Obsessed

            In Fun Home Alison Bechdel’s description of the house and garden represents the father’s obsession with outward appearances. 

            The father can control exactly the way the house looks.  It is a way of keeping up with appearances.  The father wants the house to appear to be something it is not, which is an ultimate representation of him.  “He was an alchemist of appearance, a savant of surface, a Daedalus of décor (6).  On the outside the father appeared to be a normal functioning member of society.  He was a husband, father, and an English teacher on the outside.  On the contrast the inside was hiding this desire for men and teenage boys.  The father did not want his inside self to be seen so he tried so hard to keep up appearances.

            The obsession with appearances did not just end with the house, but the garden also.  The garden is an extension of the house.  The garden is something else that his father can control.  Even though he has the kids to help him with the garden and the housework, he uses the time not to further build his relationship, but to use the kids as slaves.  “I grew to resent the way my father treated his furniture like children, and his children like furniture” (14).  Even at a young age Alison recognizes the disconnection that her father has.  When Alison asked her father, “What’s the point of making something that’s so hard to dust?” (15).  His response to her was “It’s Beautiful” (15).  She ends up developing, ” a contempt for useless ornament” (16), which develops into a greater contempt for her father.  

         

Dogwood Tree

            The father would even go “dogwood-napping” in the woods to replant in his own garden.  At one point the son even asks the father, “Isn’t this illegal?”(93). The father does not directly answer that question, but he continues on with the napping.  He is obsessed with getting this particular tree into his garden.  Bechdel describes the lilac as, “A tragic botanical specimen, invariably beginning to fade even before reaching its peak” (92).  This sentence is making a direct reference to the father.  The father is the tragic specimen that fades before reaching his peak, because of this obsession that the father has with outward appearances instead of focusing on the inward, the inward being his sexual desires.  The reference of “fading before reaching its peak” is a reference to the father’s untimely death.  The father “fades away” by putting so much time and effort in his house and garden instead of into his family, and then he dies.  He never really gets to make everything right with his family, which is also a tragedy. 

            Even with the father’s obsession with outward appearances that leads to a disconnect with his family Bechdel says they “were a family, and we really did live in those period rooms” (17).  With all the drama going on they really were a family.  They may have had more difficulties but a family none the less on the inside of those rooms.             

Steal.Kill.Destroy.

Joyce Carol Oates Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?  and  No Face by Junot Diaz are both cautionary stories about the dangers of evil in society, that tries to keep one from finding their identiy.

In Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? the evil is represented by Arnold Friend.  The reader’s first impression of Arnold from the start in this story is a negative one.

He stared at her and then his lips widened into a grin.  Connie slit her eyes at him and turned away, but she couldn’t help glancing back and there he was, still watching her.  He wagged a finger and laughed and said, “Gonna get you, baby,“ and Connie turns away again without Eddie noticing anything. (9)

On one hand there is foreshadowing there for further on in the story, but on the other hand, that is also creepy.   Out of all the pick up lines or things he could have said to Connie, he wanted his first statement to her to be “Gonna get you baby.”  This shows his true intent, that he wants to get her, not that he wants to know her.  Evil always tries to get you.

            Arnold’s description later on in the story also identifies him as evil.  He wears reflective sunglasses, which represents a mask. 

“His whole face was a mask, she thought wildly, tanned down to his throat but then running out as if he had plastered makeup on his face but had forgotten about his throat.” (106)

Arnold was wearing a mask because he did not want Connie to know who he really was, which was a man, not a teenage boy as he was trying to represent himself as.  Evil always tries to represent itself as something that it is not.  It always tries to trick you.  In this story the evil of Arnold Friend represents the predators of society who prey on the unsuspecting members of society.  Connie was just a fifteen year old girl trying to discover her identity in this world, and evil comes out to destroy that. 

            In No Face the protagonist Ysrael fights back against the evil in his society that tries to make him feel less than.  In the story when four boys tackle him, and the one fat boy sits on him, Arnold says “Strength and the fat boy flies off him”(156).  “He has the power of Invisibility and no one can touch him.” (155) 

“He runs past the water hose and the pasture, and then he says Flight and jumps up and his shadow knifes over the tops of the trees…” (153)

Ysrael uses his Invisibility, Strength, and Flight as an identity to help him fight the evil that continues to try and keep him down.  Even though Ysrael is actively using his identity, evil keeps actively coming at him.  At the end of the story when his brother asked him where he has been all day, Ysrael’s response is “I’ve been fighting evil.” (160) 

            These stories indicate that there is evil out there and we have to be prepared.  The question is will we be like Connie and let evil draw us out of our identity, or will we be like Ysrael and use our identity to fight against evil.