Bruce and the True Nature of the Bechdel Home
While reading Fun Home, I came to recognize that Bechdel has a penchant for using complex metaphors and symbolism to describe her situation and relationships. To me, one of them stood out as particularly useful for analyzing her and Bruce’s story. Her vivid description of her childhood home, which takes up the bulk of the first chapter, seems strongly reminiscent of her thoughts about Bruce and his personality. Even though the home is just an object, a passion project of Bruce’s, his relationship with the home speaks volumes about the kind of person Bruce is.
One significant parallel I noticed was Bruce’s fixation on being in control of the things around him, and of being the architect of his life and home. Just as he carefully curates each room in the home, he also curates his appearance and reputation. Through Bechdel’s narration, we get a sense of how important it is to Bruce that every area of the home be organized and beautiful. In the context of the home itself, this compulsion is quite literally visible: he plans the location of every object in every room, spends hours perfecting wallpapers. But in his life, this part of Bruce’s personality is more nuanced. He pushes rigid ideals of order and beauty onto his children, especially Alison. When Bruce’s inner aesthete decides Alison’s room will be better off with pink flowery wallpaper, Alison responds “But I HATE pink! I HATE flowers” (Bechdel 7). Despite this, Bruce installs the wallpaper, insistent on exercising control over his home and family.
This careful curation is not just reserved for other things and people, however. Bruce does the same thing with himself and his own appearance. Throughout his life, as he struggles to conceal his sexuality and inner conflicts, he is careful to create a specific persona for the people of Beech Creek. To most, he is a respected teacher and member of society with a beautiful home and loving family. Underneath this facade, however, lies a much more turbulent reality that Bruce is insistent on suppressing (at least outwardly).
The house is also a powerful example of how Bruce is emotionally detached from the rest of his family. In one literal example, Alison describes how Bruce “treated his furniture like children, and his children like furniture” (Bechdel 14). To some extent, Bruce’s obsession with the home results in subsequent isolation from his children and family. But also, the environment of the Fun Home, however aesthetic, feels stripped of emotion. Alison grows up in a home that has been set up so methodically, it lacks comfort or authenticity. Bruce effectively hides his emotions and true self behind polished surfaces and intricate chandeliers, which is why Bruce’s life and death are so indecipherable.
Understanding this upbringing is also very important for looking deeply at the choices that Alison makes. She is very intentional about setting herself apart from her father and openly embracing her sexuality, escaping the world of rigidity and performative beauty that her father worked so hard to build. To her, the home is a representation of what she is trying to escape: repression and control. She pointedly sets herself apart and emphasizes the importance of authenticity, finally freeing herself from the shackles of the Fun Home and what it represents.
Hi Kruthi!
ReplyDeleteI've just read Adrian's blog post, so your description of Bruce's work to control the house as a compulsion reminded me of it, somewhat. Not to say I think Bruce has OCD (Alison at one point says he has Bipolar (she calls him a manic-depressive) but then doesn't elaborate much on the subject explicitly) but it's interesting to think about. We see Bruce the control freak, but we could also see Bruce who thinks that if the house is perfect then this passes some kind of moral judgement on him, or it means that he's perfect, or that he's hiding everything properly (his obsession with artifice is so important it makes the title of the first chapter).
Man you covered everything and my brain shut off for the weekend. I feel like I'm mostly just repeating your points. I especially like your highlighting the effects of Bruce's controlling behavior on Alison: it is because the house is so constructed and inauthentic that she feels alienated.
Hi,
ReplyDeleteI think your idea about Bruce's relationship to the environment of the family house and how it shaped Alison is an interesting idea and a good one. There was also a part of the book where Alison mentions that she rebelled in terms of style, preferring function over whether it looks nice. I'm sorry if this part is kind of nit picky, but the title threw me off for a bit when I initially started to read, because Fun Home was the nickname for the funeral home that was the family business.
Hi Kruthi, I really agree with you that Bruce is the meticulous curator that would do anything to keep up the facade of an ideal dad and an ideal family. The ostensible ornamentations around the house are just distractions to conceal his identity and crimes. I think this act of distracting is also seen in his actions. On the surface, he appears to be committed to a range of respectable pursuits, such as reading classics, teaching, going to church or gardening, but these activities also seem to just build his image around the town, diverting everyone (and perhaps also himself?) from questionable things he has done. Anyway, great blog!!
ReplyDeleteHi Kruthi! I think this is a really eloquent description of Bechdel's narrative style and main themes. Especially the bit about her house feeling fake/like a dollhouse really shines through, and I completely agree that it plays a large role in the development of her values and personality as she grows up. It occurred to me because of the "I HATE pink. I HATE flowers" line, that perhaps she subconsciously developed a more "masculine" aesthetic because she associated her father's "feminine" aesthetic with repression.
ReplyDeleteHi Kruthi! I really enjoyed your perspective on Bruce and the house as characters that shaped Alison. I agree with you that the home is a place of repression and control because of how she was raised in it! Great blog!
ReplyDeleteHi Kruthi, I loved your ideas on Bruce's curation of his environment, specifically the house, as a reflection of his own inner world. I think a point you hit on that is especially important to the story is why Bruce's care and control over the house (and his presentation) comes off as artificial: by obsessing over how he presents himself to others (mostly to hide his sexuality), he ends up producing an image of himself so perfected that it is far from the truth. Really great blog!
ReplyDeleteHi Kruthi! I think your focus on Bruce's need for control and how that reflects how he controls his own image is super interesting! Another element of this is that he doesn't only control how he appears---he also attempts to control Alison's appearance, making her wear more feminine clothing and longer hair when she would rather the opposite. But I wonder if this is the same kind of control over an image. Is it just that he expresses his own femininity through Alison, and as a result it's less about the overall image and more a way to get out his femininity so he doesn't express it with himself (though in this he is kind of altering his own image)? Or is it just another way for him to control how things appear, creating an artificial image of his daughter?
ReplyDeleteGreat blog Kruthi, I loved how you wrote about the different ways Bruce tried to control the people and things around him because of what he feels on the inside. He knows that he can't express himself fully so I think he resorted to taking over other people's decisions as well. And we can also see how this relates to the way he expresses himself in the building of their home to perfection so that other people living in this town can look at something he did and be astonished. I feel like this is a way that Bruce is trying to cope with his own anger on the inside because of the way he had to keep it to himself for all these years. Good job!
ReplyDeleteThe title of the book may ironically and with dark humor allude to the funeral home, the family business, but in the first chapter especially, it also seems to resonate with irony describing the only occasionally "fun" home in which Alison grows up. Even the first frames, where Bruce is "prevailed upon" to "play" airplane with Alison has this thematic undertone--he doesn't LOOK like he's doing something we'd describe as "playing," and he doesn't seem to be having any "fun." Even his obsessive remodeling of the home, which is indeed depicted as meaningful and impressive ART, never seems FUN for him: he seems stressed out, obsessively focused, ordering everyone around and getting easily frustrated. The home itself is virtually a character in the first chapter, an extension of Bruce's personality in architectural form. And I'd connect this "character" status to the meticulous ways Bechdel reconstructs the setting through her drawings, at times explicitly *labeling* certain exotic objects that adorn the place.
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