Fun Home Part I

An overwhelming theme that pervades throughout Fun Home, as well as the Bluest Eye and the Student essays, are the detrimental effects that a parent's attitude toward themselves-- and consequently the way in which they present themselves to their children-- can have on their children and family dynamic. In the student essays, for example, the parents of Johnny Lee, in an attempt to create for their children the ideal American lifestyle they were never able to have, treat him with a strict, austere coldness that then leads to mental torment, after they find out about his sexual orientation. Furthermore, the shame that Johnny's father felt at having the same tendencies led to an even more violent reaction of feigned disgust, for he could not tell his wife the truth. "I don't want the faggot. I hate faggot son." (Anthology, 562) Obviously, he was experiencing "internalized homophobia. . . a fear of same-sex tendencies within oneself [which] can lead to suppression." (Anthology, 37) These internalized feelings of shame and suppression led Johnny to lose all respect for his father, thus estranging him from his family. Similarly, in the Bluest Eye, Cholly's lifelong feelings of shame and humiliation from white people, as well as his inability to understand the ties of childhood and marriage, lead him to sexually and otherwise physically abuse his children. This is brought on by an inability to express his emotion, which had caused in his family, especially his daughter Pecola, a feeling of utter worthlessness and ugliness.



These situations are very similar to that of Alison and her father Bruce in Fun Home. Due to the internalized homophobia and shame felt by Bruce, he turns to anything in his life that he can control, in order to distract him from his current unhappiness. Bruce puts more stock in perfecting the Bechdel's house than he does in raising his family, and the Bechdel's home become a cold and detached place to grow up. "I grew to resent the way my father treated his furniture like children, and his children like furniture." (Bechdel, 14) While Bruce whiled away his time in distraction of his own imperfection, he abused his children and had homosexual affairs with students. He also continually attempted to make his daughter more feminine, as she attempted to make up for his femininity, and he wished to downgrade her masculine tendencies. Eventually, Alison is only able to connect to her family through the use of literary reference, as she felt that her life with them had been a continual lie. Her father lived in constant pretense, and thus blurred the lines for her of what was reality and what was fiction in her memory. "Perhaps affectation can be so thoroughing, so authentic in its details, that it stops being pretense. . . and becomes, for all practical purposes, reality." (Bechdel, 60)
Alison grows up to become  emotionally detached, who tries to feel vicariously through others. These tendencies are directly resultant from the quietly desperate dance her parents and family employed to communicate, and the falsity of their day-to-day lives. As in each of these three relationships, the inability of a parent, specifically a father, to cope with some aspect of themselves, leads to a family dynamic that is abusive, cold, and neglectful to their children.