Fictional Parents...

To backtrack slightly, there was something from Fun Home that I wanted to post on briefly:

One of the most interesting lines to me from the whole of Fun Home is when Bechdel is describing her parents and says, “I employ these allusions of James and Fitzgerald not only as descriptive devices, but because my parents are most real to me in fictional terms” (67.1). This line appears above a panel depicting an ordinary mundane family scene: Alison and her mother are cooking (with the ever present “Sunbeam Bread” on the counter), her brother is leaning against the wall, and her father has just come home. Perhaps, for her parents, this ordinary scene of domesticity was a fiction. Her father obviously lived a “double-life” of sorts and her mother seems to be trapped by her family obligations. There always seems to be a sense of regret surrounding her mother of a life not lived. Her involvement in the local theatre and playing the piano seem to be the last vestiges of her former life and ambitions. Bechdel describes her mother’s appearance in a passport photograph, saying that her “luminous face has gone dull” (72.4) as compared with the younger, freer woman she was in the passport photo on the previous page, 71.1. She even describes her mother at that time through the lens of a fictional character, Isabel Archer from James’s The Portrait of a Lady, and describes the reason her mother stayed with her father as the same reason that Isabel stayed with Gilbert: “[b]ut too good for her own good, Isabel remains with Gilbert / … and despite all her youthful hopes to the contrary, ends up ‘ground in the very mill of the conventional’” (72.2-3). Relying on fiction as a way to relate to her own family serves to reinforce the sense of separation and “cool aesthetic distance” (67.2) Bechdel describes to the reader. At one point she even describes her household as being “like an artists’ colony. We ate together, but otherwise were absorbed in our separate pursuits. And in this isolation, our creativity took on an aspect of compulsion” (134.3). The only way left for Bechdel to relate to her family seemed to be through art.