행복의 서사 속 정서 이방인—앨리슨 벡델의 <펀 홈>

Abstract

This study aims to examine the crisis of happiness and the aspects of affect aliens in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. In contrast to its title of Fun Home, the wounds and bad feelings of family members play a decisive role in the main narrative. People in Fun Home, illustrated as a “mildly autistic colony”, desire a different meaning of happiness so they are tagged as ‘affect aliens,’ a term associated with a certain nuance of unhappiness and eventually isolated and considered as a condition of misfortune. The lives of affect aliens can be summarized in three words: anxiety, fear, and tension. In the heterosexual patriarchal system, Bruce, who plays the happy father hiding his queer identity, neither reveals his desires nor keeps up with what society wants. On the other hand, Helen, Alison’s mother, belatedly finds the real life she wants. Unlike her parents, Alison is willing to admit her queer identity and the alienation it has caused. Her search for identity is accompanied by the process of recalling her father and newly coloring his desires and failure of happiness. Bechdel rejects following a formula for happiness and tries to rewrite the meaning of a good life on her own.