Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I The Genesis of Canadian and Comparative North American Studies
- Part II Comparative North American Studies: Literary Case Studies
- “Poetics of the Potent”: Yann Martel's Life of Pi, Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, and Modes of Transcreation
- “Wanting to Light out for Tender Tenantless Territories”: Reading Landscape in Robert Kroetsch's The Hornbooks of Rita K (2001) and Mark Anthony Jarman's 19 Knives (2000)
- “Landscape–of–the–Heart”: Transgenerational Memory and Relationality in Roy Kiyooka's Mothertalk: Life Stories of Mary Kiyoshi Kiyooka
- Performing Shame: Theatrical Motifs in the Works of Alice Munro and Alison Bechdel
- Timothy Findley's “Stones”: Names, Symbols, and Stories
- Part III Comparative North American Studies beyond Print
- Part IV Coda: Reingard Nischik and Transatlantic Canadian Criticism
- Index
Performing Shame: Theatrical Motifs in the Works of Alice Munro and Alison Bechdel
from Part II - Comparative North American Studies: Literary Case Studies
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 October 2019
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I The Genesis of Canadian and Comparative North American Studies
- Part II Comparative North American Studies: Literary Case Studies
- “Poetics of the Potent”: Yann Martel's Life of Pi, Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, and Modes of Transcreation
- “Wanting to Light out for Tender Tenantless Territories”: Reading Landscape in Robert Kroetsch's The Hornbooks of Rita K (2001) and Mark Anthony Jarman's 19 Knives (2000)
- “Landscape–of–the–Heart”: Transgenerational Memory and Relationality in Roy Kiyooka's Mothertalk: Life Stories of Mary Kiyoshi Kiyooka
- Performing Shame: Theatrical Motifs in the Works of Alice Munro and Alison Bechdel
- Timothy Findley's “Stones”: Names, Symbols, and Stories
- Part III Comparative North American Studies beyond Print
- Part IV Coda: Reingard Nischik and Transatlantic Canadian Criticism
- Index
Summary
It is a joy to be hidden and a disaster not to be found.
—D. W. Winnicott 1965MY AIM IN THIS ESSAY lies in forging a link between the works of Canadian Nobel Prize-winning short-story writer Alice Munro and American cartoonist Alison Bechdel, author of two best-selling graphic memoirs. Several features motivate my interest in comparing Munro's Who Do You Think You Are? (1978) to Bechdel's first graphic memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006). Both authors work within non-canonical genres—the short story and the graphic narrative, respectively— to probe existential questions related to lineage, inheritance, and identity. Recalling Munro's title, Fun Home poses a related question: “Why am I who I am?” (Mitchell 2009). Both Munro's and Bechdel's narratives align identity with the uncanny, intergenerational workings of shame. Perhaps Ann Cvetkovich best describes their shared preoccupation when she notes that Fun Home is “haunted by questions about the effects of growing up in the vicinity of a powerful combination of violence and secrecy, including forms of secrecy that in the interest of protecting children's innocence seem only to harm them” (2008, 113). Inflected by gothic notions of uncanny inheritance, Bechdel's and Munro's narratives locate the most corrosive, shaming mechanisms of social reproduction within the private recesses of the home.
Drawing on my previous scholarship on Munro's treatment of shame and the imposition of normative gender roles, in what follows I trace Bechdel's equally complex re-staging of related traumatic, shame-filled events associated with the formation of her sexual and gender identity as a lesbian. A central comic (happy) strand of Fun Home traces Alison's coming out. But this story remains subordinate to the narrative that commemorates the tragic life of her father, Bruce Bechdel, a closeted homosexual attracted to adolescent boys, who died in 1980 when he was forty-four. Born in 1936, in the isolated, rural town of Beech Creek, Pennsylvania, Bruce worked in his hometown as a part-time mortician and a high-school English teacher. As a young man, he aspired to a bohemian, artistic life abroad in Europe, but he was called home after his father had a heart attack in order to run the family business—the Bechdel Funeral Home, founded by Bruce's great-grandfather.
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- Gained GroundPerspectives on Canadian and Comparative North American Studies, pp. 108 - 132Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2018