Identity and the Cityscape in Word and Image in
Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan,
Bechdel’s Fun Home and Selznick’s Wonderstruck.
Femke Nagelhout S2542285
Supervisor: Dr. Irene Visser 25-06-2018
Word count: 15.379 words
Master’s Dissertation Literary Studies. Programme Writing, Editing, and Mediating. Department of English Language and Culture
“Graphic novels are an art of pure composition, carefully
constructed like music, but constructed into a whole architecture,
a page-by-page pattern, brought to life and ‘performed’ by the
reader- a colourful piece of sheet music waiting to be read.”
Contents
Abstract
4
Introduction
5
Chapter One
14
From Then to Now: the Development of the Graphic Novel
Chapter Two
25
Why Am I Who I Am? Struggles with Identity
Chapter Three
37
Finally Free: Liberation in the City
Conclusion
54
Abstract
In this dissertation, I will analyse the three graphic novels Jimmy Corrigan (2000) by Chris Ware, Fun Home (2006) by Alison Bechdel and Wonderstruck (2011) by Brian Selznick. I will show how the main characters in these three novels, respectively Jimmy, Alison and Ben and Rose, struggle with certain issues as they are coming of age in the novels. These issues have common themes connected with identity, such as mental issues and physical issues. More specifically, Jimmy deals with insecurities about his masculinity and his place his society, Alison struggles with her sexuality, and Ben and Rose have to cope with deafness. I will show how these struggles are affected and sometimes caused by their parents, as parental influence is an integral part of coming of age. I will further examine the importance of the cityscape as a means of liberation as the characters find relief from their struggles by going to a big city. I will be using methods such as close reading, and paying not only close attention to the narrative and verbal aspects, but I will also examine the visual aspects that these graphic novels offer. Graphic novels combine word and image to create meaning, and in my conclusion I show how the use of word and image in Jimmy Corrigan, Fun Home and Wonderstruck illuminate identity struggles, parental relationships and the cityscape.
Introduction
Literature exists in many written forms. Novels, short stories, poetry, even song. The graphic novel is a genre that until a few decades ago was considered to be hardly worth the term of literature but is now rapidly becoming a critically acclaimed genre. The graphic novel combines the written word with illustrations to tell a story. Many noteworthy authors such as Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore contributed to the genre with ground-breaking novels, which have had impact because of the relative newness of the graphic novel and the way the medium connects with its readers. “It’s not ivory tower stuff, it's rooted in the real world. It has practical applications” according to Dr Mel Gibson at Northumbria University (qtd. in Armstrong 1). Graphic novels, by employing drawn pictures as well as words, take a middle ground between books and films, and express meaning in a wholly different way, resonating with those who look beyond the stigma of ‘throwaway literature’ that has surrounded the genre for years: “The comic-book form until recently has been unable to shed a certain area of pulpiness, cheesiness and semi-literacy” (McGrath 1).
One of the first big graphic novels is Will Eisner’s Contract with God, published in 1978. The term and the genre gained critical acclaim a decade later with the publication of Spiegelman’s Maus and Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns in 1986 and Moore’s
Watchmen in 1987. Since then, the genre has grown to include many renowned artists
and authors, such as Neil Gaiman, Chris Ware, Alison Bechdel and Shaun Tan. The genre distinguishes itself from novels written only in prose by employing images. This causes the genre to have a wide audience. The pictures cause graphic novels to be more attractive and accessible to youth. McGrath argues that “the form is better suited to certain themes and kinds of expression than others” (10). Graphic novels can well be
used for educational purposes or to treat topics that are hard to put into words, such as loss, war or trauma, but also love and sexuality. In addition to that, graphic novels are attractive to a wide audience because of the high level of immersiveness. According to Scott McCloud in Understanding Comics, “storytellers in all media know that a sure indicator of audience involvement is the degree to which the audience identifies with a story’s characters. And since viewer-identification is a specialty of cartooning, cartoons have historically held an advantage in breaking into world popular culture” (43).
This dissertation will revolve around three graphic novels: Jimmy Corrigan, the
Smartest Kid on Earth (2000) by Chris Ware, Fun Home (2006) by Alison Bechdel and Wonderstruck (2011) by Brian Selznick. I will analyse these graphic novels to see how
they express meaning through the visual and verbal aspects that the medium entails. These three graphic novels have not been analysed in this combination before, but I believe they fit well together. The novels share many themes. They all have a general coming-of-age theme, and tackle the issues that come with growing up. The novels all deal with both psychological and physical struggles: Fun Home focuses largely on the psychological issues as Alison struggles with her sexuality, while the main theme of
Wonderstruck is how to live with a disability, in this case deafness. Jimmy Corrigan
combines the two as Jimmy struggles with feelings of lack of masculinity in a society that places certain expectations on him. How society and important people in the character’s lives, such as parents, influence these struggles is another major theme of my analysis. Another theme that the three books have in common is the significance of the city. All protagonists experience a relief from their struggles because they go to the city. I will therefore argue that the city is a means of liberation for the characters.
Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan is one of the most renowned graphic novels of the 21st century. Published in 2000, it was one of the first of the new generation of graphic
novels. The New Yorker hailed Ware’s work as “the first formal masterpiece of a medium that he has proved to be unexpectedly complex and fertile” (Sjcheldal 1). The book has received multiple awards, amongst which are the American Book Award in 2001 and, also in 2001, the Guardian First Book award, which made it the first time a graphic novel had ever won a major UK book award. In 2005, Time chose the novel as one of the ten best English graphic novels ever written. The book tells the story of Jimmy Corrigan, a thirty-six year-old office worker with few social skills. He goes through life round-backed and quiet, avoiding confrontation or even interaction with other people. The only meaningful social interaction he has is with his mother. Then his father, of whom Jimmy has no memories whatsoever, invites him to stay over during the Thanksgiving weekend. Jimmy is initially apprehensive, but travels to meet him, only to experience an awkward few days with his father before his father suddenly dies of a heart attack. Chris Ware based this loosely on his own experience with his father, whom he had only a few phone conversations and one real meeting with before his father had a heart attack and died. In the postscript of Jimmy Corrigan, Ware says that “the four or five hours it took to read is almost exactly the total time I ever spent with my father, either in person or on the telephone”. However, he also stressed that it is not an autobiographical work. The story of present-day Jimmy is interspersed with the story of his grandfather who has a difficult and abusive relationship with his father as they try to survive in a rapidly growing Chicago. The novel depicts both outlandish fantasies and mundane activities in colourful images with a simple drawing style. The layout of the page can look confusing at first, because of the irregular panels which are spaced unevenly on the page. Some pages show many small, repetitive panels, depicting one action or emotion in minute detail while other pages have large panels illustrating grand scenes. This is all done deliberately, as, according to Thomas Bredehoft “the novel frequently interrogates the
relationship between the architecture of the narrative and the narrative itself” (870). The novel employs the layout of the page to signify emotion and importance rather than always showing the emotion outright on the character’s faces. Often, the characters are strangely blank-faced, especially the Corrigan men, or some characters never show their face at all. This leaves it up to the reader to interpret not only the narrative but also the layout of the panels to understand the meaning of the illustrations.
