Performing Shame: Theatrical Motifs in the Works of Alice Munro and Alison Bechdel

Summary

It is a joy to be hidden and a disaster not to be found.

—D. W. Winnicott 1965

MY 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.