aspects of her story, is what she "thinks" must have, or might have, happened.
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