methodology of fun home

I think that some interesting discussion can be centered around Bechdel’s choice of the autography as her methodology to communicate her personal story. Most of the literature that analyzes the implications of Fun Home utilizes the psychoanalytic account of ‘trauma’ and our role to bear witness. Jenny Edkins argues that “by situating ourselves as citizens of a state or political authority or as members of a family, we reproduce that social institution at the same time as assuming our own identity as part of it. As we have seen, in what we call a traumatic event this group betrays us” (Edkins 8). The connection can easily be drawn that the main character of Fun House feels a sense of betrayal towards her dysfunctional family.

psychoanalysis is useful here

Utilizing the autographical method allows for a more creative use of visual representations of the plot to advance the story. There are numerous examples of this throughout Fun Home. A stark juxtaposition is established when comparing the main character’s “diary entries” when she was young, to the “vagaries of emotion and opinion” as she aged, until her final entry is “barely perceptible behind a hedge of qualifiers, encryption, and stray punctuation” (169).

The message that Bechdel conveys is inseparable from the images present in the autography. Rather than merely being a representation of the plot, the images are instead an integral part of the broader plot. More subtle elements of the graphic novel are also communicated in how messages are conveyed. In the scene where the “tragic botanical specimen” is displayed, the textbook provides a unique method to convey the message of the plant becoming “spent and shrivelled and discoloured” (92).

A comparison must be established between the efficacy of the narrative form in the stories that we read a few weeks ago and when the autographical method is either more or less effective. The narrative form has the limitation of being fixed to one stable standpoint (recall the narratology arguments I made earlier). However, Cvetkovich argues that Fun House provides a more expansive account of a lesbian’s traumatic encounter by contextualizing it with the sexual identity of her father, paving the way for a cross-generational analysis. Graphic narratives like Fun Home “use ordinary experience as an opening onto revisionist histories that avoid the emotional simplifications that can sometimes accompany representations of even the most unassimilable historical traumas” (Cvetkovich 125). In this way, the autography provides a unique lens into both the personal trauma of the main character along with a more general historical context for these social forces.

by reading fun house, we are bearing witness to the author's trauma

Ann Cvetkovich. “Drawing the Archive in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home”. WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 36:1-2 (2008).

Jenny Edkins. Trauma and the Memory of Politics. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge (2003).