Intertextual Reality

The Odyssey, the Adams Family, Albert Camus, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, The Taming of the Shrew, The Importance of Being Earnest, PROUST, The Wind in the Willows, James Joyce, Kate Millet, on and on and on.......


"I employ these allusions ... not only as descriptive devices, but because my parents are most real to me in fictional terms. And perhaps my cool aesthetic distance itself does more to convey the Arctic climate of our family than any particular literary comparison." -"Fun Home" p.67


Bechdel employs a great deal of intertextuality to describe relationships, people, and dynamics in the novel.
These are some of the many textual references I took note of:


The map of Wind in the Willows is used in comparison to her town Beech Creek (p.146), the early life of her father is described in terms of F. Scott Fitzgerald's life and characters (p.62),

her own diary is used as a description of an author's narrative voice slowly losing authority and credibility,

radical feminist texts are used to explore her sexual enlightenment and homosexuality

James and the Giant Peach....pornography!


The Taming of the Shrew and The Importance of Being Earnest, plays that her parents were in, are used to describe the personalities and crumbling relationship of her parents' marriage.

The dictionary!


Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care book is used by her mother, this emphasizes the emotional distance that Alison and her mother had from each other.

What else did you find????

Let's talk about sex…

Are the depictions of sex too graphic for you? They seem to pop up unexpectedly. They aren't so much about the relationship of the two people having sex, as what it meant to the author... part of her internal monologue.

Is it significant that Bechdel shows us she was a butch little girl long before she tells us?

Is Bruce's relationship with Roy immoral? Should we consider Bechdel's father a pedophile or sexual predator?

Does Bechdel's father's sexuality hinder or foster her own coming out process?

An individual expressing that they think they might be gay often provokes comments of derision, i.e. If you have to ask, then you probably are. Do you believe people can truly be bisexual? Do cultural influences in both the gay and straight communities force individuals to choose one or the other?

Issues to ponder...

Okay everyone, in keeping on topic with examining the family dynamic, here are some questions you might want to think about.

1. Do you think that when Ali's Father hands her a copy of Colette's, "Earthly Paradise" he is intentionally reaching out to his daughter about his homosexuality, or is the gesture unconscious?

2. It’s obvious that Ali's father’s obsession with perfect appearance stems from his guilt and shame about being a homosexual. Do you think the distance he keeps between him and his children is for the same reason?

3. Do you think that Ali's father would have still died, had he of not known about his daughter’s homosexuality?

4. Do you think that Ali's father grew close to his daughter out of a desire to get to know her better, or was this merely to acquire an intellectual partner?

5. Do you think Ali's father would have ever become open about him being a homosexual, or would he have continued to live his life in secret and shame?

6. Do you think that Ali's Mother had any suspicions regarding her husband’s homosexuality prior to the charges made against him?

7. Do you think that when Ali's Father first met her mother during the production of "Taming of the Shrew" he was actually in love with her, her character, or the idea of her being an actress?

8. Why do you think that Ali's mother had such a strange, uncomfortable reaction to the revelation of her daughter’s period?

9. When Ali develops OCD as a child, why do you think it takes her mother so long to actually realize that her daughter needs nurture?

10. Do you think that Ali's father consciously chose to emulate and mimic the lifestyles of his favorite authors and their characters, or were the acts merely coincidental?

Video

Alison Bechdel interview

Biography

Alison Bechdel was born on September 10^th 1960 in Lock Haven Pennsylvania. She lived there with her father, mother and two brothers. Her family owned and operated a funeral home or what her and her brothers would call the “Fun Home.” She graduated from Oberlin College, which is a liberal arts college in Ohio and then moved to New York City. There she applied to many art schools but was rejected and finally found work in various publishing houses. She always loved drawing but never really saw it as a career.

Alison grew up reading MAD Magazine, which she said was a huge influence graphically, but it wasn’t until she started reading about other gay and lesbian cartoonist who were writing about their own personal experiences that she realized that she could do that too. So in 1983 Alison started writing her own comic strip called “Dykes to Watch Out For,” at first that comic strip didn’t have an ongoing storyline or characters until 1987 when she created Mo and her friends and to this day she has been continuously writing comic strips about them. Toward the late nineties was when she started to write her autobiographical tragicomic “Fun Home” and seven years later in 2006 it was published. Currently Alison lives in Vermont and is working on her another graphic memoir, which focuses more on her relationships and she also is active on her on website titled after her comic strip, Dykes to Watch out For.

Controversy

Fun Home, while receiving mostly positive criticism, was subject to a brief battle with censorship. The Marshall Public Library of Missouri, where the book was banned for 5 months. The local community held a townhall meeting in which they decided that the book contained pornographic obscenity, in the depictions of nudity and lesbian acts, and had Fun Home, as well as Craig Thompson's comic Blankets, banned. The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund and the National Coalition Against Censorship aided in the eventual return of the book to the library shelves. When asked about the incident, Bechdel said the banning was "a great honor."

Earlier this year, at the University of Utah, a professor placed Fun Home on the syllabus for their "Critical Introduction to English Literary Forms" course, in which a student petitioned to read a different book, on the basis that Fun Home was pornography. The student, along with a group called "No More Pornography," is currently seeking to have the book removed from the college curriculum altogether. As of now, the university shows no intention to do so.

Awards

Fun Home won the 2006 Publishing Triangle’s Judy Grahn Nonfiction Award, a Lambda Book Award, an Eisner award, and the Stonewall Book Award-Israel Fishman Nonfiction Award from the American Library Association’s Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered Round Table. It was also nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award.

Time, 12/25/06, #1 Best Book of the Year
New York Times, 12/3/06, 100 Notable Books of 2006
Entertainment Weekly, 12/22/06, Best Books of the Year, #1 Nonfiction
People, 12/25/06, Top 10 Books of the Year
USA Today, 12/21/06, Best Graphic Title of 2006
Los Angeles Times, 12/10/06, Favorite Books of 2006, Fiction and Poetry
San Francisco Chronicle, 12/17/06, The Year’s Best Books
New York Magazine, 12/18/06, Best Books of the Year, #7
Time Out New York, 12/06, Favorite Books of the Year
Minneapolis Star Tribune, 11/24/06, Best Books of 2006
St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 12/3/06, Best Books of 2006
The Plain Dealer, 12/10/06, Outstanding Books of 2006
Salon, 12/12/06, Best Debuts of 2006, Nonfiction
The Capital Times, 12/12/06, 2006 Favorites
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 12/15/06, Best of Year
Out, 12/2006, 100 Most Intriguing People of 2006
Amazon.com, Editor’s Choice, Top 50 Books of 2006, Top 10 Memoirs of 2006
Oregonian, 12/31/06, Best Books of 2006, #2
The Advocate, 1/07, Best Book of the Year
The Guardian (UK), 11/26/06, Pick of 2006
New York Blade, 12/29/06, Literary Stand Outs of 2006
PW Comics Week, Critic’s Poll, Best Comic Book of 2006
Publishers Weekly, Best Books of the Year 2006
Times (UK), 12/16/06, Best Books of 2006, #10
Newsday, 1/2/07, Favorite Books of 2006
The Village Voice, 25 Favorite Books of 2006

-taken from http://dykestowatchoutfor.com/reviews-and-interviews