Fun Home by Alison Bechdel has reached a wide audience and much critical
acclaim, to the point where the award-winning book was made into an award-winning Broadway musical. Bechdel started the book with no such hopes, working on it in relative obscurity. At the time of writing, she was also still running the comic strip Dykes
to Watch Out For. The strip ran for 25 years, earning Bechdel much renown in the field of
comics already. The strip also introduced the Bechdel test, in informal method for determining gender bias in popular entertainment, mostly films, which has since become widely used. Bechdel portrayed her characters openly and honestly, true to life and oftentimes with topical messages. The same approach can be seen in Fun Home. The book is a memoir, chronicling Bechdel’s childhood in Pennsylvania and her early adulthood in New York. It focuses on the complex relationship with her father, a closeted homosexual, who killed himself a few months after Bechdel came out as lesbian to her parents. The novel tells how Alison and her brothers grew up in a mansion that was being meticulously restored and redecorated by their controlling father, and how they had to help in the family’s funeral home; how young Alison suffered from OCD and how she felt insecure about her body and the changes it went through as she reached puberty. The book jumps back and forth between several points in Alison’s youth, to help the reader make connections between events, people and places. The images are simple black and white drawings with green accents throughout the book. The drawing
style is typical of Bechdel and can be found in all her works. She draws in a comic-like style, but more detailed than Ware in Jimmy Corrigan. Bechdel’s drawing style makes the characters seem rather emotionless at first glance, with the eyes almost always drawn half-lidded, but minute details indicate the emotions of the characters. According to Ed Tan, there are six basic emotions “that are found in all cultures, the expression of which is universally recognised. They include happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise and disgust” (Tan 32). He continues to explain that other, more complex emotions such as longing or contempt are blends or extensions of these emotions, but that in the graphic novel, the six basic emotions are used to visually depict feelings. Fun Home is an example of this, as these six basic emotions are employed to convey meaning, but much interpretation is dependent on the combination of the narrative and the images, as the images are not always merely literal representations of the narrative, but have many hidden metaphors. The illustrations also help with interpreting how the other characters in the book feel without the narrator having to address it, something that is not possible when only told in text.
The third graphic novel I will discuss is Wonderstruck by Brian Selznick. Selznick is mostly known for his graphic novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret, which was published in 2007 and was adapted into the successful movie Hugo. Wonderstruck, published four years later in 2011, also received critical acclaim, and was in 2017 likewise adapted into a movie, although the movie gathered less renown than Hugo. The book was met with generally glowing reviews. Chris Riddell, writing a review for The Guardian, described it as “earnest, life affirming, educational, and impossible to dislike” (1). Adam Gopnik in
The New York Times labelled it as “engrossing, intelligent, beautifully engineered and
expertly told both in word and image” (Gopnik 1), commenting on the lack of depth from the hero, but stating that any doubts “are overcome, overwhelmed even, by the purity of
Selznick’s imagination” (Gopnik 1). Wonderstruck tells two stories at the same time. The story of Ben is told in prose, while Rose’s story is told entirely in black-and-white pencil illustrations. While they at first seem to be two separate stories, towards the end they start to merge until they come together in the resolution. Ben is a half-deaf boy who loses his mother car accident. He loses his full hearing when lightning strikes him through a telephone line soon after his mother’s death. Clues from an old book incite him to run away to New York to find his unknown father. Rose, at first an unnamed girl, also runs to New York fifty years prior, to try and connect to her mother, a Broadway star, after being treated harshly by her controlling father. As it turns out in the culmination of the book, Rose is Ben’s grandmother, and they find each other through a book that Rose left to Ben’s father. Dealing with similar themes as Jimmy Corrigan and
Fun Home such as identity and parental issues, Wonderstruck is aimed at a slightly
younger audience and almost fairy-tale like, with heart-warming events and a happy ending. The unique style of telling the stories makes it a notable novel that rises above the crowd of children’s literature.
The illustrations in Wonderstruck are drastically different from the style of Fun
Home and Jimmy Corrigan. They are realistic, highly detailed pencil drawings. Selznick
employs both sweeping overviews as well as detailed close-ups, so the emotions of the characters are always displayed in great detail. This is necessary because of the lack of words. As David Berona explains in his essay “Wordless Comics”: “In a wordless comic, the use of gestures and facial expressions is an essential mechanism to indicate mood and personal emotions, and so additional importance needs to be placed on body posture and gesture” (19). Wonderstruck does this by highlighting the facial features of the main characters to the point where a face is almost comically enlarged to ensure that the right emotion come across amidst all the detail of the rest of the image. The meaning
behind the images is therefore easily interpreted, as is needed for the narrative: “Without dialogue, the images bear a heavier load for the understanding of context and narrative structure” (Berona 18). The images in Wonderstruck have no trouble carrying that load.
A central theme in all three books is how the protagonists’ relationship with their parents forms their identity. They each have pivotal struggles or conflicts that are caused or influenced by their parents. In Fun Home, Alison’s sexuality is the focal point of her identity. While her sexuality in itself is not formed by her parents, her strained relationship with her father and mother do influence the way she discovers and handles her sexuality as a part of her identity. Jimmy Corrigan tells the story of several generations of Corrigan men, and the main struggle for them is how to deal with society’s expectations of masculinity. This is displayed mainly in Jimmy Corrigan and his grandfather, Jimmy Reed, as their peculiar relationship with their parents is told throughout the story. The protagonists in Wonderstruck, Ben and Rose, have to deal with their deafness, both in the sense that they have to find their place in society, but also in the sense that they have to accept their disability as part of their identity. They can only do that when they have resolved their parental issues. Each character finds some sort of resolution to their problems in the city, which is why the role of the city is another important aspect in my analysis.
