Performance in Bechdel’s Fun Home

In Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel Fun Home, Alison’s mother is consumed by theatrical performances and the lines that she must learn to prepare for these plays.  The way that she immerses herself in performance is evocative of her life as a whole; she lives with a husband who is very concerned with outward appearance and concerned very little with their family’s internal health and normalcy

Performance is a very prominent theme in Bechdel’s novel, and her mother’s obsession with performance is particularly interesting due to the fact that most things in her life appear to be different than what they truly are.  For example, her husband is a closet homosexual who maintains their relationship to keep up a flawless exterior while their family life is crumbling beneath them.  Alison’s mother is forced to be part of a lifeless marriage in order to keep the appearance of normalcy as a part of a prominent business in a small town, and also as a family in a town that few Bechdels have left from.  Alison states that her mother “in even the most routine activities…held to exacting standards.” (163) In a play, all characters are disguised; it is impossible, from the audience’s perspective, to know anything about the actors who are playing the character roles.  The only people who know anything about the actors themselves are other actors partaking in this same performance.  They rehearse and memorize lines with which to convince the audience to believe them as actors, to have the audience be unable to separate actor from character.  It is the same way in Alison’s household; her parents are still married despite knowing that they are not right for each other besides having the ability to maintain a false façade.  It is obvious that Alison’s mother knows that her husband is homosexual, but she performs the role of a wife because it holds her family together and helps them maintain a sense of normalcy, at least knowing that other people consider them to be normal even if they are not.  One factor of Alison’s mother’s obsession with performance is that it is how she lives her life daily, performing the role of wife and mother of an average family when their own family dynamics are far from average.  

    

Another factor of Alison’s mother’s obsession with performance is revealed with Alison states that her mother “learned everyone else’s lines along with her own.” (163) She also “worked on her own costumes.” (164) These activities make it clear that Alison’s mother is used to being self-sufficient and looking out for herself as a woman and as a person living a false life.  She is afraid to forget her lines on stage and reveal her identity as a mere actor instead of a believable character.  Alison informs us that she was “terrified of going blank onstage” (163) when audience members are casting judgment upon the heads of actors on the stage.  Her mother is so concerned with learning her lines correctly that she never said her lines incorrectly or forgot them, not even once.  This reveals two things, her mother’s acting experience (in life and onstage) and her self-sufficiency due to her knowledge that she has to protect herself from being found out as a woman who lived in a dead marriage with a homosexual man who had been having affairs with other men.  Alison’s mother is terrified of shattering the façade that she and her husband have built up, and although it may have been him who instigated the need for a façade, she knows that for her family’s sake, for her children’s sake and for reputation’s sake, she has to perform well, and she takes her role very seriously.     

Alison’s mother is very concerned with performance, like her husband, but her performance is one of maintenance rather than the establishment of a false identity.  She is swept, like a Henry James character, into a life of lies that she and her children have to live with.   Her onstage performance is an activity highly related to the way that she has to live her life daily to maintain her reputation and at least the visual integrity of their family structure.

Representation in Maus

In Spiegelman’s Maus, he explores the idea of representation and the meanings that visual representations convey in his graphic novel.  One particular, visually dense chapter is “Auschwitz (Time Flies)” (201) in which Spiegelman describes the guilt that has consumed his character (Art) throughout the process of writing his novel.  One interesting facet of these panels is that all the characters appear to be humans wearing animal masks instead of being portrayed as actual animals like in the rest of the novel.  In this way, he brings the reader into the present and makes it clear that he is using animal imagery in a metaphorical way, but that he doesn’t want to compromise or undermine the meaning of these animal images by dismissing them in the description his own life.  It also speaks to the way that these connotations last throughout generations and how he still considers himself, or wants to be viewed as a “mouse” as offspring of a “mouse” just like the German reporter is drawn as a “cat” like German Nazi predecessors.  In this section, Spiegelman dismisses the idea that writing this novel was in any way “cathartic” but rather the complete opposite experience.  It is a common idea that fiction is written as an emotional outlet or as a way to express a specific message, but Art claims that he had no message to tell and that catharsis was not his intention, but rather that as a writer, he has a responsibility to tell his father’s story.  The symbolism of the mask is also interesting because masks are commonly used as disguises to be seen as something different that what is beneath it.  The knowledge that the reader has about Vladek and Art is only what Art writes about in his novel, we have the dialogue that he chose and the preconceived notions about what it means to be a mouse and a Jew, and the relationship that there might be between the two.  Similarly, the relationship between father and son is seemingly strained from the preconceived “ideal” relationship, which we know due to the author’s recounting of heated dialogues between Art and Vladek.  The idea of metafiction is exemplified in these panels in which it is clear that one man’s viewpoint has created the personal lens with which the reader views this story, and not only that, but he admits, even embraces the personal, yet accurate, nature of his storytelling.  This realization forms a distance between the author and us, as it shows how we cannot view this story as a cathartic outlet because that is not what the author intends, and it is also not an immaculate, detailed and completely factual account of the entire event, it is personal.  It is simply a story about something that happened, and the emotional response that we as readers form after reading this story is revealing of our own perspectives regarding the Holocaust.                         

