In Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics, Hillary L. Chute argues that feminist theories of life writing will benefit by considering the narrative strategies used in the first-person graphic narratives by five female artists: Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Phoebe Gloeckner, Lynda Barry, Marjane Satrapi, and Alison Bechdel. Chute prefers the term graphic narrative, “a book-length work composed in the medium of comics,” to the more common “graphic novel”: as she argues, these authors’ works are not novels, but rather a liminal genre of life writing that Barry calls “autobifictionalography” (3). All of these authors depict their traumatic experiences as disturbingly ordinary, yet each acquires narrative authority through the aesthetic freedom granted by the genre. These artists address unspeakable trauma, but their narratives are not merely cathartic or reworking politicized representations of female oppression; rather they vindicate the innovative representational power of the medium. Chute rightly claims that “graphic narratives, experimental and accessible, will play an important role in defining feminisms,” and presents this text to counter the absence of feminist scholarship on this genre (2). Chute's investigation coheres by showing how these authors present “challenging images” that cannot be found elsewhere, and their handling of such material resists a conventional politicizing of female trauma.
The analysis of Kominsky-Crumb's works, such as Love That Bunch and Need More Love: A Graphic Memoir, makes for an excellent introduction to Chute's discussion. Though often overshadowed by her husband Robert Crumb, author of Zap Comix, Kominsky-Crumb contributed significantly to the evolution of underground comics in the 1960s. Her work is the least commercial of those explored in Graphic Women, in part because she represents her material reality as ugly, absurd, and conflicted. Too frequently, Kominsky-Crumb's handling has been dismissed as unskilled and inconsistent, qualities that Chute identifies as central to her representation of the “messiness of bodies” and the paradoxes of female sexual identity (38). Here, female sexuality is simultaneously arousing and repellant, resisting reductive categorization by an objectifying male gaze. Acknowledging the conflicted nature of a female body as equally empowering and mortifying, Kominsky-Crumb posits multiple female identities to embrace the full range of sexual experience, including trauma. Thus, her work resists the politicized evaluation of sexual trauma as victimizing—a move that disturbed many of Kominsky-Crumb's feminist contemporaries. The reality she depicts often repels the male gaze and offends traditional feminist perspectives, but accepting the ordinary nature of ugly reality contributes to the dynamism of Kominsky-Crumb's work.
Phoebe Gloeckner's A Child's Life and Other Stories and The Diary of a Teenage Girl: An Account in Words and Pictures also challenge readers with ambivalent depictions of sexual trauma. Trained as a medical illustrator, Gloeckner creates shockingly realistic, highly detailed images of trauma that override the commonly cartoonish quality of the genre, creating a dark, unflinching narrative. Gloeckner never declares herself the subject of these texts, yet loads images with autobiographical references. While Kominsky-Crumb resists associating titillation with her sexual images, Gloeckner's work forces readers to see that viewing sexual acts may be simultaneously arousing and disgusting. Here Chute masters the challenge of explaining Gloeckner's ambivalent depiction of a teenaged girl's sexual abuse: the narrator is both her own agent, self-destructively acting on her own desires, and a victim of an adult's emotional manipulations. The quality of Gloeckner's handling complicates the reception of the narrative when “its visual testimony offers sexual trauma as devastating and erotic spectacle” (79). Given Gloeckner's unapologetic representation of the erotic quality of sexual trauma—her work has often been defined as pornographic—Chute skillfully navigates through the readers’ shock to establish a firm case for the artist's complex ethical ambition to represent the “confusion that sexual trauma might provoke” (78).
