Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

Bruce Allen Bechdel (1936-1980) is Alison Bechdel’s father. He was born and raised in Beech Creek, Pennsylvania, where he later raised his children with his wife Helen Augusta. After a stint in the U.S. Army, which allowed him to travel to Europe, Bruce and Helen returned to Beech Creek, where he became a high school English teacher and a part-time funeral director. His passion was for historical restoration, and in 1978 his Gothic Revival home received the Clinton County Historical Society's Annual Preservation Award. He died in 1980 when he was hit by a truck, an accident that Alison Bechdel speculates was actually a death by suicide.

As this graphic novel centers on Alison’s relationship with her father, Bruce is as significant a figure in this memoir as Alison herself. He takes on a dualistic role in Fun Home as both a sympathetic and antagonistic figure—a simultaneous obstacle for young Alison and a site of self-identification. He is presented as both exactly like Alison and nothing like her. They both felt the same shame and discomfort around their queerness, but they expressed their gender nonconformity in opposite ways. Likewise, they both struggled with the nature of reality. Where Bechdel speculates that her father actively fled from it by burying himself in secrecy and artifice, she herself suffered an “epistemological crisis” that drove her to compulsive truth-telling and acute self-doubt. However, both remedy this struggle by burying themselves in fiction. In this way, father and daughter are presented as perpetual photonegatives of one another: fundamentally the same but inverted.

Helen Augusta (1933-2013) is Alison Bechdel’s mother. She was a high school English teacher by career as well as a homemaker and an actress. She spent many summers acting at the Millbrook Playhouse in Mill Hall. She also participated in theatre at State College Community Theatre, the Project for the Performing Arts in Bellefonte, Bellefonte's Victorian Christmas, and faculty shows at her high school. She earned a master's degree in English Education from Penn State University in 1974. She died of illness at the age of 79.

Helen’s presence is secondary to that of Alison and her father. However, she plays a central role in Chapters 3 and 6, which explore both her marriage and her prowess as an actress. Helen is, like Bruce, presented as virtuosic but emotionally withholding. Her status as an actress allows Bechdel to introduce several authors into Fun Home’s stable of literary allusions, most notably Henry James and Oscar Wilde. Helen’s absence from certain anecdotes is also keenly obvious. Instead of vacationing as a nuclear family, for example, Bruce seems to supplant his wife with his male lovers. This emphasizes the instability of their marriage and the superficiality of the Bechdels’ outward presentation as a stable nuclear family.

Albert Camus (1913-1960) was a French writer, journalist, and philosopher best known for his absurdist literature. He was born in French-occupied Algeria to a working-class family. His father died in the Battle of the Marne in 1914 during World War I. As an adult living in the beginnings of World War II, Camus would attempt to volunteer for the French Resistance Army, but he would be rejected due to his struggle with tuberculosis earlier in life. In 1934, he married Simone Hie, whom he later divorced in 1936. Camus fled Nazi occupation of Paris in the late 1930s and settled in the French Alps on medical advice. There, he married his second wife, Francine Faure. He had several affairs over the course of this marriage, for which he professed feelings of guilt. After the war, the couple returned to Paris, where they raised their twins Catharine and Jean. In 1957, Camus received a Nobel Prize in Literature. He died in an automotive accident in 1960.

Camus’s literary legacy is one of heady philosophy, staunch leftism, absurdism, and existentialism. He was a self-professed anarcho-syndicalist and strongly opposed the totalitarianism of the Nazis and the USSR. Though he rejected the existentialist label, his works are largely considered to be staples of the genre. Camus’s writings interrogated the human condition, the inherent absurdity of life, and the consequences of oppressive government regimes. 

Camus and his works are a staple of Fun Home’s second chapter. Camus’s posthumously published novel, A Happy Death (1971), is the book Bruce Bechdel was reading just before his death. The novel concerns itself with the makings of human happiness. Bechdel also links Camus’s death by car accident to her father’s own death, wherein he was hit by a truck. She notes that each of these deaths were what Camus would call une mort imbecile—“an idiotic death.” She also notes that Camus took an interest in the philosophical portent of death by suicide while discussing the likelihood that her father’s death was itself suicidal.

