Literature in the Lives of Allison and Her Father
Allison's need to find the truth and show things for what they are is contrasted with her fathers need to alter the perception of things and lie in order to fit his world to his coveted reality. This takes many forms. One way it is depicted is through their aesthetic. Where Allison likes a plain design where you get what you see, her father likes things to be placed or added or garnished just right to make it seem a certain way. Another way this is represented is through the roles literature plays in Allison and her father's life. Where Allision seems to use literature to depict and make sense of the world around her, her father seems to use literature to change himself and the world around him.
When using literature as a way of figuring out their identity, one can see Allison stay true to her inclination for a more ungarnished straight forward design by choosing to read nonfiction. With nonfiction books, there are just facts and usually not many extraneous details to carry you away and cause you to imagine life differently. If anything, it makes the world around you clearer, and thus perhaps simpler and more understandable. Furthermore, staying true to her character, Allison uses this to discover a major aspect of her identity, her sexuality. Instead of trying to make reality work for her, she seeks the truth and sees if the life the book talks about is right for her. She reads about others' experiences and joins a club. Although having faced indications that her way of life is frowned upon, she uses literature and the company of others to push her forward into the unknown. In contrast, her father uses literature to hide his identity. Due to the scorn thrown at those of his sexuality in those days, perhaps he was not comfortable with himself and sexuality, and thus reading about someone who was praised and accepted by society, he wanted to copy that. In any case, he is shown to write in the style of Fitzgerald, he tries to woo a girl like one of the characters in a Fitzgerald novel, and Allison finds many parallels to the life her father leads and the life that the Great Gatbsy leads ( Bechdel 63). She further supports this by saying, “Gatsby’s self willed metamorphosis from farmer boy to prince is in many ways identical to my fathers. (63)” All in all, it seems to me that he was trying to be someone he is not because he was scared of who he was. Furthermore, her father's choice in fiction and especially that of Fitzgerald is in line with his want of garnish and making things seem a certain way. For, when I read the Great Gatsby, it seemed to me that he used a lot of extraneous detail and adjectives to really paint a picture, and oftentimes that picture was of riches and splendor and the illusion of grandeur created by the rich. In other words, the book used a lot of detail to have the reader imagine or see something society viewed as the ideal, just like how her father tries to make things look like they fit society's standards.
Furthermore, another difference between the father daughter duo is how fiction is used as means of defining their reality. Instead of chasing a fiction Allison uses fiction to fit her reality. She describes her relationship between her and her father as akin to Icarus and Daedalus (3) and as a child she felt like Wednesday in the Adams family (34). She seems to live the stories by accident and use their existence as a convenient way of laying out or explaining her life. In contrast her father seems to use literature to hide from reality. As Allison depicts the library and it being filled with ornaments and books that her father was always reading (60). Instead of living the stories, he spends his time reading the stories. Allison further describes this by saying “... Dad was always reading something (28)”. Thus, instead of taking in the world around him and creating his own stories, he chooses to be transported away to the world of fiction. Rejecting the way things are, through the lens of fiction, he can see the world as he wants it to be.
Finally, another major difference is the role of literature in their careers. Where Allison writes literature her father interprets it. Although there is some altering Allison may do to her story, her book seems more documentary-like. The art style is simple and seems to be made to get the point across. Overall, instead of trying to depict her life in an embellished way to better fit society's standards, she seems to focus more on how things were, and getting the reader to understand that. However, with her father, as an English teacher he teaches interpretations. He gives his pupils the lens in which to view writing and helps them see the book and interpret it the way he wants them too. In other words, he uses the words and tales he is given and helps others see it in a certain light among other aspects of his job.
Alison doesn't just favor nonfiction when she embarks on her own "reading Odyssey" as part of the coming-out process--she specifically favors *memoirs* and oral histories, where LGBTQ people from earlier eras speak and write in detail about their experiences and the communities that sustained them. So it's apt that her own art--the book we are reading--is a memoir that uses fiction and other people's stories as a way of understanding her own and her father's. I love the contrast in this post between Alison's reading aesthetic and the way she depicts younger Bruce using Fitzgerald (and by extension Gatsby) as a model for *performing* a particular kind of cultural masculinity and heterosexuality. He apparently manages to do a pretty persuasive imitation of "Fitzgerald madly in love"--it persuades Helen, at least. But in no sense is he "expressing himself" or using the literary model to get at a deeper truth.
ReplyDeleteI think that it's honestly pretty cool that by reading Fun Home, we get to learn about why Bechdel wrote Fun Home the way she did. I agree that it definitely seems like Bechdel wants to put more focus on the facts, rather than embellishing what happened. That may perhaps be part of the reason that Bechdel went for a completely autobiographical approach to their book, as opposed to the semi-biographical or fiction approach that other authors we read about this semester have taken.
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