Journal Article

Queering the Family, Reclaiming the Father: Proustian Evocations in Alison Bechdel's Fun Home

Michael, Olga

2020

Overview

[...]she makes frequent intertextual references to the literary canon of the fin-de-siecle and the early-twentieth century, invoking the works of Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce, to name just a few.2 Her comics, infused with intertextual references to Remembrance, allow for the structuring of queer subjects and representations of denaturalized gender and sexuality that can cause Butlerian trouble, ultimately reuniting Alison with her father in the realm of the graphic memoir.3 Fun Home thus contributes to queer life writing by illustrating the potential of comics for mediating positive accounts of queer lives, while also revealing the value of intertextual readings for the identification of such accounts within the field of autographics, as defined by Gillian Whitlock (995). Intertextual references can be identified in the visual and the verbal register, as well as in the space that is created through the interpretive combination of the two. Because of the graphic memoir's explicit references to Proust's life and art, the reader may become inclined to identify further and subtler allusions. Reading Fun Home intertextually, however, reveals how Bechdel turns Bruce's approach to fiction and reality, to literature, and to things and family members into a positive means that enables her autobiographical subject's reclaiming of her father. Bruce's conflation between the real, the fictional, and the artificial is also reflected via his obsession with preserving the anachronistic Gothic Revival style of the house, his imagining of himself as a \"nineteenth-century aristocrat,\" and his seduction of some of his high school students within the domestic domain (60).

• Publisher: University of Hawai'i Press,University of Hawaii Press
• Subject: 19th century / Accounts / Adolescence / Archives & records / Autobiographical literature / Autobiographies / Bechdel, Alison / British & Irish literature / Butler, Judith / Comics / Domestic relations / Families & family life / Family relations / Fiction / French literature / Gay fathers / Gender / Intertextuality / Irish literature / Joyce, James (1882-1941) / Lesbians / Mediation / Proust, Marcel / Proust, Marcel (1871-1922) / Reading / Relatives / Remembrance / Secondary school students / Secondary schools / Seduction / Sexuality / Wilde, Oscar (1854-1900) / Writing