Reflections On Alison Bechdel's Fun Home

1055 Words5 Pages
Alison Bechdel’s graphic autobiography, Fun Home, tells the story of Alison’s childhood relationship with her father Bruce, through a broad series of allegorical and literary references. The final page of ¬Fun Home best illustrates the entire story by referring to the common theme Greek mythology, specifically the story of Daedalus and Icarus, in the image of Alison leaping towards her father. The reoccurrence of this story throughout the book also symbolizes the gender-confused, estranged relationship between Alison and her father as they struggle to identify their places in each other’s lives. Many parallels between Alison’s life and Greek mythology appear throughout the story. A simple example of this is the fact that her mother’s name is Helen, the name of the famously beautiful woman who began the Trojan War. More allegoric references, such as Alison equating her life to that of Homer’s Odysseus, require more in-depth analysis. She thinks of her life as a journey. She specifically compares her procrastination in completing assigned reading to Odysseus’s delays in his journey. On the page prior to the last page of the book, Alison refers to her life as an “inverted oedipal complex”. This refers to how she both estranges and identifies herself with her father through the concept of their shared tribulations brought on by their homosexuality. Though her father often seemed distant, he was an equally loving father some of the time. The most obvious reference to Greek mythology, and the most blatantly apparent in the final page of the story, is that of Daedalus and Icarus. In this myth, Daedalus invents a pair of wax and feather wings in order for he and his son, Icarus to escape from the labyrinth, another invention of Daedalus’s. Even after Daedalus warned Icarus not to, Icarus flew too

More about Reflections On Alison Bechdel's Fun Home

Open Document