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (1896-1940) was an American novelist best known for the classic novel The Great Gatsby (1925), which many critics regard as the “great American novel.” He was born in Minnesota to a middle-class catholic family and raised in New York State. In 1917, he dropped out of college to join the U.S. Army and fight in World War I. His debut novel This Side of Paradise (1920) found commercial and critical success upon its release, which launched Fitzgerald into an affluent lifestyle. He famously associated with other great writers of his day, such as James Joyce and Earnest Hemmingway. He married Zelda Sayre in 1920 and remained with her until his death in 1940. The two had a famously tempestuous relationship. He struggled extensively with alcoholism and achieved sobriety shortly before his death of occlusive coronary arteriosclerosis at the age of 44.

Fitzgerald was a favorite author of Bruce’s. He is discussed at length in Chapter Three, where Bechdel uses his oeuvre and personal history to highlight Fun Home’s literary motif and theme of mirrored experiences. She writes that her father “[saw] himself in various characters” (63) from Fitzgerald’s stories; she uses this factoid to emphasize her father’s “suspension of the imaginary in the real” (65). She also compares her father to Fitzgerald’s most famous character, Jay Gatsby, at length to emphasize her father’s artificiality and meager provincial lifestyle.

Marcel Proust (1871-1922) was a French novelist and essayist best known for his seven-volume novel In Search of Lost Time (1913-1927). Proust was born in Paris in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, and he grew up alongside the consolidation of the French Third Republic. His parents were wealthy and educated. Though his mother was Jewish, he was raised in his father’s Catholic faith and later became an atheist. Proust was a lifelong asthmatic and generally sickly throughout his childhood. Proust is known to have been gay, although he never openly admitted to it. In spite of this, his novel In Search of Lost Time features numerous gay characters. Along with his works of fiction, Proust also wrote non-fiction essays and translated John Ruskin’s works into French.

In Fun Home, Proust is presented as a parallel to Bruce Bechdel. He features heavily in Chapter Four in tandem with details around Bruce’s life as a closeted gay man and great love of flowers. Bruce read In Search of Lost Time the year before he died, a book that includes what Bechdel calls “the lilac passage.” In it, the narrator is unable to differentiate between a little girl and the flowers in Swann’s Garden. As a result, he falls in love with her. This retelling captions a sequence of Bruce Bechdel working in his garden and precedes discussion around the way he “[cultivated] […] young men like orchids” (95)—i.e., he groomed them for sex.

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) was an Irish poet and playwright well known for his quick wit and lush aestheticism. His most notable works include The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), The Picture of Dorian Grey (1890), and The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898). As the child of intellectuals, Wilde was well educated from a young age. Wilde saw success as a writer, intellectual, and public figure throughout the 1880s and went on an extended lecturing tour through North America.

In 1884, Wilde married the wealthy Constance Lloyd; however, he partook in affair with men throughout their marriage. He struck up a tempestuous affair with Lord Alfred Douglas. Douglas’s father, the Marquess of Queensbury, thusly accused Wilde of sodomy, which was criminalized at the time. Wilde was tried and found guilty of sodomy and gross indecency in 1895 and subsequently imprisoned at New Gate Prison later that year. He was later transferred to Reading Gaol. He was released from prison in 1897 and spent the last three years of his life impoverished in exile. Today, he is remembered as an icon of the Western literary canon and of LGBTQ+ history.

Wilde plays a significant role in Chapter 6 of Fun Home. Bechdel recalls the summer her mother played Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest at length and describes the impact off her young interactions with Wilde’s writing: “This was the first time I’d been old enough to help [my mother] run her lines. Surprised that an adult play could be so funny, I continued reading on my own” (165).

Bechdel also connects Wilde’s sodomy trial to her father’s legal entanglement for “furnishing a malt beverage to a minor.” Today, Wilde’s position is regarded as highly sympathetic. The comparison between Bruce’s activities and what Wilde describes as the “great affection of an elder to a younger man” (180) softens Bruce’s characterization as a pederast. Conversely, Wilde’s bravery in the courtroom is contrasted with Bruce’s hearing, wherein the sexual element of his crimes was never openly addressed.