Character Depiction in Fun Home

Since we have discussed the way the writer depicts himself in many of our texts thus far, I thought it would only be fair to examine Alison Bechdel's self-portrait in Fun Home. Even in the few scenes that we see young Alison in a dress, there is an undeniable boyishness to her. She always has close-cropped hair, wears gender-neutral clothes, etc. We rarely see her smiling; in fact, she is often seen with a scowl on her face. The only time she is seen laughing is when she is telling a friend of her father's death on page 227. There is a slight hint of a smile on her face in several scenes when her father is giving her positive attention, most notably when she was his student on pages 198-199. There are very few similarities between the depiction of Alison and the depiction of her father; she mostly seems to resemble her mother. Whether this is actually the case or a just a way of Alison distancing herself from her father is unclear. Her character does not really change much physically over the course of time; it is easy to pick her out of crowd scenes and distinguish her from her siblings. Bruce, however, is not always drawn with a consistent pen. Even if Alison had not made a comment about her father's good looks on page 64, it would have been easy to tell that he was a fairly handsome man. His face carries a very bookish and serious quality, and his style seems to evolve in subtle ways with the passing of time. But the scenes in which he is reprimanding her or her siblings show a different man. For instance, the image of Bruce on 99.2 bears practically no resemblance to the image on 92.1, and is even quite different from the Bruce on 98.1. Perhaps this is Alison's way of conveying the idea that there was a side of her father that she didn't know, that he really was two people living in the same body. I think that Alison says a lot with her drawings, especially with the expressions on the characters' faces. She never states explicitly that she or her mother or her father were unhappy, but it is as clear as the titles of the books they are reading.