“Like a Comic Book by Virginia Woolf”: Alison Bechdel’s Dialogue with To the Lighthouse in Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to discuss Alison Bechdel’s second graphic memoir, Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama (2012) in order to analyse the American cartoonist’s interest in myth, and her dialogic relationship with Virginia Woolf’s autobiographical writings, in particular To the Lighthouse (1927). Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? is first introduced via its brief comparison with Bechdel’s debut memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006), devoted to her father. Then, the paper traces the parallels and differences between Bechdel’s and Woolf’s works and quests to examine their respective relationships with their own mothers. In both daughters’ autobiographical writings, the mothers appear as mythical figures, who are subjected to demythicisation necessary for the daughters’ liberation as artists. In addition, the paper discusses both authors’ reflections on the process of artistic creation seen in Woolf’s depiction of Lily Briscoe’s painting and in Bechdel’s own self-portrait. Finally, the paper demonstrates Bechdel’s postmodernist intensification of Woolf’s modernist, already self-reflexive model of writing, made possible thanks to the medium of the graphic narrative itself.

Keywords

• mother–daughter relationship
• graphic narrative
• memoir
• modernism
• postmodernism
• feminism
• myth