Throughout Fun Home, Bruce wants to adorn his tomboy daughter with barrettes, pearls, and dresses, while she frets at her growing breasts, studies men’s fashions, and tries on her father’s suits. When Alison catches sight of her first “bulldyke,” her “surge of joy” must be stifled since her father expects her to disavow such a masculinized look.18 Yet in their generational struggle, the adversaries function as doubles. As a boy, he had dressed up as a girl; as a girl, she dressed up as a boy. She shares his admiration for male nudes; they are both connoisseurs of masculinity. His obsessive decorating surfaces in her obsessive-compulsive disorder, which results at one point in her ornamenting every statement in her childhood diary first with the words “I think” and then with a typographical caret that eventually expands in size to cover entire pages.19 After Alison comes out to her parents, her mother outs Bruce.
Despite his irascible temper, in a family of isolates who rarely display physical affection, Bruce and Alison share their most intimate contact through books that further clarify why Bechdel refuses to dismiss the unliberated past. Drawings of libraries, scenes of reading and instruction, typescripts of manuscripts, book covers, and bookstores abound, emphasizing the intertextuality of Fun Home. Alison imagines her mother as a Henry James character, her father as an F. Scott Fitzgerald character. “The line that Dad drew between reality and fiction was indeed a blurry one,” Bechdel writes,20 but the same could be said of his daughter.
Many of the coming-out panels in Fun Home portray Alison during her college years in bed with a lover and books—including Adrienne Rich’s Dream of a Common Language and Olga Broumas’s Beginning with O—“in what was for me a novel fusion of word and deed.” Laughing, naked and entwined with her lover, Alison relearns the significance of James and the Giant Peach, for “in the harsh light of my dawning feminism, everything looked different.”21 (The lovers’ glee nicely contrasts with the assumption that the dawning light of feminism needs to be “harsh.”) Fascinated by the lesbian past, Alison wonders if she would have had the courage of Eisenhower dykes and prides herself on knowing “the three-articles-of-women’s-clothing rule.” She relishes Proust’s use of the word “invert,” even though she realizes that “it’s imprecise and insufficient, defining the homosexual as a person whose gender expression is at odds with his or her sex”: “Not only were we inverts,” she thinks about herself and her father, “We were inversions of one another.”22
Bruce, who had given the child Alison a calendar so she could keep a diary, also gives the college student Alison his copies of Colette’s Earthly Paradise and Joyce’s Ulysses. Colette’s account of women sharing “their predilections” in Montmartre becomes a welcome addition to the stacks of texts entrancing Alison, which could have qualified as an independent reading course in “contemporary and historical perspectives on homosexuality.” After Alison comes out “officially” in a newspaper piece titled with a line by Colette—“of this pure but irregular passion”—Bechdel draws Alison holding Colette’s book with her left hand and masturbating with her right: “she was even good for a wank.”23 Hers is a textual and sexual awakening.
Although a seminar on Ulysses bores Alison, Bechdel draws on it throughout the close of Fun Home. And the confluence of her father’s two gifts of Joyce and Colette leads to a page toward the end of Fun Home in which Bechdel provides portraits of Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, who ran episodes of Ulysses in their Little Review, and of Sylvia Beach, who published “a manuscript no one else would touch.” Bechdel concedes that it may have been “just a coincidence that these women—along with Sylvia’s lover Adrienne Monnier, who published the French edition of Ulysses—were all lesbians,” but over a frame of Alison reading Colette, Bechdel writes, “I like to think they went to the mat for this book because they were lesbians, because they knew a thing or two about erotic truth.”24 What helps redeem Bruce Bechdel is the literary genealogy he bequeaths to his daughter, a lineage that crosses the divide of the before and after of the second wave of feminism and of pre- and post-Stonewall.25
Fun Home ends with a double image of Bruce’s death (the front of the oncoming truck) and his resurrection: Bruce standing in a swimming pool, looking up with arms outstretched as young Alison prepares to launch herself from a diving board into his arms and into the water where he stands. She is symbolically diving into the wreck of her family’s life, just as Adrienne Rich recorded herself imaginatively diving into the wreck of her marriage.
