Representing the GLBTQ Experience: A Close Reading of Fun Home as a Glimpse into the Past Anonymous College

One of the best parts of Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir, Fun Home, is its embeddedness with critical conversations about literature as well as gender. In each image and on each page, the book promotes the story’s complex dynamic, one in which Bruce’s decline is pitted against Alison’s rise as a fully “out” lesbian. On some pages, the images are more salient than the pictures, and vice versa, especially on the pages in which the pictures of text are fetishized, either through an emphasis on the text as caption or as an image of readable text. This book is essential, especially for those who want to understand gender issues. The doubling and inversions in the book, which are almost obsessively explained to the reader, reinforce how far society has come since Alison’s childhood in terms of understanding GLBTQ identities. Examining one page in close detail, and doing so in conversation with some secondary sources, reveals to what degree this work is unique. Early in the book, one specific page reinforces this claim.[1]

In a vertical triptych, Bechdel focuses on her father’s “skillful artifice,” which is played out in what appears to be a vignette of several scenes occurring over the course of one day. The first image is framed by...