Under the Feet of Jesus

In Viramontes’ novel Under the Feet of Jesus, the image of a barn is one that is used repeatedly to introduce new concepts in Estrella’s life, symbolizing her discovery of a new sense of self and voice.  The barn may also be a symbol of the collective experiences of a generation of Hispanic migrant workers, portraying their hardships and collective journey as well as Estrella’s personal development. 

The barn is first introduced as a symbol of the uncertainty of Estrella’s family’s circumstances.  Viramontes says in Chapter one that “the silence and the barn and the clouds meant many things.  It was always a question of work, and work depended on the harvest, the car running, their health, the conditions of the road, how long the money held out, and the weather, which meant they could depend on nothing.”  To Estrella’s family, the barn reveals the difficult conditions of their working lifestyle and the fact that they do not have control over any of the things that will allow them to have enough money to survive.  The novel begins with an air of forced dependence on the undependable and a certain despairing quality that makes us believe that Estrella and her family have a significant amount of hardship to overcome before they are seen as powerful.  Estrella and her sisters look at the barn and call it a “cathedral,” evoking the idea of religion and a concept bigger than she or her family.  She looks at the barn with a sort of awe and respect as a new sort of frontier. Perfecto, her step-father and the man thirty-seven years her mother’s senior, however, knows that it is bound to collapse at some point and he bellows at the girls to get out of the barn.  Perfecto’s point of view throughout the book is that of a realist, he knows what it is like to work day in and day out, and he has knowledge of how to barter for services that he needs.  Perfecto is the image of the quintessential male migrant worker with a family who has endured personal hardship and overcome, but remains in a difficult spot trying to provide for his family.  “It seemed [Perfecto’s] very existence contradicted the laws of others, so that everything he did, like eat and sleep and work and love was prohibited…he committed himself to tearing the barn down.  The money was essential to get home before home became so distant, he wouldn’t be able to remember his way back.” (83)  The imagery of Perfecto getting the girls out of the barn portrays his role as a father figure, aware of the dangers of their position in life and knowledgeable about the hardships of being a migrant worker, having little voice and feeling weak instead of powerful.  The barn image is repeated again when Estrella is trying to learn how to spell and read and she meets Alejo.  She explains that “she wanted to tell him how good she felt, but didn’t know how to build the house of words she could invite him into…Build rooms as big as barns.”  (70)  This is a new step in Estrella’s life as she tries to learn how to communicate with Alejo and tell him about her life.  She associates words and possibility and ideas with the bigness of the barn that she experienced, but she doesn’t know how to put her emotions into words.  The fact that Estrella associates her self-expression with the barn, a symbol of work and hardship, reveals how fully encompassed she is in a life of labor as a teenage girl.  Again, the barn symbolizes an idea that is bigger than she knows what to do with; although she knows that there is potential for a greater self-expression through language, the only way that she knows how to express it at this point is by remembering the grandness of the barn, and making it her goal.