ARE YOU MY MOTHER?
When Fun Home opened as a Broadway musical in 2013, it won five Tony Awards. By that time, Bechdel had moved to rural Vermont with the painter Holly Rae Taylor and published Are You My Mother? The smart but distant mother in Fun Home evolved into a central character in its sequel, which met with fewer accolades—possibly because of its investment in psychoanalysis, in particular the theories of the pediatric psychiatrist D. W. Winnicott. Yet here Bechdel concentrates on the effect a mother born before the women’s movement has on a daughter coming into maturity after it. In doing so, she illuminates the psychology of many girls mothered by women who assumed that they and their daughters were born to be defined as the second sex.
Within numerous frames in Are You My Mother? Helen Bechdel is remembered trying to breast-feed her baby daughter, protecting little Alison from Bruce’s wrath, and later assisting the young woman financially. Yet in pictures of Alison’s face-to-face conversations with her therapists and of her phone chats with Helen, Bechdel portrays a self-absorbed mother. Had she been, in Winnicott’s terms, a good-enough mother? The aging Helen responds to Alison’s phone calls by going “on and on about” people and events Alison doesn’t know. “She doesn’t want to hear about my life,” Alison thinks. Maybe “it’s partly the lesbian thing, like she’s afraid if I get a word in edgewise, it’ll be ‘cunnilingus’ ”: “It’s like I’m the mother,” she concludes.26
Alison suffers when her mother belittles her autobiographical work (“Isn’t that a rather narrow scope?”), finds it embarrassing (“You’re not going to use your real name, are you?”), and ends up sounding as homophobic as Kate Millett’s mother: “I would love to see your name on a book but not on a book of lesbian cartoons.” When Alison reveals that she has a contract for a book of lesbian cartoons, Helen says, “I’m not comfortable with it. You know I’m not.”27 Alison hunches over the hung-up phone in tears.
Throughout many of these hurtful exchanges, Helen is reading a newspaper. We begin to judge her a narcissistic mother, one not-good-enough to give her daughter the affirmation she needs. But Bechdel knows that the thousands of pictures she has drawn of herself prove that she is just as or even more narcissistic than Helen. Since these illustrations also manifest her artistry, they suggest that Bechdel’s mother must have done something right.
The mystery of what it means to be born before the women’s movement is solved after a therapist convinces Alison to ask her mother, “What’s the main thing you learned from your mother?” Without skipping a beat, Helen says, “That boys are more important than girls.”28 Helen’s mother worshipped her sons, just as Helen adored hers. Here the period before feminism clearly implies the devaluing of daughters even by loving mothers. This mother–daughter exchange immediately leads to a flurry of thought boxes about penis envy, Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse (1927), and the brutality of Woolf’s own father, maybe because Woolf articulated the anger of daughters at the privileges accorded their brothers by mothers who accepted their husbands’ values.29
“Before” and “after” were terms that haunted Woolf too, especially in a diagram of To the Lighthouse that Bechdel reproduces.30 The lingering Victorian order with its traditional women in part I of To the Lighthouse is set before the chaotic “long night” of the Great War in part II; in part III, the modern world with its liberated women emerges in the aftermath of devastating destruction. Like Lily Briscoe, Woolf’s surrogate in the novel, Alison struggles to come to terms with the traditional wife and m
other who serves the needs of autocratic men. Just as Woolf eased her grief for her own mother by writing about the emergence of the New Woman, Bechdel comes to terms with her mother by analyzing what her own liberation from traditional womanhood means about her mother’s mothering.
