Break this World's Shell

Over the course of Fun Home, Alison’s artistic and literary values, and her relationship to truth and objectivity, are influenced by her relationship with her father. When Alison is younger, she is aesthetically oppositional to him, and values truth in contrast to his interest in façades, but as she grows older, and she becomes closer with her father, she embraces subjectivity more, and their shared interest in literature overall to pull them together, although it also pushes them apart. When Alison was very young, she diametrically opposed to her father’s artistic values, perhaps in part because they increased her choreload. On page 15 in particular, she describes herself as “utilitarian to his aesthete” above a panel where, as a young child, she complains about the difficulty of dusting a particularly ornate chair to her largely apathetic father. It is likely due to this that she “developed a contempt for useless ornament,” finding that “If anything, they obscured function… They...

  One of my favorite scenes in The Bell Jar , by Sylvia Plath, is when Buddy and Esther meet again, once Esther is in remission from her crushing, reality-distorting depressive breakdown. Prior to Esther’s ultimate test of readiness to return to society, it probes the extent of her recovery and character development. Esther has sorted out her feelings for Buddy, feeling happy to only feel a sort of “amiable boredom” (p238) towards him. She does not need him in any way, but she doesn’t hate him either. She has moved on—this is an active improvement in their relationship before their breakdown, when he brought up many conflicting emotions in her, by virtue of her feeling betrayed by him but unable to properly break up with him. This demonstrates that her healing from her illness has actually extended to bettering her life in broader ways, with Dr Nolan helping her feel more comfortable with her own sexuality by getting her access to birth control.    The prior gender ro...