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 aristocrat overseeing his estate" (60). At first, it felt so encapsulating, since the dude kind of built his on stage to live and model his life around. But what Allison said next made me think about my framing of the situation in my mind. She says that "affectation can be so thoroughgoing, so authentic in its details, that it stops being pretense... and becomes, for all practical purposes, real" (60). This made me rethink because if Bruce was genuinely living the life of the person using the room, and he doesn’t have many qualms about it, why am I thinking that he is limiting himself when in reality, he is just creating the only version of himself he knows how to create. It is honestly really sad when a person’s true life is so risky for people to know about that he has to completely mask it with an equally quirky lifestyle.

The reason why Bruce doesn’t feel like a true villain to me is since Allison constantly reminds of the real life he was leading. Being in the closet for Bruce is not an easy choice, but the only realistic way of survival for him, especially in a tiny rural town as a high school teacher. Bechdel doesn’t use this to excuse his behavior, but it frames him as a person whose main flaw is one of the key forces that shaped him and his personality. In the later parts of his life, like when Allison started to talk to him about books, there would genuinely be some affection, and Allison knew it, but in the end, he would always overstep, and she didn’t enjoy it. He never was really authentic to himself, and I think it was because he didn’t just create an intricate lie for the rest of the world, he created for himself and he could never escape it.