Intertextuality and Homosexuality in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home

Abstract

This article is an interpretative analysis of the comic book Fun Home by Alison Bechdel with particular attention to the intertextual play with the book In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. The author of the comic uses a modernist writer's imagery to create – both in the graphics and the text – a platform for communication with her own father, Bruce. Thus, the mediated language of metonymy, the figures of Thanatos, Eros, floral motifs, become one of the ways of representing homosexual love. Proustian insinuations remain the domain of the father, while the daughter's side contains a comics work serving a double, transgenerational emancipation.