Alison and Bruce Bechdel Were Each Other's Inverse

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 the household, is someone Alison can already see right through. She says it herself: "despite the tyrannical power with which he held sway, it was clear to me that my father was a big sissy" (Bechdel 97). They are both performing gender for each other, and neither of them is doing it because they want to.

What makes this relationship so hard to watch play out is that it is not really about control. It would be easier to read Bruce as a strict father enforcing gender norms just for the sake of it, but Bechdel doesn't make it that simple. Bruce is not enforcing norms he believes in. He is enforcing norms he himself is trapped by. For example, in the wedding scene Alison wants to wear sneakers, Bruce wishes they had a straw hat for her, and the narration says it directly, "while I was trying to compensate for something unmanly in him...he was attempting to express something feminine through me" (Bechdel 98). They were both trying to live through each other. And then there is the pearl necklace moment, where Bruce physically tries to put pearls on Alison and she refuses, and he snaps, "What're you afraid of? Being beautiful?" (Bechdel 99). That line says so much more about Bruce than it does about Alison because he is the one who wants to wear the pearls. He is the one who is afraid. Bechdel calls the whole thing "a war of cross-purposes, and so doomed to perpetual escalation" (Bechdel 98), and that is exactly what it is. Neither of them could ever win because they were not even fighting about the same thing. Bechdel writes that she "wanted the muscles and tweed like my father wanted the velvet and pearls, subjectively, for myself" (Bechdel 99), and that really is the whole tragedy of it. They both just wanted to exist as themselves, and they never once said that out loud to each other.