Repression vs. Openness Theme Analysis

Throughout Fun Home, Alison Bechdel’s exploration into her own lesbian sexuality is juxtaposed with her father Bruce’s repressed gay or bisexual orientation. While this contrast between openness and repression in the book is specifically related to sexuality and gender-identity, the book is also a powerful portrayal of the impact of repression more generally, the way that shame can drive a person to hide that shame, and then how hiding that shame can in turn create complicated and self-destructive behaviors.

The memoir traces the development and impact of repression primarily through Alison as she grows up. As a young child she begins to become aware of the way that she is different – for instance her attraction to the butch lesbian she sees in a restaurant as a five year old, and her father’s disapproval of that attraction. This recognition of difference leads to shame and a denial of her true self: she lies to her father and says that she does not want to look like the lesbian in the restaurant. Later, Alison develops compulsive habits that could be classified under the umbrella of OCD, likely due to “repressed hostility,” leading her to create rituals around dressing and undressing, passing through doorways, and avoiding certain numbers. She also compulsively begins to write daily journal entries in a diary (even as her journal entries turn over time from truthful to obscure to inaccurate, mirroring her repressed state). Such obsessive behavior betrays a need to control the world in some way, a need driven by the sense that the world that has forced her into repressing herself is so far beyond her control. But the obsessive rituals – such as Alison’s need to pass through a doorway in just the right way or else to try again – are themselves out of control.

While Alison’s story traces the development of such obsessive behaviors, they are just as evident in her equally repressed father. In the book Alison describes her father’s constant decorating of the family house using a metaphor that excellently captures the dynamic of repression and obsession: she sees her father as being both Daedalus and the Minotaur – both the Greek designer who created the inescapable labyrinth to house the terrible monster, and the monster itself. In this way of seeing things, the obsessive behaviors are a desperate way to hide and control the monster a person sees within him or herself, but they never eliminate that person’s sense that he or she really is at heart a monster. And so even as the behaviors offer control, they are also a prison (and the “monster” can still sometimes escape, as both Bruce’s rages and affairs with some of his male teenage students attest).

When Alison goes to college, she finds an environment that allows her to see herself as something other than a monster. At Oberlin, she explores her sexuality in-depth, first intellectually, delving into books on the subject, then socially, joining her college’s “Gay Union” and becoming a part of the gay and lesbian campus community, and finally physically, when she begins a relationship with Joan, her first girlfriend. Alison eventually eliminates her final repression, and writes a letter to her parents in which she comes out of the closet as a lesbian. Although neither of her parents is fully supportive, Alison’s honesty and openness do cause Helen, her mother, to come clean about Bruce’s secret homosexual proclivities. So, though Alison coming out of the closet doesn’t lead to the parental acceptance she is surely seeking, it does grant her more openness and honesty about her parents’ relationship and her father’s repressed sexuality. And Alison, in turn, reflects that honesty in Fun Home itself, making her story and the story of her family open to the world.