Browse MUSE Subject Headings for Articles

Fun Home is an autographic narrative about memoirs, memory, and acts of autobiographical storytelling that mingles irony and pathos in the comingout/ coming of age story of young Alison in an “artistic, autistic” family who run a funeral home. Its multimodal text interweaves allusions to Modernist literary texts and feminist manifestoes with drawn photographs and diverse cartooning styles. This essay explores Bechdel’s graphing of subjectivity at multiple interfaces, and examines her use of ambiguous “evidence” for a father-daughter coming-out story that is both indictment and posthumous homage.

When Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic came out in 2006, the striking literary quality of the narrative was noted from her first reviews. Bechdel’s memoir is positioned at the intersection of image, narrative, autobiography and history. But Bechdel makes an additional play for high literary status by larding her book with the influence of canonical modernist literature, not only through frequent and explicit citation and reference, but also by subtler formal, thematic and textual gestures. Of all of these references, Joyce is the most ubiquitous; Joyce frames the novel and introduces both the conflict presented and its reconciliation. Bechdel clearly states the legitimacy of the graphic narrative as inheritor of the modernist tradition, particularly as exemplified through Joyce. At the same time, her relationship to Joyce and the modernist tradition is playful and sometimes combative.