The role of place in literature has received much attention.Leonard Lutwack said in his book The Role of Place in Literature that the “the twentieth century evidences a new interest in place as an important issue in general” (2). This has to do with the fact that “the representation of place in literature has an important influence on how people regard individual places and the whole world as a place” (Lutwack 2). This means that more attention is being given to studying the significance that a place can hold for
someone. Place in a novel can have two functions, according to Lutwack: “Place has a literal and a symbolical value, a function serving both geographical and metaphorical ends” (31). I will discuss both these functions in my analysis. The fact that I will be analysing graphic novels influences some aspects of my analysis, as Lutwack explains: “There are limits, of course, to what narrative can do with place or omit doing: a novel too exclusively concerned with the description of actual geographic places may become a travelogue or a history; a novel with too little attention to place may verge toward abstraction” (18). Graphic novels do not have that limitation. In graphic novels, characters and events are nearly always drawn in front of some sort of background. According to Scott McCloud in Understanding Comics, “Backgrounds can be […] a valuable tool for indicating invisible ideas, particularly the world of emotions. Even when there is little or no distortion of the characters in a given scene, a distorted or expressionistic background will usually affect our ‘reading’ of characters’ inner states” (132). This means that backgrounds have an important role in graphic novels, functioning not only as a backdrop, but as a means for the reader to interpret more about the characters or the narrative. The city, being a location, functions as a background. I will analyse the way the city is visually depicted in these novels in order to extract the meaning of the cityscape for the characters and how it plays a part in the characters’ liberation from their respective struggles.
In this dissertation, I will focus on several questions. The main focus is to examine how these three novels express meaning through word and image by showing the struggles of each main character. I will do this by analysing how the characters each live with their issues, which have to do with sexuality, masculinity and disability in addition to handling societal and parental influence. I will also argue how the characters seek
answers to their problems in the city and how the city helps them find liberation from their pasts and their parents.
In order to fully understand my analysis of the three novels, Chapter One will lay the foundations for analysis by detailing the development of the genre, as well as explain some theoretical aspects of the medium such as format and style. Chapter Two will dive into the main problems that the protagonists struggle with, which forms the central point of their identity and the stories’ resolutions. Special attention will be paid to the relationship of the protagonists with their parents, because those relationships influence and in some cases enhance the psychological issues that the characters struggle with. Chapter Three will focus on how the characters are influenced by their surroundings, in particular the city. The visual representation of the city will be a crucial point of analysis in each novel. I will examine what role parental and environmental influence plays in the formation of the characters and how this is expressed in each novel.
Chapter One
From Then to Now: the Development of the
Graphic Novel
Comic books have a long and rich history, but the genre of the graphic novel is of a younger age. The 1950s and 1960s are a crucial backdrop to the early stages of the development of the genre. In this period, comic books received quite some backlash; in fact, there was an anti-comics crusade, led by teachers, parents, educationalists, psychologists and journalists. They claimed that comics promoted crime in youth and that the simplicity and low literary value of comics was creating a generation of illiterates (Beatens and Frey 30). This led to censorship of horror and crime comics, and between 1948 and 1955 comics were systematically marginalized to such an extent that the industry almost collapsed. The genre in an attempt at regulation and self-protection, changed its focus from “extreme horror and crime to safer genres such as romance, war and superhero material” (Beatens and Frey 31). The result of this change of focus was that comic books received a new burst of creative energy. Publishers, hindered by the censorship on horror and crime, were all too ready to tackle new themes, most notably adult satire on society. Not only comics concerning those themes were published, but also magazines about comics, such as Bill Gaines’ Mad, which inspired many imitation titles and so advanced the popularity of this new style of comics.
Predecessors of the graphic novel as we know now are found in several publications of the 1950s. Historical war comics such as Two Fisted Tales and Front Line
Korean War. The latter was less of a comic and more of a contemporary albeit fictional reportage about war, announcing a tradition picked up years later in graphic novels (Beatens and Frey 35). In line with the new regulations, they featured no graphic gore. At the end of 1959, Harvey Kurtzman prompted another tradition of graphic novel when his Jungle Book got taken up by Ballantine Books, a well-known mainstream publisher and was published as a one-shot book-length comic. Todays’ graphic novels are nearly all published as a single publication in book form, as the three novels of this dissertation are, but Kurtzman was one of the first to employ this format. The 1950s were therefore simultaneously a time of repression of adult comics as well as a time when the fore-runners of graphic novels were produced.
In the 1960s the reputation of comic books was on the rise again. Historian Jean-Paul Gabilliet highlights that “the early to mid-1960s witnessed a general renaissance of superhero comic strips, with all the major publishing houses either reinventing characters or creating new ones” (qtd. in Beatens and Frey 40). This was helped along by the popularity of the Pop Art movement, the style of which influenced the style of the new superhero comics. Remnants of the visual style of the Pop Art movement can still be seen in Jimmy Corrigan, with its colourful line-art drawings. Pop Art also influenced the
Batman television series, which aired in 1966. It connected comics to the wider Pop
phenomenon and “pushed them away from categorization as (good or bad) juvenile literature” (Beatens and Frey 42). While the series pushed comic books and especially the superhero genre to new heights of popularity, it also inspired significant counter movements. Adult comic readers were unhappy with Batman’s campy, comedic tone. The comics industry turned away from the satirical style of the television series and moved to develop its antithesis: dark, serious strips with a gritty disposition usually associated with early graphic novels. This reaction against the mid-1960s comedy style
was still to be seen in the famous graphic novels of the late 1980s, such as Moore’s
Watchmen, V for Vendetta and The Killing Joke, which were notable for their tendency to
display adult cinematic-style violence.
The underground comix scene also fed into the development of the graphic novel. Comix differ from comics in more ways than just the spelling. Comix are small press or self-published comic books. Apart from the manner of production, the main difference between comics and comix is the content. Comix are often socially relevant and satirical in nature, depicting content which is often censored or forbidden in mainstream comics such as explicit sex, drug use and violence. Comix saw their heyday between 1968 and 1975, treating the topics that were forbidden from mainstream comics by the Comics Code Authority, which was why comix artists had to operate underground so as to escape scrutiny. By doing so, “the underground comix changed pre-existing assumptions of what comics could achieve” (Beatens and Frey 56) in both style and subject. No topic was taboo in these satirical and often sexually explicit strips. The artists owned their own work and as such did not have to worry about producing commercially viable comics. Their works also appeared often as longer one-shot ‘novels’, as they were easier and less risky to self-publish. The influence of comix can be found in Fun Home. The book addresses similar themes as comix, such as sexuality. The illustrations are also explicit; Alison is shown masturbating and having sex with other women, something that would have been restricted in a graphic novel until the influence of the comix.
