Fun Home-Asope

In the novel FUN HOME, the narrator who is also the main character, Alison, tells us about her life and family as she grew up. One thing that you come to understand is that her father is a very meticulous and order centered man. The narrator tells the readers that her and her father are inverts of each other. She reports that her father is a "sissy" and that he liked flowers and feminine things. IN contrast, the narrator was more attracted to masculine things, like shirts with french cuffs and dressing more like a boy. The narrator states that her and her father filled in for each other where the other lacked. On page 120 of the novel, you can see pictures of the narrator's father where he is in a female bathing suit and you also see a pose of him on a beach. In both of these pictures her father looks very feminine and lacks the masculine quality that fathers are known to have. There is also a picture of the narrator and she looks more masculine then feminine. I think these panels help the reader to see that both of these characters longed for the others anatomy, but they could only mock the others image. They truly are inverts of each other, wanting what the other has.

Fun Home (Pg 23)

On page 23 of Fun Home, it becomes clear that Alison sees her father as a figure that was always lost. When we learn that her father committed suicide, she says, ”his absence resonated retroactively, echoing back through all the time I knew him.” Her father is gone, but like the death of any parent, there is a process of grieving. When his homosexuality is revealed, it seems as through Alison is looking back at memories of her father and trying to figure out who he really was. As Alison points out some of her father’s feminine appearances, it further illustrates his hidden sexuality. Mowing the lawn, for example, is a normal thing to do. The way this book illustrates such a chore speaks volumes about the relationship between Alison and her father. The unfinished grief is visually represented as Alison is shown moving the lawn in endless circles to finish the task. It is evident that Alison and her father shared a special bond, even if it was now clear back then, in regards to their sexuality. Alison understands that throughout her relationship with her father as well as her memories of it, there were signs that “echoed” her father’s melancholy.

Fun Home Panel

On page 120 of  Fun Home we see two significant panels that portray a sense of resemblance in Allison and her father.  The top panel shows a photo that is captioned as being Allison’s father.  Her father is defying the social normal, and instead of wearing a pair of swimming trunks, he is wearing a women’s bathing suit.   Allison describes him as elegant.   I feel like this was an important discovery in Allison’s eyes because it unveiled a bridge between her father and herself that she had never seen before.  In fact, she mentions earlier in the novel that she once begged to have swim trunks instead of a bathing suit at the beach.

In the second and largest panel, we see two pictures side by side, one of Allison’s father (age 22) and the other one of Allison (age 21).  The profound similarity between the two pictures stops Allison.  The setting of the photos, the way each of them smiles, the way they positioned themselves and the angle of the photos all seemed to show Allison a side of herself that resembled her father.  It was a side she hadn’t accounted for in the past.  I believe they make her take into account what was going on in her life at the time the picture was taken, and then try to relate to what her father may have been going through at the time of his picture.

Fun Home Panel

I found the panel on the bottom of page 7 to stand out to me the most. Above the picture there is a caption that says "It was his passion. And I mean passion in every sense of the word" and inside the panel, in a box are the words "Libidinal. Manic. Martyred."
This particular panel stood out to me because of the reference (or at least I think it is) to the Passion of the Christ. The word "passion" in the caption works with the picture, of her father, with the house shadowed in the background, hunched over, looking tired, and carrying piece of wood for his house as Jesus carried the cross through the streets and also the word "Martyred." in the box works to create this image of her father sacrificing himself for his passion for historical restoration. When you think of the Passion of the Christ, it invokes a lot of deep emotions for people, tied to a passion for their religion, and by making an allusion to that the author is visually showing you how much her father loved his restoration, that he would give himself for it like Jesus did for his people.

Alison and masculinity

I don't have page numbers on my Kindle version, but its at location 34 (out of 81) when Alison is sitting in front of a shelf full of books, looking at an image titled "The Rifleman." This image depicts a man wearing a cowboy hat, holding a rifle over his shoulder. The caption for this panel reads, "Indeed, I had become a connoisseur of masculinity at an early age." Sitting by her side on the floor is a handgun. What is interesting about this image, though, is that on the shelf below "the Rifleman" is what appears to be a Dr. Seuss book, reminding us that she is, in fact, a child - even though there is a gun on the floor right next to her. Another difference in this image is the fact that she is actually made to look a little feminine. She has a clip or pin holding her hair back, and it is slightly longer than it is in most of the other images. It is clear in this image that she is female, whereas in many other panels her sex is ambiguous at best. This images plays games with the reader, contrasting the young femininity with the mature masculinity.

Fun Home Page 98 - I feel pretty

In the top panel on page 98 of Fun Home, Alison and her father are shown preparing to go to a wedding. The panel really shows Alison and her father's opposing characteristics. The caption says, "Not only were we introverts, we were inversions of one another." If only they could pull a "Freaky Friday" and switch bodies then everyone would be happy. That being impossible, they were each struggling against the personality that was expected of them. To go against the grain was not something that should be done. Yet, in their outfits, you can see her father's desire for things to be pretty with his velvet jacket and striped tie, expressing his desire for his daughter to look more womanly. Alison was jealous of his suit and hated being forced to wear a dress and nice shoes as opposed to sneakers. The gender norms in this case are brought to a complete comparison in this one drawing. This is especially noticeable because the mother is also in the panel. She tells the father that he will "upstage the bride." The fact that everyone is dressed more casually, and he is spending time primping suggests his desire to be pretty which we are taught is not many at all. Whereas his daughter, wants to get out of her fancy clothes and dress like she normally does. We rarely see her in a dress or with her hair done. She is the anti-thesis of the girly girl. Her father picks up her slack in this case as she does with his masculinity. It could be said that they were "inversions" of one another, but also that they complete each other as what one is lacking the other has. This may be one more reason why above the bottom panel on page 86, Alison says that she is "reluctant to let go of that last, tenuous bond" when her father dies. They were bonded in the way that they were able to somehow live vicariously through one another. This is why Alison drew the connection of her "coming out" and his death. As she had finally decided to embrace herself, she no longer needed to live through her father.

Fun Home pages 22-23

On page 20, Alison begins to talk about the quality of parenting that she received from her father. More specifically Alison mentions his presence throughout their relationship and her life as he was living. We see that her father was always around and this is told to us by the text provided along with the images. Her father constantly puts her and her siblings to work with him doing various chores and tasks. While Alison and her father are physically close, we also see that they could not be further apart as far as a conventional, “proper”, father/daughter relationship goes. On page 22 and 23 the images and the text work in perfect harmony to show us how truly self-absorbed her father was even in their private moments where they would be expected to be bonding. Right off the bat we see her father enter the scene riding on the back of the mower shirtless. He is constantly working to model his concept of perfection while excluding his own family from his life even as they are present. While he may be teaching her to mow and complete lawn care tasks, he is also trying to appear as an icon of perfection as he leans on the mower positioning his body in an appealing way for whomever it may interest. Her father goes as far as wearing cologne to work I the ward because he needs to be able feel better than your average father who works in the yard and ends up stinking, naturally, later on. The bottom line is that her father was always there but no matter how close they were, he was never really present in the moment. A powerful example of this is the image that goes along with the text reading like so, "amputees feel pain in a missing limb", as her father is front and center while she is nothing but a shadow in the background as she has always been during the course of her  childhood.