Did Bruce's Lie Go Too Far
When I first started reading Fun Home, I honestly had made up my opinion on Bruce, and it wasn’t very positive. The novel doesn’t help in this scenario, with ample evidence building that paints a not very appealing picture of him for us readers. Everything from being emotionally distanced, to having affairs with teenage boys, to forcing his children to help him remodel the home, something he seemed to be more interested in than the children itself. But in the chapters between these events and the end, I somehow started to feel sorry for him. I don’t think I am giving him a pass for what he did, but he definitely became a slave of societal pressures, making his life miserable. The scene in the library is one example, where Bechdel describes the intricacies of Bruce’s library. Everything from the flocked wallpaper to the velvet drapes, and the centerpiece being the leather topped mahogany desk. In Allison’s words, it was made to emulate the feeling of a “nineteenth-century aristocr...