The last chapter portrays the barn as an object overcome by Estrella as she finds her voice by climbing to the top of the barn physically.  She has found her voice in other ways such as standing up for Alejo in the nurse’s office and getting her family’s money back, Petra gets an identification card proving her autonomy and Estrella finally understands that she has to rely on herself to overcome hardship.  “What made her believe that a circle drawn in the earth would keep the predators away?  That was all she had, papers and sticks and broken faith” (169)  Previously, Estrella had said that she never asked why they believed that a circle around the house would keep out scorpions, but the fact that she decides to finally ask reveals a newfound self-reliance that she didn’t have before.  Estrella climbs the barn and finds herself on the roof “as immobile as an angel standing on the verge of faith.  Like the chiming bells of the great cathedrals, she believed her heart powerful enough to summon home all those who strayed.”  (176) Unlike her past description of the barn, the symbol of her circumstances, being described as a cathedral, she describes her own heart as a cathedral.  This shows the shift in her viewpoint from viewing her circumstances as greater than herself and too big for her, to seeing herself as having the power to overcome her circumstances. 

Estrella gives herself and her own voice power by relating her heart to a cathedral and stating that she is standing on the verge of faith.  This faith, instead of faith in the undependable is instead a faith in her own abilities as Estrella finally overcomes the barn, the symbol of oppression and her difficult circumstances. 

The Absurdity of War in Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five

            Kurt Vonnegut uses facets of irony and figurative language to describe the impact that war has made on his protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, in the novel Slaughterhouse Five.  Vonnegut displays the absurdity that Billy has experienced in the war by using nonsense words to describe the aftermath of a massacre and by using images such as birds and broken kites to show the way that Pilgrim’s sense of time has been altered due to his experiences.  

“The cattle are lowing, the Baby awakes.  But the little Lord Jesus, no crying He makes.” This epigraph from Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five is from a popular Christmas carol that describes Christ as a baby, refraining from crying even though He “saw things worth crying about.” (331) The narrator likens Billy Pilgrim to Baby Jesus, saying that “Billy cried very little…and in that respect, at least, he resembled the Christ of the carol.”  (331)  The only time that Billy cries openly is when he sees the condition that his horses are in after some “horse pitiers” reproach him for letting the horses suffer.  Throughout the novel, Billy is a prisoner of war, trapped on a foreign planet, without proper clothing and watching those around him die horrid deaths, but he only cries when he sees his wounded horses.  Jesus cried when Lazarus died and He saw Lazarus’s sisters weeping for their brother, but Billy doesn’t cry because the sight of death and human suffering moves him, he cries because he is upset at the way the horses have been treated.  He doesn’t cry for himself or other people, he cries for animals, and this is not expected or logical, it is an absurdity. Throughout the novel, an important concept is that massacres are events that leave the people speechless, because there’s “nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.”  (211) Billy soundlessly reprimands his wife, claiming that Valencia was “simple-minded…to associate sex and glamour with the war.” (279) The narrator uses the indecipherable and nonsensical phrase “poo-tee-weet” to describe the only sound made after a massacre, and that is the chirping of birds.  Birds are often representative of concepts such as freedom and life, the ability to spread one’s wings and conquer gravity.  Birds are a symbol in this novel of how life goes on after great tragedies such as massacres, and that life is still possible after such an event, although there is really no sense to make of why something so terrible ever had to occur.  That is why they say such absurd things such as “poo-tee-weet.” Birds, freedom and flight however, take on a different light in this novel when Billy is described as another flying object, a kite. 

 An Englishman equates Billy to a “broken kite” during the war after the Englishman notices his dismal state and the way that his captors have taken him advantage of him.  The symbols of the kite and the bird have a few similarities and a few differences among them that are interesting comparisons between Billy and birds.  Kites have strings that anchor them to something or someone and although they do have the capacity to leave the ground and fly, it is a controlled flight unlike a free bird.  The kite string in Billy’s case may be his fate, the inescapable destiny the he is bound for, to die.  However, Billy is aware of his fate and he knows how and when he is going to die.  I think that being called a “broken kite” has two different meanings, one being the face-value fact that he is trapped as a prisoner of war and has had what little freedom he had, taken from him.  However, Billy is also aware of the Tralfamadorian concept of time in which fate is inevitable and free will is not real, so the idea that he cannot escape his fate makes him a broken kite because he has always been a broken kite once he realized that escape wasn’t real.  Flight is just an illusion, because free will never really existed to Billy Pilgrim, except when he didn’t know that it didn’t exist.  Even then, his free will was never actually there, he just thought it was, until the aliens enlightened him.  If a kite’s flight is just an illusion, then maybe the birds’ flight is also an illusion, depicting the concept that freedom from fate isn’t actually possible and that humans just have an absurd idea that it is.  We may all be broken kites but just not know it.  Vonnegut writes “even if wars didn’t keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death.”  (201) The idea that fate is inescapable is key to Vonnegut’s novel and having Billy described as a “broken kite” is one way that this concept is communicated. 