Toward the close of Are You My Mother? Bechdel associates Helen’s reserve less with rejection and more with “aesthetic distance.” Changing with the times, has she begun to accept her daughter’s talents? Helen is depicted putting up with the publication of Fun Home and even defending her daughter’s commitment to serving the needs of the story, instead of the needs of the family. After Helen reads part of the sequel, her generous judgment—“it coheres,” “It’s a meta-book”—serves as a welcome confirmation that triggers an important memory of the “crippled child” game that Bechdel associates with “the moment my mother taught me to write.”31
As a preschooler pretending, oddly, to be a disabled child, Alison had playacted the sense of lack she acquired from Helen’s assumption that “boys are more important than girls”: to be born the daughter of such a mother is to be born disabled or, as Freud would have put it, castrated. But Helen’s willingness to share her “disabled child’s” playacting enables Bechdel to weigh that injury against a gift she also received. The something Helen did right: she encouraged her hobbled daughter’s imagination. Helen is pictured offering the make-believe “crippled” toddler make-believe braces and make-believe special shoes. Bechdel thinks, “She could see my invisible wounds because they were hers too.”32
On the last page, little Alison decides, “I think I can get up now,” and Bechdel concludes about Helen, “She has given me the way out.”33 Like Woolf’s Lily Briscoe, who resists the instructions of the mother-woman but nevertheless finds her a source of inspiration, Bechdel has made her injurious but beloved mother a muse. With a generosity born of good-enough nurturing, the liberated woman honors the traditional woman whose mold she has broken.
Freed from the family romance by her two autobiographies, Bechdel understandably wanted to leave the subject of childhood behind. Her next project, The Secret of Superhuman Strength, will apparently focus on fitness and mortality, but the political climate has slowed its progress. The inhabitants of Dykes to Watch Out For were resurrected because they served as much needed “therapy” during the Trump presidency, a period she associates with rising attacks on transgender and Black people, with “unleashed forces” that make her feel “completely impotent and powerless and terrified.”34
EVE ENSLER’S V-DAYS
While Bechdel explored the psychological injuries of girlhood, many of her peers addressed the physical traumas of womanhood. Seven years older than Bechdel, the performance artist Eve Ensler has dedicated her career to fighting “unleashed forces” that terrify women around the world. Back on Valentine’s Day, 1998, Ensler established annual V-Days to call for an end to violence against human beings born with vaginas—a word that, she believed, many still found difficult to utter.
Having grown up with a remote mother and a physically as well as sexually abusive father, Ensler became dependent on drugs and alcohol after graduating from Middlebury College. Her then husband got her into rehab, and after the ten-year-old marriage ended, she remained close to his son, whom she adopted. Dedicated to using the theater to make the world a safer place, she enlisted a range of organizations to produce her celebrated 1996 play The Vagina Monologues in order to raise funds for antiviolence activism.
Distilled from hundreds of interviews, the first-person narratives in The Vagina Monologues describe women’s ignorance and shame about their bodies as well as their conflicted reactions to menstruation, masturbation, childbirth, domestic abuse, rape, and female genital mutilation. Translated into forty-eight languages and staged in more than 140 countries, The Vagina Monologues was originally performed by Ensler herself but has since starred such celebrity actresses as Jane Fonda, Whoopi Goldberg, and Susan Sarandon, as well as countless undergraduates in college productions.