Comix laid groundwork for future graphic novels in style, content and format, but the collapse of the underground comix was in itself nearly as significant as its emergence. Regulations and censorships on obscenities got ever stricter and underground publishers were facing economical strain. The comix industry slowly fizzled out, leaving a cultural-economic gap to be filled, which happened slowly over the
next few decades with publications that increasingly resembled the graphic novel as we know it today. Mainstream publishers became interested in these works because they were neither comics nor comix, but something lengthier, more serious, reflexive and sophisticated, often published in a one-shot book format. This is why lengthy publications such as Jimmy Corrigan, Fun Home and Wonderstruck are able to exist.
The graphic novel genre really started to take off when in the late 1980s the ‘Big Three’ graphic novels were published: Moore’s Watchmen, Spiegelman’s Maus and Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. They found their origins in the late 1970s when comix were changing into a new format; in fact, parts of Maus were first printed in underground comix titles. Roger Sabin said about the Big Three: “In essence, they were what they said they were: novels in a graphic form” (qtd. in Beatens and Frey 81). Marvel was among the first to actually use the term ‘graphic novel’ as a title for a long-form, first-publication series. Not only was the groundwork already laid for the graphic novel to emerge, but the times were also right for the kind of topics that graphic novels cover. The American cultural-political context played a big role in making the genre feel especially relevant. For example, when Maus came out in 1986, the times were right to remember and reflect on World War II and the Holocaust, as the 80s and 90s saw significant international commemorations and anniversaries. Similarly, The Dark Knight
Returns and Watchmen were strongly relevant to the late Cold War period in which they
were published. Jimmy Corrigan, Fun Home and Wonderstruck also show how they are a product of the 21st century. The books deal explicitly with themes such as identity,
sexuality, mental health and disability, which are themes that are dealt with in the 21st
As the graphic novel slowly developed into a full-fledged genre, the features and formalities of the genre became more defined. New terminology was coined, and new theories and methodologies for studying the genre were developed.
The term ‘graphic novel’ was a much contested and a rather vaguely defined term. When the term was newly coined it was still of little value, it simply came to mean “expensive comic book” (Beatens and Frey 2). Nowadays, the term is more defined, but is still ambiguous. Beatens and Frey further describe the graphic novel as not just a genre but a medium, which is
part of other, more encompassing cultural fields and practices. […] Within these fields and practices there are rarely clear-cut distinctions between types and categories, but rather more commonly scales of differences, that are known by creators and publishers, that are often deliberately exploited to achieve resonance with readers. (7)
The problem with labelling the graphic novel as a medium is that it does not become easier to define exactly what makes a graphic novel. The Oxford English Dictionary gives the following definition: “a full-length (esp. science fiction or fantasy) story published as a book in comic-strip format” (OED, def. 7). However, this definition is problematic. The genre has for a long time not been restricted to science fiction and fantasy; in fact, autobiography and memoir are now heavily featured genres within the medium of the graphic novel. The central novels in this dissertation are of those genres; Fun Home and
Jimmy Corrigan have elements of memoir and autobiography, and are certainly not
science fiction or fantasy. Furthermore, as can be seen in especially Wonderstruck, not nearly all graphic novels employ a comic-strip format. The fact that even now the term
‘graphic novel’ is met with confusion and vagueness already hints towards the troubles the term caused when it was first coined. Influential artists such as Art Spiegelman and Alan Moore actually refused to use the term, preferring to keep referring to their works as comics instead: “It’s a marketing term […] that I never had any sympathy with. The term ‘comic’ works just as well for me” (1). This opinion is shared by others, such as Neil Gaiman and Jeff Smith. The latter said on the term: “I don’t like that name. It’s trying too hard. It is a comic book. But there is a difference. And the difference is, a graphic novel is a novel in the sense that there is a beginning, a middle and an end” (Smith 1). Over the years it has become clear that there are fundamental differences between comics and graphic novels. Some of that has to do with how critics and audiences treat both genres. Graphic novels receive critical acclaim and quite some titles are considered worthy enough to be labelled literature, and as such they have established a different general standing. As Ed Tan describes it in his essay “The Telling Face in Comic Strip and Graphic Novel”: “one senses it has something to do with popular and elite culture -comics are ubiquitous and graphic novels are difficult to obtain; and with the age of readership- children read comic strips, and adults graphic novels” (31).
In addition to critical reception, there are some formal differences between comics and graphic novels, which Beatens and Frey describe in four levels: form, content, publication format and dissemination. The differences in form entail that there are often differences in the drawing style of either genre, but most prominently in page layout and narrative. Graphic novels hardly adhere to the well-known comic book style of organizing the panels in evenly spaced tiers. For example, Fun Home and Jimmy
Corrigan both use the classic panels that originated in comics, but the grouping of the
panels on the page are hardly comic-like. Fun Home will often feature pages with larger and smaller panels, and the layout of the pages in Ware’s book are almost erratic, with
smaller and larger panels grouped next to each other and reading order depending on how the panels are sorted. This was how the genre first distinguished itself from comic books, by moving away from grid patterns in the way of Fun Home and Jimmy Corrigan, or even more radically by removing panels altogether and featuring page-filling illustrations such as in Wonderstruck.
The way of narrating is also different in graphic novels than in comic books; the narrator is more present in the graphic novel. Bechdel, Ware and Selznick each have a distinguishable protagonist and narrator in the book, while many comic books treat a large array of characters and are focused more on the plot than on the inner workings of a character. Graphic novels are disposed to realism and are not restricted to fiction, whereas many comic books focus on genre such as science fiction, fantasy and the superhero genre. Other differences are in publication format and manner of dissemination. The graphic novel prefers book format and often avoids serialization, opting for the one-shot formula instead as it is considered more prestigious, and while comic books have a certified market, graphic novels first depended on small, independent publishers until Maus was taken up by a big mainstream publisher. These differences mean that “graphic novels, though not necessarily a sharp break at the level of form or market conditions, represent at least some level of self-knowing ‘play with a purpose’ of the traditional comic book form, and in some cases a radical reformation of it” (Beatens and Frey 22).
