Ben's Blogging Shed

     Bruce's death is one of the most important events in this book and a lot of Alison's reflections and contemplations revolve around it. She specifically mentions how she sees that her coming out is linked with his death, and while that's probably true to some extent and it makes a sense in the narrative of Fun Home , based on what she says in the book I still don't think it was actually a suicide. The main reasons Alison gives for it being intentional is how her coming out seems to have caused the divorce which drove him to suicide (Bechdel 58-59) There's also the constant theme throughout the book that Bruce more or less failed his coming of age due his staying closeted, and that that sense of failure could have also driven him to suicide, and the sense that he kind of felt trapped in Beech Creek (Bechdel 125) However, Alison also gives us reason to believe it wasn't a suicide: she mentions that Bruce jumped back in front of the truck like he'd seen a s...

    One of the more important questions that the ending of the The Bell Jar  leaves unanswered is to what extent the bell jar Esther felt trapped by is really gone. Esther herself even acknowledges this, "How did I know that someday … the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again?" (Plath, 241). It's unclear to if it's even entirely gone by this point, and it's possible it could just be replaced by another one. Esther also mentions on page 238 that the other girls at college were under a different kind of bell jar. Esther's college experience has been one where she felt very trapped by the pressure on her to succeed and to have a plan for her future, so in that way the entire academic world has been somewhat of a bell jar for her. However, she seems to be more or less back to her old self by the end of the book, but with a different outlook on the world.     Adding to the fear of the bell jar is Buddy's comment about who Esther wo...

    Throughout The Catcher in the Rye Holden constantly mentions that he hates the movies. So much so that it's one of the first things we learn about him when on the second page he says "If there's one thing I hate, it's the movies. Don't even mention them to me" which was also in reference to DB being in Hollywood. However, they seem to keep coming up in the story, and he even has some memories of seeing movies with Phoebe as well as DB multiple times. He mentions having seen her favorite, The 39 Steps multiple times as well and here he doesn't even seem to dislike it (Salinger 76). There's also the trip he goes on at the beginning of the book with Ackley and Brossard to see a movie though they never end up actually going to it (Salinger 42). And then there's the fact that he seems to  talk about movies in a way that implies that he's seen enough to know they're all bad. While that might have been possible in New York in the 1940s, but i...

    It is definitely not easy, but I do think it's possible to see some elements of the hero's journey in William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying . However, the hero isn't just one individual, it's the entire Bundren family which is essentially acting as one unit. It is also possible to see some smaller hero's journeys for individual characters like Darl and Cash, but here I'm just going to focus on the Bundren family, since I think it's easiest to see a hero's journey that way. However, there are still many steps that aren't really here. There's not much of a supernatural aid, meeting with the goddess, temptation, atonement with the father, and it feels like a lot of the parts of the return phase are also missing. However, there is a significant change in the family over the course of the journey, mainly Anse deciding to get a new wife days after burying Addie, and Darl going to a mental hospital. They do seem to have gone through some kind of col...

     Maureen Murdock's model of the heroine's journey is somewhat like Victoria Lynn Schmidt's model and the Hero's Journey, but is generally more restrictive and harder to apply.  It would still be much easier to just have one definitive monomyth that was more broadly applicable and didn't discriminate based on gender. And that emphasis on gender and to a lesser extent on spirituality is the main problem with Murdock's model. It's difficult to apply when it forces stories to revolve around or heavily feature these concepts and as a monomyth it definitely shouldn't, though much like Victoria Lynn Schmidt's model it may not be entirely intended to be a monomyth. However, if it was broader and more about identity that just gender it would be more easily applicable, like in the case of Quicksand where it uses some ideas from Murdock's model but in the context of race.      While it's not as useful as Victoria Lynn Schmidt's model, they two d...

    The first main problem with Victoria Lynn Schmidt's Heroine's journey is that while it may be better than the Hero's journey, it still has some pretty stringent elements. This is mainly due to the emphasis on the heroine undergoing a spiritual change, as there are many stories that fit the model decently but don't have much of a spiritual change and something like The Hunger Games come to mind. This as well as the emphasis on a betrayal at the beginning make it much harder to apply broadly. However, it is possible that it wasn't entirely meant to be a monomyth in the same way as the hero's journey and seems to be designed to be a bit more specific. However, the "Descent", "Eye of The Storm", and "Death" Stages do work in a more broad variety of stories so it was definitely meant to loosely fit most stories that at least feature a heroine. It is also less restrictive than Maureen Murdock's model which focuses too much on gen...