Lynda Barry is perhaps the most prolific artist discussed in this text, and the range of her work allows Chute to address Barry's formal strategies that are widely employed in this genre. However, unlike the other artists, Barry creates tensions by only suggesting scenes of trauma rather than depicting them, risking readers’ discomfort as they imagine the trauma by viewing its aftereffects. This oblique representation exploits every aspect of the artistic production: the space between panes suggests deliberate omissions, and fluctuating types and entries in handwriting add tone and emphasis to the narrative voice. Barry's innovations challenge simplistic definitions of the cartoon: even though her narratives are told through the medium of comics, their content is often unexpectedly dark; even though they use a popular genre, the narrative methods are sophisticated. Such works as Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies!, It's So Magic, and One Hundred Demons chart the evolution of Barry's style over nearly thirty years. Chute could easily produce a monograph on Barry's work alone, yet she cleanly uses her analysis to illuminate what all of these artists achieve in this medium. She writes: “The basic structural form of comics—which replicates the structure of traumatic memory with its fragmentation, condensation, and placement of the elements in space—is able to express the movement of memory. It both evokes and provokes memory: placing themselves in space, authors may forcefully convey the shifting layers of memory and create a peculiar entry point for representing experience” (114). Barry's use of highly flexible forms facilitates all that “autobifictionalography” entails for her. Though her works suggest that parts of her narratives tell her own story, by requiring the reader to imaginatively contribute to the narrative of trauma, she implies that these memories are collective: they tell her story and the story of many others.
Collective memory also inspires Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, a work memorializing both personal and national trauma. Satrapi employs the double lens of an adult's narrative about herself as a ten-year-old witnessing the effects of the 1980 Iranian Revolution. She skillfully overrides conceptions of the child narrator as a naïve spectator: when young Marji questions the history of the Revolution and its effects, readers—often uniformed Westerners—are educated alongside her. Her keen questions and perceptions, however, illuminate the shared national trauma in sophisticated ways. Satrapi's techniques, borrowed from the German expressionists, facilitate this. Some critics have dismissed Satrapi as unskilled, but, as Chute notes, this fails to recognize how her style invokes a child's perception of history and the overwhelming anguish of the Iranian people. Besides memorializing a nation's trauma, Satrapi also challenges notions that art requires virtuosity to be effective. However simple, Satrapi's formal choices reflect not only how memory simplifies and reorganizes the experience of trauma in order to process it, but also how those tactics fail in the face of widespread suffering.
All of the works Chute explores rely on the flexibility of the cartoon form to create complex narratives about trauma and memory; this is especially true for Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, a graphic-narrative memorial to her father, who committed suicide after years of hiding his homosexuality. Bechdel's drawing reproduces archival evidence—family photographs and letters, pages from newspapers and novels—to support her adult narrative voice as she unravels the past, tracing her nascent identity as a lesbian and artist in response to her father's stifled sexual and artistic expression. Every aspect of the page testifies to her artistic freedom as she constructs “a deeply crafted, intensely structured object” of images and text (178). Further, Chute argues that Bechdel's narrative innovations justify serious academic consideration of the graphic narrative in contemporary and US literature. As a literary work, Fun Home reveals its story through an elliptical pattern of knowing and not-knowing, but its powerful dynamic depends on its forms, which also underpin its popular and critical success. By relaying memory through images, the complexities of Bechdel's narrative become accessible.
A few peculiar editorial choices do not weaken Chute's project, though they seem counterintuitive. For example, chapter one devotes a page to an exhaustive list of sex acts in Kominsky-Crumb's collaborative work, The Complete Dirty Laundry Comics. The amount of detail fails to contribute much to the overarching argument. In contrast, Chute notes the absence of academic criticism on Kominsky-Crumb, but relegates criticism by other figures in cartooning, such as Harvey Pekar, to the notes. However biased and dismissive we find Pekar's evaluations, placing them in the body of the text would support Chute's larger claims more effectively. The choice of illustrations is also sometimes puzzling. Placing black-and-white illustrations in the chapter that addresses them makes sense, but the logic behind the color plates is elusive. They include several pages from Bechdel's work, even though the color differs only slightly from the black-and-white illustrations already included. Bechdel's work is not strictly black and white—the wash is greenish, creating a different effect than gray tone—but the difference does not seem great enough to warrant reproducing them in both black and white and color. The text would benefit from more color reproductions of Barry's works that use a collage technique since it reveals more depth in color plates than in black-and-white reproduction. However, these choices do not detract from Chute's overall argument. In a culture that increasingly relies on the savvy reading of the visual, Chute's work is timely, powerful, and necessary for both feminist and auto|biographical criticism. Readers already familiar with the graphic narrative will also recognize the significance of Chute's work; reading Graphic Women will rightly extend the audience for these artists and attract critical engagement.