The most striking feature of a graphic novel is of course the graphic part. The visuals of a graphic novel are of such importance that they merit study. While it is easy to say that a graphic novel can be conceived of as a story told by a multiplicity of panels, this is too narrow a classification. Beatens and Frey describe three levels of organization of a graphic novel: the strip or tier, which can be organized horizontally, vertically or a
combination of both; the page, which can have a variety of sizes and formats; and the book, which is not only a compilation of pages but also takes into account aspects such as binding and cover, as well as size and format. Considering this, the three novels of this dissertation differ greatly from one another. Although the books are roughly the same size, Jimmy Corrigan has a drastically different format than the other two, opening at the shorter side rather than the traditional longer side. This means that the organization of the page is automatically different for Jimmy Corrigan, as it arranges the panels on a landscape layout rather than a portrait layout as Fun Home and Wonderstruck do. In the organization of the strip and tier, Fun Home and Jimmy Corrigan are somewhat similar in that they employ panels and group them in irregular tiers, but Wonderstruck stands out as it only has page-filling illustrations, interspersed with chapters consisting of text only. The effect is that each book reads very differently, and thus requires a different manner of interpreting the narrative. Wonderstruck alternates between having the story explain itself through text and needing to interpret the story from wordless pictures. Fun Home has a traditional reading order of left to right and up to down, but is heavier on text than
Jimmy Corrigan, which in turn is erratic in its reading order, sometimes requiring the
reader to take time to figure out which panel is supposed to be read next.
Sequential organization of panels is necessary, as the panels and frames need to be put next to each other in order to keep the story going. As Bredehoft explains, “sequentiality appears to be virtually definitive of narrative, at some level, and surely the simplest narratives take the form ‘x happened then y’” (872). However, according to Beatens and Frey “nonsequential reading is inevitable, given the impossibility for the human eye to separate the panel from the page” (106). When looking at a page, the reader automatically takes in the whole layout before reading each panel separately. Often, authors make use of this by attaching meaning to the layout of the page as well, as
can be seen especially in Jimmy Corrigan and Fun Home, where the size and placing of the panels often influences the meaning. For example, a bigger panel might indicate an event of bigger importance, and a tier of small panels may be used to show minute changes in emotions. Bredehoft further argues that “In practice, however, the sequentiality or ordering of the events being narrated and the sequentiality of the narration may have little or nothing in common” (372). This is very evident in Jimmy
Corrigan, where the scattered and irregular reading order of some pages makes for
rather confusing reading, as past and present intertwine. With no introduction, the narrative moves from Jimmy’s contemplations about his father to the story of Jimmy Reed. The only indications are visual clues, as suddenly the buildings are more old-fashioned, the streets filled with horses and carriages rather than cars. Fun Home also jumps between timelines, although the distinction is clearer: it is obvious when Alison is a child and when she is an adult. This in contrast to Jimmy Corrigan, where all the Corrigan men look very similar, both as children and as adults.
The novels further distinguish themselves from each other in their drawing styles, which also has consequences for the way each novel expresses meaning. Drawing style is a central aspect in the structure of any graphic novel. “One of the most striking features of drawing style is its incredible impact on the reader’s perception and judgment of a graphic novel” (Beatens and Frey 138). Artists can fully express their personality and individuality through their drawing style. Some artist opt for a very impersonal style instead, but the authors of Fun Home, Jimmy Corrigan and
Wonderstruck each have a distinct and personal style that they employ in multiple
works, making their styles recognizable. Brian Selznick draws his pictures in a realistic style. He portrays faces in great detail, especially when close up, in order to express emotion. He also works with light a great deal; his black-and-white illustrations are
carefully shaded and his characters often have a halo of light around them so that their faces do not get lost in the background. Bechdel and Ware, on the other hand, employ a more cartoonish style, Ware even more so than Bechdel. Bechdel uses simple lines and little shading in her characters, instead displaying their emotions in an integer manner. The illustrations are black and white, with a green tint, in contrast to Ware’s full-coloured pages. The use of colour, or lack of it, is in each novel intentional. It is explained by Scott McCloud in Understanding Comics:
In black and white, the ideas behind the art are communicated directly. […] In flat colours forms themselves take on more significance. The world becomes a playground of shapes and space. And through more expressive colours, comics can become an intoxicating environment of sensations that only colour can give (192)
This is in accordance with how each novel employs colour to express the meaning behind its narrative. Wonderstruck is drawn only in black and white, as the ideas behind the art need to be conveyed directly because of a lack of words. Fun Home uses a green so subtle it is almost grey, which accentuates the clear lines and shapes Bechdel uses to draw her characters. Jimmy Corrigan is extremely colourful, to really draw the reader in and evoke sensations and emotions even without the narrative.
Ware draws his characters in a simple style in which only the basic emotions are given, and even those are sparse. Ware employs repetition and body language to depict details and meaning. At the same time, the images in neither of the books are overly complex. This is in fact part of why the images carry the narrative so well. McCloud argues that the more abstract a character is drawn, the more easily an audience can identify with it. If a character is too realistic, according to McCloud, the reader is “too
aware of the messenger to receive the message” (37). This is because “when we abstract an image through cartooning, we’re not so much eliminating details as we are focusing on specific details. By stripping down an image to its essential ‘meaning’ an artist can amplify meaning in a way that realistic art can’t (McCloud 30). Charles McGrath agrees with this, saying that “most of the better graphic novelists consciously strive for a simple, pared-down style and avoid tricky angles and perspectives” (3). While this certainly holds true for Jimmy Corrigan and Fun Home, Wonderstruck is rather different, as it does aim for visual prowess by showing realistic and detailed drawings. However, in the case of Wonderstruck this not only works but is rather necessary, since the pictures hold no words. In this case, to contradict McCloud, the messenger is the message, and as such merits a realistic drawing style.
Chapter Two
A major theme in three novels is how the main characters struggle with issues concerning their identity as they grow up. These problems concern psychological and physical matters such as sexuality and disability. Alison in Fun Home struggles with her sexuality, Jimmy in Jimmy Corrigan has issues concerning masculinity, and Ben and Rose in Wonderstruck have to cope with their deafness. These problems are in all three novels connected with the relationships the characters have with their parents.
Personality issues
In each of the three novels, the question that is most important for the protagonists is not necessarily “Who am I?” but rather, “Why am I who I am?”. Even as children, Alison, Jimmy, Ben and Rose realize that there is some personality trait that sets them apart from others. This is something they have to discover and learn to accept and live with.
