Allusions In Fun Home

Alison’s Odyssey In Bechdel’s, Fun Home, the Odyssey functions as a transitional object for Alison, who is undergoing a challenging journey of self-realization. Throughout her memoir she explains how she goes through her own odyssey. She makes many self-discoveries but it is not until she is older that she recognizes that she is in fact a lesbian. Amid her journey she alludes to characters and settings from the epic poem. “One Siren led to another in an intertextual progression.”(207) just like the Sirens songs lured sailors to their death Alison uses this allusion to illustrate a new found consciousness. Upon reading multiple texts Alison finds temptation in books about homosexuality, a guilty pleasure that stops her from doing what she is supposed to do such as read Ulysses. This is where her Odyssey begins; she comes to succumbs to the fact that she has sexual desires for the same sex. The Underworld is Alison’s next stop it’s where she finally comes out and joins a gay
Alison is looking to be trapped on an island but instead of an island of destruction and disaster Alison is content with where she is in life. Joan, “being of colossal strength and ferocity, to whom the law of man and God meant nothing.”(214) Alison mentions how Odysseus wanted to escape the Cyclopes cave. He wanted to do this in order to make it home to his wife. Alison does not want to escape this cyclops because if she did she would be escaping her true happiness. Bechdel used many allusions of the Odyssey as a security blanket. This security blanket helped procreate her memoir. Alison’s had finally come to her clear path and that was for her to have a sexual inversion in a heteronormative