A Brief Foray into the Bruce and Helen's Relationship
We get our initial look into Bruce and Helen’s relationship on page 13 of Fun Home– or shall we say, Alison gives an initial look into their relationship, through her perspective. The lines “in theory, his arrangement with my mother was more cooperative… In practice, it was not” follow panels depicting Bruce showing Helen a chandelier in a magazine, to which she says “Bordello,” meaning “brothel[like]” (Bechdel, 13). Of course, he buys it, and the subsequent page shows Helen disdainfully saying “whorehouse,” as he hangs the chandelier up.
This introductory chapter paints Bruce as an architect, an artificer, and a Daedalus. For our first impressions of Helen to be that she is abjectly against Bruce’s architectural decisions –the very extensions of his identity– within their home, very distinctly shows that she and Bruce are utterly incompatible. Bruce is even worse: he purposely dismissed her input. Why doesn’t she make any act of resistance in the face of this disrespect? We don’t see her put up a fight. It’s easy to compare her to Helena Taylor, who carries resentment after resentment, fighting her husband until she can’t bear it anymore. At this point in writing, I am tempted to entirely shift this blog to a comparison between Helen Augusta (formerly Helen Bechdel) and Helena Taylor– as Mr. Mitchell pointed out, even their names are similar.
We see plenty of other examples of… suboptimal… relationship dynamics in Fun Home, namely corporal punishment used on the children (which we first see exhibited on page 18), Bruce’s LIBERAL use of verbal abuse and threatening on both Helen and his kids (throwing things and yelling insults), and of course, his famous infidelity. But supposedly, the family did not start out unhappily. While I was scouring through Fun Home for my short essay, especially the beginning of the book, I came across a noteworthy quote:
“Camus’ first novel [A Happy Death], it’s about a consumptive hero who does not die a particularly happy death. My father had highlighted one line. [‘He discovered the cruel paradox by which we always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love- first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.’] A fitting epitaph for my parents’ marriage.”
Why is this a “fitting epitaph”? We certainly know how Bruce and Helen deceived themselves to each others’ advantage. They meet in college, and Bruce meets Helen while admiring her acting as the female lead, Katherine, in The Taming of the Shrew (Bechdel, 69). While he’s in the army, he writes love letters to her, mimicking Fitzgerald. They travel to Europe and live abroad, fulfilling that desire of his to “...go on a roaming drunk [together]. I want to wake up somewhere not knowing how I got there like they did in Brussels" —or at least the part about living and partying in Europe. Alison describes her mother as a character by Henry James: a promising young woman who falls in love with a smooth talker, who, "in a twist on the usual heterosexual trope... [Oh, Father, don't you think he's the most beautiful man you've ever seen?] ...Catherine is the lover, and Morris the beloved" (Bechdel, 66).
Through that section of first falling in love, we can infer the first self-deception. Now, how have they deceived each other to their disadvantage? It really seems to us that considering Bruce’s villain-esque portrayal, Helen has simply finally realized how awful he is.
We are left to wonder whether Helen ever planned to share Bruce's secret with Alison, or whether she intends to continue to abet his deception even as she so obviously disapproves of his behavior. The whole book revolves around the unanswerable question of what might have been different if Alison had not come out when she did, but it also seems like Helen is relieved to get to unload about all the secrets she's been carrying all these years. Even as she seems to be warning Alison away from a lifestyle and sexual identity that, in her view, will lead to a life of pain and deception, she also seems glad to finally get to talk about all this stuff. She presumably hasn't confided in anyone about her husband's secret life, and what it means for her emotionally. And for Alison, this one piece of information starts to seem like a skeleton key of sorts, the "answer" to a wide range of questions she's had about her own childhood. We view Bruce's aesthetic control-freak tendencies differently once we view him as repressed and sublimating his queer desire into home decorating. It's maybe possible to view his abusive behavior more sympathetically, if we consider the pressure and shame he is contending with.
ReplyDeleteI always remind readers who are curious to learn more about the inner workings of this strange marriage to check out the follow-up to _Fun Home_, _Are You My Mother?_. This book goes MUCH deeper into Helen's experience, and of course that entails further insight into the early years of the marriage from her point of view.