For Alison, central to answering this question is her sexuality. According to Whitcroft, “It seems relevant to question to what extent sexuality forms identity, as it contributes to a large part of character growth” (26). In Alison’s case, it certainly is a key factor in the forming of her identity. Her struggles with her identity are already clearly showing when she develops obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) as a child. She starts keeping a diary, first to merely relay facts about what had happened during the day. However, she soon starts to question whether what she writes is true, so she adds phrases such as ‘I think’ in order to justify her own perceptions, and not even being sure of those. She creates a symbol, drawing it over almost every noun and pronoun to make up for the uncertainty she feels; the uncertainty that she might not be telling the
objective truth, that she might not be an objective truth. This shows that she is mostly concerned with what it means to have an identity and how her feelings, traits and experiences make up one person. Not only does she struggle with that, she also struggles with the fact that she struggles. This is seen in figure 1. Her posture and expression, in combination with the text, indicate that she knows that it is not right for her to feel that way, but she is unable to feel otherwise. This is a good example of how Alison’s struggles are depicted in the book: an illustration which is explained in the narrative, but which also tells a lot on its own. “One function of the visual art in Fun Home is to show rhythm and silence in speech, as written word cannot” (16) according to Agnes Muller in “Image as a Paratext in Fun Home”. This is evident from figure 1, as it shows Alison’s silent struggles more clearly than she could have ever narrated them. She claps a hand to her forehead in frustration as she is almost done undressing, a pained expression on her face. This, in combination with the caption indicating that it is the third time in a row that this happened, shows how much her OCD is influencing her life. The visual plays a great role in portraying her emotions, as the text above the image is rather factual. The image shows Alison’s frustration with the situation in a way that the text does not.
Fig. 1
Only as she matures and discovers more about herself and her sexuality does she grow out of her OCD. This means that for Alison, knowing how her sexuality is a part of her is integral to developing herself as a person and learning to live with who she is.
Not only internal, psychological issues are formative for someone’s identity, but physical issues can also heavily influence one’s identity. This is shown by Ben and Rose in Wonderstruck, how their deafness is part of discovering why they are who they are, and how they can live with it. Both Ben and Rose are heavily influenced by being deaf. In the beginning, when Ben is only half deaf, he already gets bullied for it. Being able to still hear with one ear, he has never learned sign language or proper lip reading, and as such, he has trouble communicating when he becomes fully deaf. However, he seems to accept his fate quite easily. When Jamie starts teaching him sign language, he is not unwilling to learn. This in contrast to Rose, who actively refused to learn any means of communicating that her father told her. She felt hugely limited by her disability until she met other deaf children, who taught her sign language in a way that showed her how communication improved her life. Her life remained influenced by her deafness. She received a lot of critique when she and her deaf partner decided to have a baby: “How could two people raise a hearing baby? Our parents pointed out that we couldn’t hear a deaf baby, OR a hearing baby crying at night. Even worse to them, they worried the baby would never learn to speak” (Selznick 547). However, despite that, Rose continued through her life with optimism, and not only raised a son but also built a career. Rather than letting her life be ruled by her deafness, she took matters into her own hands, and will teach Ben to do the same.
Jimmy Corrigan’s has both mental and physical issues as he struggles with societal expectations of masculinity. Sarah Gladwin argues that “Jimmy Corrigan examines masculinity and what it is like to constantly battle the social pressure to live
up to an ideal masculinity” (1). Jimmy grew up without a father, and from when he was a child he always imagined a father for himself, much like Ben. Ben often imagined Major Tom to be his father, as it was his mother’s favourite song. Jimmy was a fan of Superman as a child, the embodiment of masculinity. Superman even takes on a fatherly role, if only for a night, when a Superman actor goes home with Jimmy’s mother and spends the night. He gives Jimmy his mask as he leaves in the morning, and Jimmy puts it on. This shows that besides admiring Superman, Jimmy also wishes to be more like Superman: by putting on the mask, he can pretend that he is Superman. How unsuccessful he is in being more like Superman is made visually obvious in a similar interaction with women. Jimmy, as a child, gets told off by his mother, which Superman witnesses. In the panel, Jimmy’s mother’s breasts are prominently featured, with Superman staring at them (see figure 2). Superman then goes home with Jimmy’s mother. A few pages later show Jimmy as an adult. He is awkward and shy, unable to look much less speak to women and often escaping in fantasies and daydreams. Jimmy has an encounter with a woman on a plane. She has a similar temperament to his mother, as she tells him off for looking at her breasts. The pictures and positioning are very similar to Superman’s encounter with Jimmy’s mother (see figure 3), but the outcome is different: Jimmy lacks all the confidence and finesse that Superman has, and rather than going home with the girl, he withdraws in fantasies, staring meekly out the window. He realizes that he is not as masculine as he feels he should be. This happens again when he meets his father, who boasts about his various conquests. Jimmy, feeling he should not be inferior to his father in terms of masculinity, makes up a girlfriend, even as he fantasizes about getting with nearly every woman he meets. This shows that not only does Jimmy struggle with ideals of masculinity, his life and identity also get heavily influenced and even controlled by his parents.
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Parental issues
Jimmy not only has to deal with issues concerning his masculinity and his social ineptness, but he is influenced by his parents to such an extent that he develops an Oedipus complex. Because his father is absent, Jimmy is focused solely on his mother as a kid. The extent of this is shown on the first page: the Earth is pictured, floating in space. A speech balloon pops up from somewhere on the earth; his mother calling out “Jimmy!”, after which the panels zoom into the earth to Jimmy’s house. This shows that for young Jimmy, his mother is the centre of his universe.
When Superman goes home with his mother, Jimmy puts on his mask. Next to wanting to assert his own masculinity, this is also a sign of Jimmy’s Oedipus complex developing, as he places himself in Superman’s position of being with his mother. Jimmy imagines his parents having sex shortly after meeting his father. In his imagination, his mother is turned away from him as he looks on. Jimmy then takes a glass beer mug and smashes it in his father’s face, continuing to stab him with a shard of glass. “The scene ends with Jimmy poised over his wailing father as if he were going to slit his throat, clearly exhibiting the requirements for an explicit Oedipal recognition” (Spavento 81).
Fig. 4
While Jimmy imagines his father in many different ways (see figure 4), his mother’s face is hardly shown. This is to indicate that if Jimmy were to look directly at his mother, he would be forced to confront his Oedipal wishes (Spavento 83). During Jimmy’s Oedipal fantasy his mother’s face is turned away, and in the opening pages in which she sleeps with Superman, her face is never fully revealed. Her face is only shown on the last few pages of the book, right after she tells Jimmy she is in a relationship. The panels before that, her face is always obstructed, sometimes in an explicitly clumsy manner: Jimmy holds his crutch in front of her face, or she drinks from a glass of water
(see figure 5). Then, a few panels after his mother is seen holding hands with her new partner, her face is drawn (see figure 6). This means that Jimmy is finally able to cope with his Oedipal feelings: his father is dead and his mother found a partner, meaning that Jimmy is not the only man in her life anymore. His mother’s face being drawn shows that Jimmy is able to assess his relationship with her and have her influence on him decrease. Now she is not a faceless, controlling force looming over him, always in the background but never explicitly shown. Instead, his mother becomes simply another person in his life whom he can interact with in a normal manner.
