Under Construction Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

Abstract

Among various attempts to define the characteristics of the comics medium, one fruitful and often-quoted analogy is Art Spiegelman's comparison of comics structure to a building. Several major comics artists have created works that feature buildings and houses not just as metaphors for the structure of comics but as narrative embodiments of personal, cultural and historical change. This paper will focus on Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006), a graphic memoir featuring the author's family home as it undergoes meticulous architectural restorations under the direction of her closeted gay father. Her father's obsessive renovations both reflect and disguise the on-going construction of bodies, sex and gender identities, and familial relationships taking place within its walls. Unlike her father, Bechdel ultimately escapes the constraints of her family's Gothic Revival house by engaging with the more liberal house of fiction and writing her own coming-out memoir.