From Grades to Grays

  The graphic novel Fun Home is filled with constant literary references. One of these, and the one I will be focusing on, is the novel Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust. Alison Bechdel spends many pages unpacking metaphors for her relationship with her father that can be found in the novel, such as the concept of “inverts.” Alison and Bruce are not only “inverts” in Proust’s sense (that is to say, homosexuals who express their gender oppositely to their sex), but they are also inversions of each other, and through that they have a connection, though it causes many conflicts between them. She ends this comparison to the novel by talking about the new title for the novel, translated more literally from the French: In Search of Lost Time . I believe that the entirety of Fun Home is Alison’s own Search of Lost Time . The original French title is A la Recherche du Temps Perdu . Alison explains, however, that Perdu does not just mean “lost,” as it had been translated. ...

The Bell Jar opens with a description of what happened to the Rosenbergs—execution by electrocution. Esther describes how the idea of it horrified her, and how she imagined “being burned alive all along [her] nerves,” something that “must be the worst thing in the world” (Plath 1). Now, one of the things Esther is most terrified of in the novel is electroshock therapy. After her terrible experience with Doctor Gordon, she wants to never go through it again, making Doctor Nolan promise to not make her go through them again, at least not without a warning. I think there are parallels between the Rosenbergs and the electroshock therapy, and I think they’re pretty interesting to explore. I first began to think about the parallels between the shock therapy and the Rosenbergs when I read about the treatment she got from Doctor Gordon. Esther describes it, saying, “with each flash a great jolt drubbed me till I thought my bones would break and the sap fly out of me like a split plant” (P...