Alison as Bruce's Final Masterpiece

From the very first chapter of Bechdel’s Fun Home we understand Bruce’s role as an artist. Alison writes that “his greatest achievement, arguably, was his monomaniacal restoration of our old house” (Bechdel 4). While many artists allow their personal experiences to bleed out into their art as inspiration, others allow their work to express the things they cannot say themselves. As the book continues, we understand the secrets Bruce hid from the world and his daughter. I believe that his artistry amid his house, however, was not his only form of expression for his hidden identity, but also his treatment and modeling of Alison herself. 

The first example of Bruce reflecting the identity he masks onto Alison is in her childhood bedroom wallpaper. She responds to the pink, flowery wallpaper he selected by exclaiming: “But I hate pink! I hate flowers!” (Bechdel 7). Alison’s rejection of the wallpaper indicates that the choice was solely determined by Bruce’s desire to pour femininity into a conventionally appropriate setting: his daughter. This displacement of femininity is further explored in chapter four as Alison fights her father’s resistance towards the masculine apparel she finds herself drawn towards. She articulates these emotions vividly on page 98: “As I was trying to compensate for something unmanly in him…He was attempting to express something feminine through me” (Bechdel). 

Throughout this book, Alison is still discovering herself, her sexuality, and what her “masculine” draws mean in actuality. Her father, however, has already seemed to accept who he is, reject public acceptance, and rather chose to reflect his buried truths through his daughter. The significance here is that Alison was sort of toying around with masculinity and the hole that she found her father left unfilled. Ultimately, Alison came out as lesbian and publicly accepted the subtle adaptations she’d been making her entire life. Bruce, however, never came out and never planned to to our knowledge. Thus, that makes his reflection of femininity onto Alison all the more important because that was the closest he would ever reach to expressing his hidden identity. Though he could tell friends, neighbors, and society about his house renovations, he could never admit that his greatest work of art was not expressed in wallpaper, but his daughter.