Aside from the eponymous "Bechdel Test", Alison Bechdel has sent a ripple effect through culture on more than one front. Alongside her success in the Broadway world, Fun Home is consistently characterized as groundbreaking and revolutionary. The LGBT influence is has had is unprecedented, and Bechdel's duality as both a proud member of the LGBT community and a femininst combines two very important cultural issues. 

 

Inside of her own works, some of the most poignant influences that Bechdel has, are those from which she is most comfortable: books. While the influence of the time period can be seen in the drawings themselves, and her own life is the source material for the graphic novel itself, one should closer examine the extensive list that Bechdel names or draws in her novel. The theme of literature can be seen in the musical as well, but not nearly as clear nor poignant as the novel makes it seem. Books are seen in the house, and Bruce is seen reading books often in the musical, but esteemed literature is at the forefront of nearly every metaphor, comparison, and anachronism in the novel. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fun Home is positively steeped with literary references, both in the drawings and those that are directly mentioned by Alison as either something she is examining, something she is discovering, or something her father is relating his life to. Here is an entirely compiled list of every piece of literature, including drama, separated by category. 

 

Below is a complete list of hopefully every piece of literature mentioned in the novel. Some of the readings are shown with the context where they were refererenced, while others, such as The Great Gatsby,  are constantly used as a reference to the inner workings and complexities of the characters in the novel.

 

 

Readings by Bruce 

Leo Tolstoy – Anna Karenina
Kenneth Clark – The Nude (“I was Spartan to my father’s Athenian.” Young Alison plays soldier in the background while her father reads this in the foreground.)
John Ruskin – The Stones of Venice (“But once I was unaccountably moved to kiss my father good night.” Bruce is reading this in bed.)
Rudyard Kipling – Just So Stories (“…some encounters could be quite pleasant.” Bruce reads bedtime stories to Alison.)
Albert Camus – A Happy Death (“A fitting epitaph for my parents’ marriage.” Alison finds it suggestive that Bruce was reading this shortly before his death.)
Günter Grass – The Tin Drum (Father and mother in “expatriate splendor” in West Germany after the war.)
Ernest Hemingway – The Sun Also Rises
F. Scott Fitzgerald – The Great Gatsby, The Far Side of Paradise (“Such a suspension of the imaginary in the real was, after all, my father’s stock in trade.”)
Nancy Milford – Zelda
Marcel Proust – Remembrance of Things Past
Erick Rücker Eddison – The Worm Ouroboros (“Maybe that’s what’s so unsettling about snakes.”)

 

Alison's Readings During Childhood: 

Edward Gorey – the Addams Family cartoons
The Merriam-Webster dictionary. (Over the course of the novel, Alison looks up queer, lesbian, eighty-six, seventeen-year locust, father, beget, andorgasm.)
MAD Magazine
Kenneth Grahame – The Wind in the Willows
Dr. Benjamin Spock – Baby and Child Care (“I had spent many an hour browsing in that edifying volume.”)
E. B. White – The Trumpet of the Swan
Esther Forbes – Johnny Tremain (read to her by her mother)
Raymond Abrashkin and Jay Williams – Danny Dunn, Time Traveler

 

Alison's High School Reading: 

J. R. R. Tolkien – The Fellowship of the Ring
J. D. Salinger – The Catcher in the Rye
Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice

 

Alison's College Reading: 

Albert Camus – The Myth of Sisyphus (“It’s not that I think he killed himself out of existentialist conviction. If he’d read carefully, he would have gotten to Camus’ conclusion that suicide is illogical.”)
Joseph Conrad – Heart of Darkness
James Joyce – A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (“Good. You damn well better identify with every page.”)
Homer – The Odyssey
James Joyce – Ulysses
Colette – Earthly Paradise (Consider this as part of her queer reading, too.)

 

Alison's Queer Education:

Word is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives (1978)
Radclyffe Hall – The Well of Loneliness
Our Right to Love (1978)
William Masters & Virginia Johnson – Homosexualities
Anaïs Nin – Delta of Venus
Out of the Closets and Into the Streets (Out of the Closets: Voices of Gay Liberation, 1972 anthology ed. by Karla Jay & Allen Young)
E. M. Forster – Maurice
Patricia Neil Warren – The Front Runner (1974)
The Gay Report (1979)
Violette Leduc – La Batarde (1964)
Our Bodies, Ourselves (1971)
Sidney Abbott – Sappho Was a Right-On Woman (1972)
Adrienne Rich – Dream of a Common Language (1978)
Olga Broumas – Beginning with O (1977)
Mary Daly – Gyn/ecology (1978)
Ann Weldy – Women in the Shadows (1959)
Del Martin & Phyllis Lyon – Lesbian/Woman (1972)
Virginia Woolf – Orlando
Rita Mae Brown – Rubyfruit Jungle (1973)
Jane Rule – Desert of the Heart (1964)
Cecil Beaton’s Diaries
C. A. Tripp – The Homosexual Matrix (1975)
Virginia Woolf’s letters
Jill Johnston – Lesbian Nation (1973)

 

Alison & Joan's Childhood Deconstruction: 

A. A. Milne – The World of Pooh
Roald Dahl – James and the Giant Peach

 

Plays and Theatrical Parallels: 

Ruth & Augustus Goetz – The Heiress (based on Henry James’ Washington Square)
Shakespeare – The Taming of the Shrew
Henry James – The Portrait of a Lady
Wallace Stevens – “Sunday Morning” (“Honest to god, we had a painting of a cockatoo in the library.”)
Edward Albee – The American Dream
Paul Osborne – Morning’s at Seven
Oscar Wilde – The Importance of Being Earnest (her mother plays Lady Bracknell)
Margaret Drabble – The Waterfall (1969) (I think this is the only book that Alison’s mother is seen reading, apart from plays.)