The senselessness of massacres and war are underlined by the idea that death is inescapable and inevitable.  The concept that birds are the animals that have something to say after a massacre suggests that it is only our illusionary concept of freedom and escape that makes us believe that a meaningful life is still possible after massacres, because birds sing and birds are the symbols of freedom.  However, freedom in this novel is not really freedom at all, but a stringing along by fate.  Vonnegut reveals this concept of an illusionary free will through the statement that Billy is a “broken kite” and comparing him to Christ’s resistance to crying as a baby, suggesting that massacres are illogical and all reactions to them are illogical, such as crying, death, the birds’ response of “poo-tee-weet” and optimism for the future.  Vonnegut shows optimism through a rewinding of one’s life and looking back into happier moments that have already been lived, not in what’s to come.  There is no concept of being optimistic for the future once it is revealed that free will is not actually free to Vonnegut and that death and wars will never stop occurring. 

Vonnegut’s comparison of Billy to Christ shows the illogicality of Billy’s reaction to war and the idea that war only generates absurdity.  He also uses bird and kite symbolism to describe the concept of an illusionary free will and the fact that war and massacres are illogical and nothing that comes from them are rational either.  

Finding her Voice: Janie’s Story in Their Eyes Were Watching God

Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God can be described as a Quest narrative in which the novel’s main protagonist, Janie, searches for fulfillment through a meaningful and loving relationship while gaining self-knowledge of what it means to be a woman in a predominantly patriarchal society.

The story that Janie tells Pheoby encompasses the novel itself and expresses how Janie has finally found her voice and is willing to tell her story to a future generation of women.  This process of finding her voice is a difficult journey in which she endures two loveless marriages and experiences social oppression that causes her to curb her speech and consequently hinders her personal development.  Janie’s first realization about marriage is that it does not “compel love like the sun the day.” (25) Janie wanted a love “sweet…lak when you sit under a pear tree” (29) but instead receives Logan, a man who wants her to “chop and tote wood” and calls her “spoilt rotten.” (31) Her compulsion to be married to a man that she never loved comes from her Nanny, a woman who knows the social obstacles that a woman has to overcome such as gaining financial stability, and wants Janie to be able to “sit” or have the luxury to refrain from working due to a well-to-do husband.  This compulsion that Janie’s nanny feels for Janie to be married reveals the expectation that women depend on men for financial security and that at this moment, Janie is willing to succumb to these social expectations. 

Janie’s second marriage begins with a personal choice that Janie makes to leave Logan and follow Jody, a “citified, stylish” man whose plan was to build “a town all outa colored folks” and become a leader in the new city.  Janie shows a bit of her natural spirit and voice by leaving Logan and telling him that he “ain’t done [her] no favor by marryin’ [her.]”  However, her voice is quickly suppressed by her new status as Jody’s wife, a mayor’s wife, when she learns that her high society status demands submission.  When they argue about Janie’s tendency to enjoy typically “lower class” entertainment such as the mule funeral, Janie “took the easy way away from a fuss.  She didn’t change her mind, but she agreed with her mouth.”  This suggests that Janie disagreed with her husband, but she chose not to speak up.  During her years with Jody, she “learned how to talk some and leave some…she got nothing from Jody except what money could buy.” (91) Janie finally speaks up when Jody begins to attack her appearance in the store and Janie “robbed him of the illusion of irresistible maleness” by telling him that he looked like “de change uh life” instead of keeping her mouth shut.  It is at this pivotal moment that Janie rejects social norms and speaks candidly to her husband instead of curbing her speech.  The irony in this exchange is that it did not seem shocking that Jody would call out his wife in public, but to have a wife call out her husband was scandalous and clearly against social norms in this scene.  This suggests that the oppression that Janie is under as a woman has implications in regards to how she speaks even to her own husband and that her place in society is expected to be a silent one.

