Alison Bechdel's Trauma and Abusive Experience

TASK All of the following topics relate to the text Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, written and illustrated by Alison Bechdel. Please choose one and only one of the following topics to write your third essay on: A.) Alison Bechdel employs a series of literary allusions throughout Fun Home. Discuss the two literary references in the memoir that you think most successfully capture or define how she processes her past experience, explaining the allusions and arguing why they figure so prominently in her thought process. Use the class’s “Wiki Project” to assist you with information about those allusions. How do those two allusions connect or relate to one another? To what extent do these allusions alter her memory or her perception of her experience? Are these allusions, overall, helpful or harmful to Bechdel’s mental health, personally? To what extent do these allusions capture her experiences accurately or inaccurately as a memoirist, especially since the allusions are almost all works of fiction? B. ) Based on her stories and experiences depicted in Fun Home, has Alison Bechdel undergone “trauma,” “abuse,” or “disfunction” (or any combination of those three terms)? Argue for which term or terms apply or do not apply to her experience based on the definitions provided in your class’s “Wiki Project” and the evidence presented in her memoir. Based on your answers, how might these various conditions affect the accuracy of her memory? Does telling this story provide her healing and recovery, or does telling this story help “spin” her experience inaccurately and more deeply into one of more these categories in a manner that may hurt her more than help? C.) Alison Bechdel identifies herself as a “lesbian,” and Fun Home charts her discovery and early exploration of her sexual identity. Using the class’s “Wiki Project” as a resource, define “sexuality” and argue to what extent one’s sexual identification is a key part of one’s larger, more whole identity. How does Bechdel’s father’s sexuality--and his apparently absent identification with any orientation label like “gay” or “bisexual”--perhaps figure into his life story and experience? Would Bruce Bechdel have made different choices and perhaps lived a different life if he, like Alison, had accepted and labeled his sexuality openly as a younger man? How does Alison’s awareness of her father’s sexuality affect her perception of her own sexuality, and in turn, how do his actions and decisons affect how Alison sees herself as a “woman” and as a “lesbian”? Note that each topic includes a constellation of related questions. You may answer these separate questions in whatever order you find most logical or compelling, but you must nonetheless address all these questions within each topic at some point within your paper. Whichever option you choose, you must do the following: ● You are only allowed to use two sources for your third paper: Fun Home and your class “Wiki Project.” No other research is permitted. ● You must use both Fun Home and your class Wiki Project. (The more generously and effectively you cite these sources, the better your paper.) ● No Works Cited page is necessary. ● You are not only allowed but encouraged to use examples from your education, life experience, and things you have read and watched, assuming you know them by memory and do not need to look them up. I am inviting you into the discussion more openly than a typical academic or scholastic paper. Besides using first person, make your “voice” more prominent than usual, and attend to your use of pathos and ethos. (Better papers will use this personal element more insightful and thoughtfully.) This is not a diary entry or a “blog,” but something semiformal, like halfway between your blog assignment and a traditional essay like Essay 1 or 2