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.