When Ensler was diagnosed with endometrial cancer in 2009, while working with war and torture victims in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, she realized that “the cancer had done exactly what rape had done to so many thousands of women in the Congo.” “Fistulas”—holes between the vagina, bladder, and rectum—“have been caused by rape, in particular gang rape, and rape with foreign objects like bottles or sticks. So many thousands of women in eastern Congo have suffered fistulas from rape that the injury is considered a crime of combat.”35 Wanting to relate her own suffering to the pain she witnessed “in the body of the world,” she produced a memoir with that title as well as a one-woman performance piece.36
Ensler’s subsequent global campaign, One Billion Rising, arose in 2012 out of the V-Day movement. The election of “our predator-in-chief” only strengthened her commitment to it.37 Since now one in three women worldwide experiences sexual assault in the course of a lifetime, Ensler organizes internationally to raise consciousness about threats produced by terrorism, fundamentalism, and warfare. In addition, she has helped create safe houses for young girls seeking refuge from female genital mutilation.38
In the States, Rebecca Solnit has explained, “The more than 11,766 corpses from domestic-violence homicides between 9/11 and 2012 exceed the number of deaths of victims on that day and all American soldiers killed in the ‘war on terror.’ ”39 The online harassment of women in social media (as in the “Gamergate” controversy arising from misogynist video game culture) and on dating websites (with men sending unsolicited “dick pics”) also proves the ongoing relevance of Ensler’s work. So do Patricia Lockwood’s 2013 poem “Rape Joke,” which went viral and earned a Pushcart Prize, and Emma Sulkowicz’s 2014 “Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight),” which made headlines when she carried a 50-pound dorm mattress around Columbia’s campus to publicize her allegation that she had been raped by a fellow student.40
In 2019, possibly influenced by the #MeToo movement, Ensler published The Apology, a text written as if it issued from her (dead) father, who here provides the words of regret she longed to hear from him. The book was dedicated to “every woman still waiting for an apology.” 41 And after its publication, Ensler—feeling that she had rid herself of her father’s ghost—shed the patronymic, renaming herself as simply V.
Ensler’s V-Day and One Billion Rising campaigns epitomize many earlier feminist efforts to extend global activism. Just as Kate Millett traveled to Iran weeks after the revolution there, to assist women protesting the mandatory veil, so in the mid-eighties Robin Morgan established the Sisterhood Is Global Institute, while the ailing Audre Lorde resettled in Germany, where she joined with Afro-German women to campaign against the racism and xenophobia they confronted.42 Between 1993 and 1996, Susan Sontag—in her sixties—made eleven visits to besieged Sarajevo, where she protested the Bosnian genocide and, amid the shelling, directed a production of Waiting for Godot.43
Also on the international scene, two feminist humanists—the theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and the philosopher Martha Nussbaum—were awarded the Kyoto Prize, the Japanese version of the Nobel, for their work in philosophy and ethics. Like Spivak’s, Nussbaum’s activism on behalf of the marginalized can be understood as part of the enterprise that postcolonial academics called “feminism without borders” or “transnational feminism.” 44 Spivak donated the prize money to schools in impoverished regions in her native West Bengal,45 and Nussbaum gave it to philosophy and law programs at her home institution, the University of Chicago. Both believe, as Nussbaum put it, that education is “a key for women in making progress on many other problems in their lives.” In one-quarter of the nations of the world, she has noted, male literacy rates are higher than the female rate by 15 percentage points or more.46 The night after Trump’s election, when she was in Japan to receive the Kyoto Prize, Nussbaum began writing her next book, The Monarchy of Fear: A Philosopher Looks at Our Political Crisis (2018).
Similarly t
urning to education, the feminist psychologist Carol Gilligan translated the “shock” of the 2016 election into a question needing analysis in the classroom and in a book titled Why Does Patriarchy Persist? She collaborated with Naomi Snider, who had enrolled in her 2014 law seminar “Resisting Injustice,” and together both teacher and student became “sounding boards for one another,” holding out hope for the demise of patriarchy and the victory of democracy, which “like love, is contingent on relationship: on everyone having a voice that is grounded in their experience.” 47
TRANSGENDER VISIBILITY: FROM SUSAN STRYKER TO MAGGIE NELSON
Ensler must have realized that The Vagina Monologues would make her vulnerable to charges of essentialism,48 but she was unprepared for another sort of attack from younger feminists. Because Ensler had composed a new monologue for trans actors who consulted her in 2004 about performing the play, she was quite surprised when, several years later, a number of groups on college campuses labeled The Vagina Monologues transphobic and canceled its staging. In response, she argued that new forms of activism should not erase or tarnish older forms of activism.49 Trans rights, important as they are, should not invalidate earlier efforts to highlight women’s rights, especially in the resurgent backlash: “Trump is teaching us how deeply racist and sexist and homophobic our country is,” Ensler pointed out.50 But that transgender people and trans studies have begun to find a home in the academy is apparent from the controversy. Growing efforts to advance trans visibility have engaged a number of twenty-first-century writers.
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