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Ben and Rose also both have to deal with a precarious relationship with their parents, which influences their choices in life significantly. For Ben, it is not only his mother’s death that occupies his mind, but also the question of who is father is. Like Jimmy, he was raised only by his mother, and similar to Jimmy, he has to deal with the death of a parent. The difference is that it is his mother who dies, and so he is left with the question of who his father is. This becomes his foremost thought, the drive behind his choices, rather than cope with the loss of his mother, or the full loss of his hearing. Bereft of any other family, he lives with his aunt and uncle, and “Even though he loved them, he didn’t feel at home with his aunt and uncle. But where else could he live?” (Selznick 24). This is why he is compelled to go on a search for his father, not only to find a family member closer to him than his aunt and uncle, but also to find out where he came from, as his mother always kept that a mystery:
His grandparents had died when he was very little, and he’d never known anything about his dad. The one time he had hinted around the subject to his mom […] her eyes filled with tears. […] Right afterward she’d put on her favorite record and played a mysterious song called ‘Space Oddity’, about an astronaut named Major Tom who gets lost in space. (Selznick 24-25)
After this, Ben imagines Major Tom being his father, and continues to imagine him as a fatherly figure arriving at his family’s house to rescue him. He also does not have many friends; his cousin of the same age bullies him. This is why he is eager to trust an unknown boy he meets in New York, happy to have any friendly contact after the shock of the big city. For the same reason, he is willing to accept Rose after she tells him that she is his grandmother: “Rose’s face somehow changed before his eyes. Her skin, her
white hair, and her slender fingers no longer belonged to a stranger” (Selznick 520). Having finally found something that connects him to his family, even if it is not exactly the person he wanted to find, is enough for him to be at peace with himself and his history.
Rose, while knowing who her parents are, still struggles with her relationship with them, as they force behaviour on her due to her disability. She is obsessed by her mother, a famous actor, the point where her focus on her mother is nearly as intense as Jimmy’s focus on his mother. Rose keeps a scrapbook of her mother to make up for her absence, and when they reunite, it all seems to go well. Images of Lillian on the stage and Rose looking at her hopefully follow each other, only to reveal Lillian’s fury when she sees Rose and subsequently tries to send her home. Rose, already having to live with her disability without being able to communicate save for writing, gets rejected by the mother she looked up to, because of her deafness. Her distress at her mother’s rejection is depicted very clearly. Her mother is initially drawn as a beautiful woman, but her expression turns angry and ugly as soon as she beholds Rose. She drags Rose to her dressing room and is drawn towering over her, her angry face in the mirror (see figure 7). The control Lillian has over Rose is emphasized by Lillian’s face being drawn twice, once from the side and once in the mirror, so as to fully show her anger. Lillian’s face in the mirror is extremely close to Rose and seems to stare her directly in the face, showing how intimidating Lillian is to Rose. Rose, in contrast, is only shown from the back, her posture demure. Her face is only vaguely drawn in the mirror opposite, showing just a glimpse of a sad expression. This shows that Rose feels like she is nothing compared to her mother, as she sits there surrounded by her mother’s fancy cosmetics. The bouquet of roses next to Rose shows that Lillian celebrates her success with a different kind of
rose: the flower instead of her daughter. This all works together to show how little Lillian cares for her daughter.
Fig. 7
The same goes for Ben; he runs away from home because he lives in a place where he is not understood. As Virginia Zimmerman says her article “The Curating Child”, “[The] children are not so much running away from home as they are running toward a richer sense of self in context” (45). They flee the home they are unhappy in to risk a chance for escape from their struggles and a better life with a better grasp of who they are. This is similar to what happens to Alison in Fun Home, whose father’s controlling presence impairs her in her own struggles.
Alison’s way of dealing with her sexuality is influenced by her parents; by Bruce’s behaviour and his closeted homosexuality as well as Alison’s difficulties in connecting with her mother. The juxtaposition between Bruce and Alison is key to Alison’s identity. Central in the book is Alison’s father, Bruce Bechdel, and his suspected suicide and closeted homosexuality. Alison’s relationship with her father is strained, something that influenced her identity from the start. In the first chapter, child Alison is shown to reject
her father’s ways and to be his antithesis: “I was Spartan to my father’s Athenian. Modern to his Victorian. Butch to his Nelly. Utilitarian to his aesthete.” (Bechdel 15). On page 16, Bechdel says “I developed a contempt for useless ornament. What function was served by the scrolls, tassels and bric-a-brac that infested our house?” (emphasis mine). The word ‘developed’ indicates she would not have acquired such a distaste for ornaments had her father not had such an obsession with restoration and decoration.
The novel shows that Alison has difficulty comparing her father to other men: “Indeed, I had become a connoisseur of masculinity at an early age. […] I measured my father against the grimy deer hunters at the gas station uptown, with their yellow workboots and shorn-sheep haircuts” (Bechdel 95-96). This results in Alison feeling as if she has to act masculine rather than feminine, to compensate where her father fails (Watson 135). Similarly, Bruce’s insistence on Alison dressing and acting feminine stems from his own desire to perform femininity (Watson 136). This clash only propels Alison’s active deviation from her father. At the same time, their clashing identities also allow for an odd balance, where each makes up for the other’s lacking. As Watson says: “Her desire to recast her gender assignment is balanced by his discomfiture with the public exhibit of what he perceives as transgressive sexuality and is repeated throughout the chapter in cartoons that contrast his fastidiously dressed and combed presence with her rakish tomboy looks”.