Janie truly finds her voice when her husband Jody dies from kidney disease and instead of mourning for a “suitable” length of time for a high-society woman, Janie lets her hair down and proclaims that “mourning oughtn’t tuh last no longer n’grief” (113).  This suggests that she is no longer preoccupied with the opinions of the townspeople in regard to her behavior as a mayor’s wife, and she intends to live her life without the pressure of society’s judgment against her.  Janie has the freedom to marry who she likes due to her inheritance from Jody and she exerts her freedom by yoking herself to a poor man that she truly loves.  This suggests that although she is defying social norms by marrying a man like Tea Cake, she really gained the freedom to do so by accepting the inheritance of her late husband Jody, which suggests that she still retains some dependence on her previous marriages because of the financial fall-back plan that Jody provided her.  There is room for debate as far as what this says about her status as a woman in general in this society and whether her inheritance gives her power or leaves the power in the patriarchy.  However, Janie makes the decision to leave the money alone and depend on Tea Cake for their living.  The final scene in which Janie really finds her voice is when Tea Cake is sick and threatens her life when he is not in his right mind.  Janie could have been shot by Tea Cake since she knew that he had a “pistol under the pillow” (222) and gone down with him.  However, she chooses her own life and instead commits the most heinous act possible, which a wife could commit, in the eyes of society by shooting her husband when he threatens her immediate life.  This intentional choice of Janie’s to choose her own life over defining her life by her husband’s fate is the final choice in Janie’s process of finding her voice and defying social norms. 

Janie’s progress in finding her voice is one that leaves plenty to debate about the status of women in her era, but it leaves nothing up to debate as to whether or not Janie found her voice in particular.  Her decision to choose to live her life without a man is a climactic scene in which Janie displays the results of her life’s journey.  As a woman, she may still be under the thumb of a patriarchal society, but the novel ends on a hopeful note with Janie sharing her story with a younger generation and spreading the desire to find a woman’s free voice in a primarily patriarchal society.     

    

             

Religion in The Sun Also Rises

Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises follows the journey of Jake Barnes, a wounded American expatriate, and Brett Ashley, an unconventional woman who does not fear breaking social norms.  They journey to Spain and experience jealousy, displaced passions and a disillusionment that could only result from unrequited love.  Hemingway uses biblical allusions, explores Jake’s journey of “reconciliation” and portrays Catholic traditions to explore the way that Jake seeks religion to search for the meaning for life that he has lost.

Hemingway titles his novel The Sun Also Rises based on a biblical passage from Ecclesiastes which reads “one generation passeth away, and another generation cometh, but the earth abideth forever…The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to a place where he arose…all the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again” (Ecc.1:4-7).  The use of this passage in the title underlines the reason for the journey that Jake and Brett take to Spain; it is a journey that they hope will find them meaning in a world that seems absurd and uncontrollable.  Ecclesiastes is written by an author whose identity remains controversial, although the main narrator in the book is a Teacher, whose main concern is for the “rationality of existence” (Fox).  This same argument extends to say that the Teacher is unsure whether or not “it is possible for the wise to find the answers to their questions at all”  (Fox), reiterating the circular patterns of life and the fact that the same questions have been asked before and will be asked again.  Jake’s journey in this novel is not one of a certain destination, and not of hopelessness, but it is rather the beginning of his search for truth and reconciliation to God as he learns to live his life in a meaningful way by seeking morality and rejecting selfishness.  The imagery in this biblical passage reiterates the idea of a “lost generation” seeking wisdom in a world that is constantly changing, yet similarly problematic for generations past and future.  Brett and Jake are two of Hemingway’s characters who search for meaning because of what they’ve lost in a war that happened to occur in an absurd and uncontrollable world that isn’t so different from ours.                

