Citation: Lemberg, Jennifer. “Closing the Gap in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, The Feminist Press, 2 June 2008, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/238093.
Thesis: “Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, makes a strong and explicit claim for the power of graphic narrative as witness. (Page 1)
Translation: Fun Home proves why graphic novels are so effective at provoking feelings and thoughts that relate you to the characters experience.
Structure: In the opening paragraph of her article, “Closing the Gap in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home” by Jennifer Lemberg, she hooks the reader with her thesis for the article right up front. She claims that Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel, Fun Home “makes a strong and explicit claim for the power of graphic narrative as a witness.” With this opening sentence to set the stage for her argument, she is then able to give a brief overview of the plot of the novel. Using the plots key topic, that being her multi-layered relationships with her family members she is able to discuss the multiple aspects of their relationship as evidence. For the analysis, Lemberg is able to relate her evidence back to the thesis’s main claim: the effectiveness of comics use of words and pictures to convey feeling/experience. For example, she mentions how “Photographs prove difficult to decipher” and “overidentification with literature by and about other people threatens to throw lives off course. By framing each of her (Bechdel’s) chapters wit words and images that bear a complex relationship to each other, Bechdel reminds us that it is in the space between existing visual images and familiar storylines where we make meaning of the individual lives.” After following this model for a few paragraphs of finding pages in the book as evidence and relating them to the thesis through analysis, Lemberg switches the structure up a bit. She goes from simply referring to these comic strips on certain pages, to actually displaying them in her article in order to talk about them and their ability to do exactly what her thesis claims in various ways. This architecture or sorts is able to get Lemberg to the end of the article. Here, she concludes with a closing paragraph that masterfully reviews the points of her article in just a few short sentences. Among the many points she makes, she talks about how, “Whether or not we are convinced, along with Young Alison, that images provide a ‘mystical bridging of the symbolic and the real,’ or succeed in closing the ‘gap between word and meaning,’ we are powerfully engaged by Bechdel’s controlling vision.” In hindsight it is the continuous use of various sources of evidence to prove a point, followed by analysis in which Lemberg relates this information back to the thesis that makes this article so effective and convincing to its reader.
Rhetorical Strategies:
- Effectively using evidence from the text in question (Fun Home).
- Bringing in facts from an outside source as evidence (Marianne Hersch, and the points of her article).
- Using diction to make it seem like her statements are facts more so than beliefs about Bechdel’s intentions. This subliminally helps the reader believe her arguments more.
