Pride, Prejudice & Penny: the coming of age novel

In  Fun Home  by Alison Bechdel, the "closet swapping" of Alison and Bruce during their childhoods is one of the most concrete examples that Bechdel presents to highlight similarities between their experiences. Alison, as a girl, feels ambivalent about fashion and doesn't want to wear girls' clothes, until she sees a woman at a truck stop with her father and immediately idolizes the "butch" clothes and "recognizes her with a surge of joy" (118) as she sees how she wants to express herself. Her father restricts her ability to dress outside girls' societal norms, and makes certain she wears barrettes and keeps her long hair.  As she gets older, she cuts her hair and dresses in "butch" fashion, able to express herself clearly when she goes to college. As the inverse of this, Bruce is used to being repressed due to societal standards, but expresses himself in coveted ways. Alison finds an old picture of him in college wearing a women'...

Joan is possibly the most covertly hated character in Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar.  At first, she's a somewhat distant friend that appears in Esther's asylum, which she takes as a joke. As time goes on, she gets more and more annoyed and begins to compare herself to Joan. This begins because Joan has also dated Buddy Willard and has a direct connection to Esther's life in society, and she hates Joan because she seems better than Esther. More specifically, she's jealous because "Joan had walk privileges, Joan had shopping privileges, Joan had town privileges. I gathered all my news of Joan into a little, bitter heap, though I received it with surface gladness. Joan was the beaming double of my old best self, specially designed to follow and torment me" (108). She also hates her because she's part of the crowd that, in Esther's head, singles her out-- she's sure they're talking about "how awful it was to have people like me in Belsize an...