Throughout Brett and Jake’s search for meaning on their voyage to Spain, Jake begins to pursue religion lightly, and although he doesn’t reject the church, he doesn’t necessarily want to be closely associated with it just yet.  Jake’s war wound affects him sexually, and Brett is too interested in sexuality to enter into any serious relationship with him other than a purely emotional one.  Jake pleads “Couldn’t we just live together, Brett?  Couldn’t we just live together?”  (48) She is honest about her desires and responds “I don’t think so, I’d just tromper (deceive/cheat) you with everybody.  You couldn’t stand it” (48).  Jake’s realization that he and Brett will never be together the way that he imagines is the source of his disappointment, and the reason that the relationship wouldn’t work is due to a wound that he never asked for.  Jake has no control over Brett’s emotions or over his abilities after the war, and it is perhaps this lack of control that drives Jake to seek religion as a possibility to gain more control over his life by becoming more religious instead of actually seeking God due to belief.  When Bill asks Jake if he is a Catholic, Jake answers “Technically” (108) indicating he is pessimistic, or at least skeptical of God due to his injury and hopeless relationship with Brett, and he is not willing to associate himself too rigidly with the Catholic denomination, although he does not reject it.  Jake’s viewpoint of religion, initially, is more that of traditions and facades, praying for things such as the “bullfight…fiesta…and fishing” (85).  He describes the cathedral, saying that it was “dim and dark and the pillars went high up and there were people praying and the smell of incense and…some wonderful, big windows” (85).  Although he doesn’t disassociate himself with Catholicism or reject the church, he also doesn’t mention God and he doesn’t seem to ask for any actual answers or pray for reasons as to his suffering, as one might expect, he only wishes that he “felt religious” (85) and leaves the cathedral thinking that Catholicism is a “grand religion”  (85).  He doesn’t seem to trust God initially, because of his poor circumstances, and even his attempts to seek religion seem to be drawn from the idea that maybe he can create meaning for himself by becoming more religious, not from a solid belief that God is good, trustworthy, or even there, at least not at the beginning of the novel. 

However, even through his skepticism, he continues to frequent churches in Spain and even attend mass, suggesting that he continues to search for meaning in religion through a journey of “reconciliation”.  Gertrude Stein labeled the generation of the 1920’s the “Lost Generation” indicating the struggles that this generation faced learning how to “act in a world divorced from the moral absolutes of the past”  (Helbig).  Jake declares, “Maybe as you went along, you did learn something.  I did not care what it was all about.  All I wanted to know was how to live in it.  Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from that what it was all about” (152).  This statement suggests that Jake’s viewpoint of his generation is very similar to that of Gertrude Stein.  He seeks religion as a lifestyle by which meaning might be found after he sustains a debilitating injury in the war and seeks to learns how to live in a fragmented society.  Brett and Jake have a conversation about religion at the end of the novel and Brett tells Jake that her decisions were “what we have instead of God”, and Jake responds, “Some people have God…quite a lot.” (215).  It is clearer in this conversation that Jake is beginning to identify himself with people who have God.  Helbig suggests that Jake’s story is one of “reconciliation…of his own conflicting feelings” about the church and his affiliation with it, and his own morality.  She suggests that Jake’s journey of reconciliation progresses in stages, from contrition to selflessness, and that he seeks the church throughout the novel, despite and because of his own imperfections.  Jake begins pursuing religion by praying, and Helbig suggests that this praying indicates a stage of “contrition” in which Jake realizes that he is sinful, and “the repetition of “I” in Jake’s statements underlines his inadequacies”  (Helbig).  She suggests that the final stage of his reconciliation journey is when he surrenders his relationship with Brett by realizing that he had been “having Brett for a friend…not thinking about her side of it…[and] getting something for nothing” (148).  Jake’s search for meaning in this novel is culminated by selflessly surrendering the one thing that he valued the most and that he thought was the relationship that would bring his life meaning.  Hemingway uses Brett and Jake and their subsequent relationship to represent two sides of a generation searching for meaning in traditional values and new ways of life that have yet to be reconciled in their society or their personal lives. 

            

Hemingway uses biblical allusions and explores Jake’s reconciling journey and his pursuit of religion through Catholic traditions to portray his search for truth and morality in a generation that is seeking a new way of life after a debilitating war.  Jake looks for meaning in religion and discovers that it is selflessness that will remove him from the rut of hopelessness that he had previously inhabited.  Hemingway uses Brett and Jake’s relationship to portray how a new generation was trying to reconcile old values with new ways of life and reflect on the same struggles that were inevitable for present and future generations.