Lynn's Coming of Age

One of the hardest things to ignore about Fun Home is how clearly Alison and Bruce needed each other to be something neither of them could be. They were almost like reversed mirrors. Alison grows up tomboyish, always leaning toward short hair and men's clothing, and Bruce spends his life restoring their Victorian house with this obsessive attention to beauty, to curtains and wallpaper and flowers. Bechdel draws this contrast constantly, but nowhere more clearly than in the barrette scene. Bruce asks young Alison where her barrette is, tells her it keeps the hair out of her eyes, and she fires back at her father, "So would a crewcut" (Bechdel 96). And that is basically their entire relationship shown in those two panels. Bruce is trying to pin femininity onto his daughter, almost literally, and she is already pulling away from it without even thinking about it. Her cousins nickname her "Butch," and she loves it. Meanwhile, Bruce, who holds all this authority in ...

Dodo Conway is barely in The Bell Jar, but I think she might be one of the most important characters in it. Even her name feels deliberate. Plath seems to have quite literally named this woman after an extinct bird, and not just any bird. The dodo was flightless, studied and catalogued by scientists like a specimen before it went extinct, defined almost entirely by its biology and its inability to go, quite literally, anywhere. Plath naming this character Dodo doesn't feel like a coincidence. She lives next door to Esther's family, and every time she appears, she is pregnant, pushing a baby carriage and trailed by "two or three small children…wobbled along in the shadow of her skirts" (Plath 116). She is not presented as miserable or trapped. She is devoted to her life, almost radiant in it, and that is exactly what makes her so unsettling to read. Plath doesn't use Dodo to argue that domesticity is a trap for all women. She uses her to show that it doesn't ma...