The two do not always clash. They find a “shared reverence for masculine beauty” (Bechdel 99). Their personalities are similar in that they are both creative, inventive and persistent. Alison inherited from Bruce a passion for literature, as well as an almost overly keen eye for detail, which is shown mainly in the drawings of the novel: “Just as Bruce is portrayed as having an obsessive need to make things look perfect, (…) Bechdel’s drawings reveal a similarly compulsive behaviour” (Stebbins 285). Their
sexuality is also something that binds them. As a child, even without knowing that Bruce was homosexual and that she was too, Alison found something in her father that she could identify with. Rather, she could identify with the lack of something, which resembled her own ‘lacking’. At the same time, Alison’s sexual identity was always overshadowed by her father’s, his closeted homosexuality and attempts to force gender normativity on Alison disallowing her from developing and discovering her own sexuality. Even her coming out was overshadowed by her mother telling her about Bruce’s homosexual exploits. The fact that her mother knew about Bruce’s sexuality but refrained from telling Alison until she came out herself indicates that the relationship between mother and daughter was not very close. Her mother seems to be hardly present in the novel; her contribution to the story is mostly in short, terse sentences. However, the visual aspect of the graphic novel “offers us additional ways to look for the mother besides listening for her voice; sure enough, a closer inspection reveals that she is solidly present in the text, appearing in many panels” (Mitchell 18). This detachment from her mother influenced Alison as much as her more intimate relationship with her father. Bechdel explores her relationship with her mother in more detail in Are You My
Mother? (2012), the follow-up to Fun Home.
The three novels all deal with psychological and family-related issues. Not only do the main characters have similar problems, such as Jimmy, Ben and Alison having to deal with a deceased parent, or Rose, Jimmy and Alison struggling with their place in society, the novels also express these issues in a similar manner. The stories heavily rely on the accompanying images to bring to light nuances and reveal more about the emotions and motivations of the characters. Each novel employs a different style of drawing and organization, but the intent of the images is the same.
Chapter Three
“Any space implies, contains and dissimulates social relationships” (83) according to Henri Lefebvre in his book The Production of Space. In this chapter, I will examine the significance of the space in which the events in each book take place. In all three novels the city has a significant influence on the lives and decisions of the characters and thus also on the forming of the characters identity; all struggles that were previously discussed are all in some way resolved by the big city. According to Lynne Manzo in her paper “Beyond Home and Haven”, “Place is inextricably linked with the development and maintenance of continuity of self” (52). The relationship that a person has with a place is dynamic, and as such allows for “an exploration of how places hold meaning through both negative and positive experience” (Manzo 53). Places reflect the on-going process of how people make their identity, which includes challenges and struggles, which then lead people to seek places where they can find succour and restoration. People often get stuck in habits and routine in the places where they live (Manzo 55), as can be seen in for example Jimmy Corrigan, and moving to a different place can spur the dynamic process of finding meaning and identity. As Milford Jeremiah argues, “In the literary world, place is usually combined with time and events to establish what is known as the social setting or the social context of a literary work” (23). I will argue that the city as a place, in combination with time and events, is a means of liberation for the characters, both from their pasts and from their parents. This is represented in not only the verbal narrative, but also the visual presentation in the graphic novels. As Lefebvre said, “a further important aspect of spaces of this kind is their increasingly pronounced visual character” (75). I will argue how the visual
representation both reflects and enhances the significance the city holds for the characters.
Liberation from the past
The city for the characters is a means of liberating themselves from the struggles they had to deal with in the past. Alison’s eyes get opened to the existence of the gay community in New York, while Ben and Rose discover how they can live with their deafness, in a New York of a different time. Jimmy experiences some tragic events in Waukosha that lead to him being more secure of himself.
In Wonderstruck, both Ben and Rose are able to accept their disability and learn to live with it by going to the city. For both of them, the city means liberation, although in slightly different ways and in different times; Rose escapes to the New York of the late twenties and sees the city as a chance for a new life, while Ben visits New York in 1977 and goes to the city mainly to find answers about his father. Rose spends much of her childhood cooped up in her grand family home in Hoboken, next to the river. Across the river, Rose can see the skyline of Manhattan. Knowing that her mother is there, the vague contours of the city seem to her as an exciting, far-off place full of possibilities, not the least of which is reuniting with her mother, whom she idolizes. Rose’s fascination with the city and her hatred for her home is represented in her making models of the city out of the book on lip-reading that her father gave her. On page 88-89, the image of the book is drawn, and on page 92-93, the pages are made into buildings of New York. The next pages reflect how Rose sees the city: the skyline of New York is vague and blurry across the river, but with a brilliant sunrise over it. In contrast stands Rose’s house, tall and imposing with closed and barred windows and a big black tree in front of it (see figure 8). This reflects Rose’s feelings: her house is her prison, as shown by the
tree blocking it, and the city is open and full of possibility, as shown by the vague outline of the buildings with the sun rising over them. The use of shading indicates the contrast between both places as well. The left side of the page is dominated by the harsh, black tree, giving a dark, ominous feeling to the page. The left side of the image is brightly lit by the sunrise and its rays reflecting on the water, making the whole page light up and showing the hope and possibility that lies in New York. However, once Rose arrives in New York and gets rejected by her mother, the city suddenly does not seem as glamorous (see figure 9).
Fig. 9
The buildings, once majestic and inspiring to Rose, now are replaced by houses depicted in harsh, straight lines with small, barred windows, reminiscent of Rose’s own home. The houses are coloured dark grey, giving them an inhospitable look. This is a stark contrast to the lit up skyline of figure 8. The people are only shadowy figures, each of them walking away from Rose as nobody is inclined to help her. Rose herself is engulfed by a halo of light, both to draw attention to her as the main character and to show that even now she has not yet lost hope, for she sets out to find her brother. It is only when she finds her him and feels safe that she is able to accept herself for who she is and learning to live with her deafness as she finds a school for deaf children. There, she learns sign language, connects with other children and eventually finds a partner. Ben, fifty years later, runs to New York after having lost his mother and his hearing, and having found a picture of his father and a book that mentions his name. The events in
New York lead him to find Jamie and Rose, who both accept him for who he is, and start to teach him sign language. Coming to the city meant for Ben that he found a place to belong.
The significance of the city stretches over generations; while fifty years separate the two, Ben and Rose both find what they need by going to the city on their own in an attempt to find a solution to their respective problems. This is represented in the picture on pages 554-555 (figure 10). Ben and Rose stand looking over the panorama of New York that Rose helped build and keep. They are positioned above the city, the buildings sprawling out beneath them. This shows how they overcame their struggles by moving to the city and finding peace there. The buildings are once again depicted as majestic structures, coloured in whites and light greys, in contrast to the dark, straight-forward houses seen in figure 9. This shows that Ben and Rose have overcome their struggles thanks to the city, which is therefore shown in a positive light. A similar story happens in Fun Home, as Alison moves from her hometown to New York.
Fig. 10
