Two Ways of Looking at the Father: Sharon Olds’ The Father and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home

Abstract

This article explores a series of visual-textual devices used in the representation of father figures in the poetry collection The Father (Sharon Olds, 1992) and the graphic memoir Fun Home (Alison Bechdel, 2006). I argue that literature can contribute to undo the conflation of paternity and patriarchy by portraying fathers as complex, fallible, and above all real individuals, as opposed to the disembodied abstract principle that has been prevalent in Western cultures. I will contend that the subsuming qualities of the dominant fiction can be subverted via a series of formal mechanisms related to the visual field that seek to foster reader engagement. In doing so, both The Father and Fun Home provide alternatives to traditional representations of the father figure.

Keywords

• fatherhood
• father-daughter relations
• gaze
• haptic visuality
• ocularization
• comics