A Very Lit Blog

An oddly common motif throughout  Black Swan Green is that of birds: Jason lives in a town with "swan" in it, and he also attends a goose fair, during which he makes a crucial decision regarding his own principles (choosing to return the wallet to notorious asshole Ross Wilcox). Now, that's not a lot, but it's weird that it's happened twice. We can do something with this.      "Black Swan Green hasn't got any swans." This sentence is one of the first things we hear about the town from Jason. It's a quick little quip, something that could be easily passed off as world building. And yet, at the end of the book, when Jason is contemplating the many changes his life has gone through in such a short time, what does he see? A swan.  Swans are very common symbols in literature, and mean many different things, but one I'm choosing to focus on one specific meaning: that of elegance and femininity. Jason is embarrassed about his poetry; the hypermascul...

 Throughout Fun Home, Bechdel uses herself and her father as allegories relating to other literary works many, many times, even to the point of redundancy. While this might just be her love of literature, something she shared with her father, I would argue that it is more to frame her narrative less like an autobiography, but more like a crafted fictional tragedy. Many times in the book, Bechdel mentions how novelesque her life was, even apologizing for some of the dramatic irony present in her story. I will just come out and say that I'm pretty sure a good chunk of her story is embellished for effect, and there's nothing wrong with that in my opinion. But I think her use of her and her family as a tool for storytelling is something she picked up not only from her extremely influential father, but her mother as well. In the first few chapters, Bechdel states that her father seemed to occasionally enjoy having kids, as it helped "add to the illusion", like they were mu...