Queering the family, reclaiming the father "Proustian Evocations in Alison Bechdel’s fun home"

Abstract

In this essay, I examine the representation of the father/daughter relationship in Alison Bechdels Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, and I propose that via its intertextual references to Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past the graphic memoir recasts the distant pair into a queerly reunited one.¹ Fun Home recreates Alison’s problematic relationship with her closeted gay father, Bruce, during her childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood, when she comes out as a lesbian, and up until his death four months afterwards. Bechdel reproduces via the comics medium a variety of archival materials, including family photographs, her parents’ love letters, and her childhood diaries, to tell the story of growing up with her distant father.