Fashion From Inside the Closet

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's bathing suit, potentially for a prank, where she says "the pose he strikes is not mincing or silly at all. He's lissome, elegant" (120). Bruce found the ability to express his affinity for feminine fashion through the pretense of a joke. He also mentions he wanted to be a girl and "would dress up in girls clothes" (221) just like Alison, which makes me wonder: if he were in a different world, would Bruce grow up to be more like Alison?

Although we know less about Bruce's history, his childhood and experiences at a younger age can be speculated according to societal values at the time. We do know he was molested as a child by a farmhand, which again adds into the elements of societal control. At the same time, his taste in what looks good and his affinity for more feminine clothes becomes apparent in the way he sets up the house, but also in the way he sets up Alison's clothes and her life within the house. She describes in chapter 4: "Not only were we inverts, we were inversions of each other. While I was trying to compensate for something unmanly in him, he was trying to express something feminine through me" (98). The difference between this inversion of the two is that Bruce is used to an environment of repression, and inherits the ability to control. We see this in the way that the house is meticulously controlled to be perfect and the pictures he takes matter more than the actual experience. As Bechdel puts it, he used his talent "to make things appear what they were not -- that is to say, impeccable" (16). He attempts to shift her away from expressing sexuality, as in his experience you would be treated badly if you expressed your sexuality and he might have felt guilty about his own (false) homosexual impact on her.

Naturally, this repressive environment Bruce creates from generational trauma also impacts Alison's mental state and perception of her father. He is absent enough from her that she begins to resent him, to the point where their relationship had become “not the sobbing, joyous reunion of Odysseus and Telemachus. It was more like fatherless inversion of it” (221). At the same time, she aims to impress him during her childhood. His relationships with young men and his presence in her life affect her own journey of sexuality later on, as she psychoanalyzes and compares him to herself. While the house is beautiful, it traps her in a world of perfect, feminine expression that comes more from who Bruce is than who Alison is -- which is evident in the way that she always wants to cut her hair. In this trapped space of a home, the word "closet" has a double meaning that is kind of ironic-- the closet that Bruce brings her that isn't necessarily about her but a combination of his need for perfection and his expression of sexuality, and the fact that Alison's lesbianism is repressed until she goes to college-- quite literally leaving the "closet" of Bruce's oppression of her identity. 

Noticeably, when Alison goes to college, she is able to find a group of people where she can express her sexuality openly and be freer of "the closet" by discovering her identity as a lesbian. The way that Alison dresses is a very obvious example of the battle of expression between Alison and Bruce's identities. While Bruce remains confined by the need to disguise his true self, Alison’s journey charts a movement toward openness, making their “closet swapping” both ironic and deeply revealing.