Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama

While Helen accepts what she feels are inconsistences in Fun Home, she also tells her daughter that she would never understand her side of events (251). Afterwards, Alison dreams of removing a large tumor from her face. She finds herself at Stonehenge with dumpster-lined condos surrounding it. After extensive dream recording and psychoanalyzing, Alison begins to understand how her mind operates.

Alison compares her parents to the Ramsays in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Based on Woolf’s own parents, the husband is virulent, and the mother is idealized. Alison relates this to a day when Helen insists that she is equal to Bruce after they fight. Alison also notes that Woolf uses the word “feminist” in early drafts of the book.

Jocelyn tells Alison that her anxiety is rooted in her anger toward her mother, but Alison only feels empty. On Jocelyn’s request, Alison asks Helen what her mother’s most important lesson is. She says, “That boys are more important than girls” (264). Alison finds this hypocritical, but Helen insists that her treatment is better in comparison.

In 1964, Winnicott speaks to the Progressive League on feminism, noting that men and women have mutual envy of each other, and misogyny comes from a boy’s reliance on his mother.