Michel Foucault begins his essay “We ‘Other’ Victorians” with a description of what he calls the “repressive hypothesis” (Foucault 10). This hypothesis holds that openly expressing sexuality at the beginning of the seventeenth century was...

The introduction of the novel – or long form narrative prose in general – granted the writer a unique, widened canvas on which to blend rhetoric and art. Here, the writer is invited to both persuade and entertain, sometimes veiling one with the...

The graphic novel Fun Home by Alison Bechdel opens with a series of panels portraying how she and her father used to play airplane. At the same time, Bechdel makes a connection between them playing airplane and the myth of Icarus and Daedalus. It...

Although Alison Bechdel tells an emotional story in her graphic memoir Fun Home, she also grounds various important plot points about identity construction in mythology. In this way, she is able to articulate the complex and often contradictory...

In its creation and consumption, literature involves an inherent contract between reader and author. The parameters of this contract are often set by the work’s genre, and help the reader to determine whether the text should be interpreted as...

Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home challenges both established gender roles and heteronormative identities. Gender is shown to be constructed, assigned through Western standards, and then practiced through performance. Bechdel’s graphic novel explores the...

It is often thought that graphic novels and comics are in some way less sophisticated or overall lesser than traditional novels, as if the use of illustrations rather than long text descriptions makes it a more simplistic medium. However, the...

Fun Home is an autobiographical graphic novel by American author and cartoonist Alison Bechdel. It follows the story of her maturation, growing up in Pennsylvania, moving out of the house, and coming to terms with her sexuality. In the process,...

Every coming out story must deal with the characters’ struggles of being in the closet. The stage of not yet being able to be open about one’s identity can be the most difficult and turbulent point in dealing with their queer identity. It is a...

Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home is a groundbreaking piece of literature in which an audience is able to experience an autobiographical piece unlike any other. Through the illustrations in this graphic novel as well as the utterly human words and...

Ambiguity is present within every language as every word can be interpreted slightly differently. In literature, complex ideas are often indirectly depicted through the use of metaphors and symbols. Likewise, images also possess a sense of...

In Alison Bechdel’s “tragicomic” graphic novel Fun Home, the author combines the traditional forms of the Bildungsromanwith the more contentious form of the graphic novel in order to apply a literary analysis to her own life. The result is a...

One of the best parts of Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir, Fun Home, is its embeddedness with critical conversations about literature as well as gender. In each image and on each page, the book promotes the story’s complex dynamic, one in which...

Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home has the polished surface appearance of a charming comic about a young girl’s coming of age and struggles with self-identity. Bechdel’s strong personal voice emanates from the text with a captivating candor that renders ...