Sexuality as a Fleeting Connection Between Alison and Bruce
In Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Alison explicitly contrasts her own sexuality to that of her father. While she and Bruce didn’t have a close relationship during his lifetime, they have one crucial trait in common, their sexuality, which causes a confusing connection that Alison has to navigate after her father’s death. Alison describes her relationship with her father Bruce as distant, recalling feeling like nothing but a piece of furniture or an extra set of hands for his constant renovations on their house. Throughout her childhood, she illustrates her father as uncaring and cold, never feeling comfortable enough for any physical affection or open enough to confide in. She illustrates her family as completely separate, each in their own spaces, working on their own projects, only coming together when absolutely necessary; she describes that “the more gratification we found in our own geniuses, the more isolated we grew” (Bechdel 134). Despite the fact that Alison felt so disconnected to her father during her childhood, once she became a young adult, their relationship took a slight turn.
Once Bruce realizes that they have similar interests in literature, he takes it as an opportunity to connect with her––granted, this connection is slightly odd, with him playing more of a teacher figure than a father figure, but still, a connection nonetheless––and begins to share and discuss his favorite books with her. Bruce ends up using his new role as a provider of literature for Alison as a way to reach out to her; when he gives her Collette’s autobiography to read, she wonders if this choice was intentional. She later asks Bruce if he “knew what [he was] doing” by having her read this autobiography, to which he responds “I didn’t really. It was just a guess. I guess there was some kind of… identification” (Bechdel 220). By bringing up this book, Alison sparks one of the most honest conversations we see her have with Bruce about his life. Literature plays a big role in connecting Alison and Burce, and their connection through literature drives most of their connection through sexuality.
The moment that Alison is told about her Father’s affairs with men, it is initially a shock, but later leads her to be more open with her father. When Helen tells Alison about her father’s sexuality, it is in reaction to Alison’s own coming out, directly linking the two; if Alison had never come out, she might not have ever been told about her father’s sexuality during his lifetime. Despite the fact that his sexuality is such a shame in his life, Bruce is surprisingly open with Alison about his sexuality, and it ends up bringing the two together in an unexpected way. When Alison comes out to her parents, she is doing so with the assumption that they wouldn’t understand, because they’ve never had to go through what she’s going through, but in reality, her father has gone through something very similar. While Alison is juggling with the idea of living as an out gay person––with her mother advising against it––Bruce admits that “There’ve been a few times I thought I might have preferred to take a stand” (Bechdel 211). Bruce clearly handled the issue of his sexuality very differently than Alison, but he has a better sense of what she’s going through than what Alison had originally assumed, and is able to give advice and opinions based on his own lived experiences. Alison had always felt like she had nothing to connect with her father about, and had felt like her father wanted nothing to do with her life or her interests, but when she comes out to him, it opens a door for a connection that she never knew existed. The biggest shame in Bruce’s life becomes one of the core things that connects him to his daughter.
Throughout the novel, Alison contrasts the way she handled her sexuality with the way her father did, and explicitly compares them to each other. She compares old pictures of her father to pictures of her at the same age, wondering if he was feeling the same way that she was, wondering how similar their experiences were. This is a very confusing thing for Alison to contemplate, wondering how her father’s experiences compared to her own, and having to look back on his life without him, wondering what the truth is behind each picture he took and each letter he wrote. Alison and Bruce have more in common than Alison knew for a majority of her lifetime, but the trait that connects them is one that Bruce spent his entire life trying to hide, leaving Alison little to nothing to go off of while trying to retrospectively search for a connection between them. Bruce’s story is one of a million “what if’s,” and with Bruce dead, Alison has no choice but to guess what her father’s story was, and what it could have been. After a lifetime of trying to find a connection with her father, once she finally (and very unexpectedly) finds one, it turns out to be his deepest shame, and something he would never openly live out.
This is one of my main takeaways of the book and I completely agree with you on it. I think there was so much left unsaid because of Bruce's untimely death and this leads to Alison hastily deciding that their queerness would keep them connected. Obviously during her life they were not very close, but she hopes to create a connection from the image of her father she constructed after his death. This is really interesting to me because I feel like in a lot of other ways Alison has worked through her childhood trauma by voicing her feelings about it in the book, but on this one front she is stuck in the past, just hoping.
ReplyDeleteWhat a weird sequence of events, isn't it? Bruce doesn't come out and so Alison is born into a family with a closeted father, and learning about how he had hidden his identity in part fuels her coming out. Even though Alison and Bruce's sexualities were the main point of connection in their relationship, they seem quite a bit different when you think about Alison's ability to be open about her sexuality both in her environment and in her familial relationships. This is entirely different from Bruce's pretty much nonexistent coming-of-age, and this difference makes it so Alison will never get to relate to Bruce in the way that she wants.
ReplyDeleteI would even say that this late-discovered connection between Bruce and Alison doesn't ONLY represent a painful lost opportunity (as it does seem like Bruce is perhaps being reluctantly lured out into the light by Alison and her questions, maybe portending the possibility of a new, more open life for him on the other side of this crisis), it also helps revise Alison's assessment of Bruce's demeanor throughout her childhood. She is shocked by her mother's revelations, for sure, but there's also a sense in which it "clicks" for her--Bruce's often cold and distant behavior, his "aestheticizing" of the house, his various "fictional" identities, his brushes with the law, all start to "make sense" in a more sympathetic way if we see him as a flawed man struggling with his identity and the real moral compromises that concealing it entails. Bruce acknowledges that he's not a "hero"--he has no interest in being a queer activist or trying to change the world for the better--but it DOES seem like he is at least positioning himself for a more open and honest "second act" in life. Which is what leads me to keep feeling like his death is an accident, despite Alison's insistence to the contrary. In that painfully awkward car-ride scene, I see him WANTING to speak more openly with her but afraid to--and that fear is something they could chip away at eventually. And when he proposes bringing her to the gay bar where he's clearly spent some time over the years, he IS trying to invite her into his world in a more open way. I wonder how this story might have ended differently if that bouncer had let them in, even though Alison was underage (an ironic issue for BRUCE to face, I admit).
ReplyDeleteHiya Ruby! Bruce and Alison's relationship when it came to their sexualities was definitely something that I found a bit hard to navigate. It was so interesting how they could use it as a way to bond with each other, and it really did change their relationship with each other quite substantially. I overlooked the whole connection it had with literature when initially reading the book, so this was a really fascinating read! Great blog!
ReplyDeleteHi Ruby! I am so glad someone elaborated on how Alison used her identity and her father's to create a connection between them. Her obsession with understanding her father leads to almost finding anything relating to her own life and that is proven throughout the story throughout her finding photos or recalls her childhood as an adult. The novel shows the connection they did have at the end where there seemed to be a mutual understanding between the two of them but not a total explanation from Bruce haunted Alison throughout this book. Great post!
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