Reading and Seeing Women’s Life Writing Through Adrienne Rich in Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother?

ABSTRACT

Alison Bechdel’s 2012 autography Are You My Mother? makes visible the power of a feminist poetics of revision. In this graphic memoir, Bechdel uses women’s writing and texts, and the intertextual, intersubjective relationships they engender, to show and tell the story of the subject as revisable. To tell the story of such a revisable self, a self revised through reading and writing, is a form of feminist practice, and to tell it in comics is to render that practice uniquely visible. Close attention has yet to be paid in readings of Are You My Mother? to another feminist lesbian woman writer who was preoccupied with the process of re-visioning the subject through reading and writing: Adrienne Rich. Rich is a touchstone for Bechdel’s parallel self-narratives of erotic discovery and development as an artist and a writer. Bechdel learns re-visioning the subject, through writing and revising, as a feminist practice, from Rich. Evidence of this process and practice may be found in Bechdel’s intertextual engagement with Rich’s work along with the artist’s comments on Rich, as well as archival materials such as drafts of Are You My Mother? and letters to her mother, Helen.

KEYWORDS:

• Alison Bechdel
• Adrienne Rich
• Are You My Mother?
• feminism
• life writing
• revision

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Claire Buck and Erin Kappeler for reading drafts of this article, and acknowledges with gratitude the staff of Smith College Libraries.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For further delving into Bechdel’s use of intertextuality, see Ball (2013). For a focus on Virginia Woolf, see Clewell (2017). For a trenchant critique of literary scholars who privilege and thereby misread Bechdel’s appropriation of canonical texts, see Pizzino (2016).

2 The emphasis is Galvan’s, and the quoted material from Rich appears in ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’ (Rich 1994).

3 Bennett is positing this argument, particularly with regard to ‘closure’, in riposte to Scott McCloud’s influential Understanding Comics (McCloud 1994).

4 ‘Bob’ refers to Helen’s romantic partner, who makes an appearance in Are You My Mother? Readers of Bechdel’s work will recall that Helen’s husband and Bechdel’s father, Bruce Bechdel, was killed by a truck in 1980, an apparent suicide—the story of Fun Home.

5 I follow the convention in writing about Bechdel’s work of referring to ‘Alison’ as the character-narrator figured in the text through word and image, and to ‘Bechdel’ as the author and artist.

6 Slashes are used to indicate that quoted lines are taken from different panels that appear in sequence. These are of course distinct from the slashes used to differentiate lines of poetry, but Bennett on the application of DuPlessis’s notion of ‘segmentivity’ to comics, and the thinking through of panels and pages in terms of the segmentivity one finds in poems (110), is worth recalling here.

7 Words become maps, and maps make visible story as well as place, throughout Bechdel’s work. Several maps of Beech Creek, Bechdel’s hometown, appear in Fun Home, and an important early pair of images in Are You My Mother? depict maps of London tracing the intersecting paths of Virginia Woolf and D. W. Winnicott in Bloomsbury (25–26). The intersecting of these figures in the imagined space of the city manifest Bechdel’s themes of the reparative potential of art (Clewell 2017, 62). For more on maps in Bechdel’s work, see Kelp-Stebbins (2020).

8 See Watson (2012).

9 Monica B. Pearl outlines the ways in which lesbian memoir and autobiography seeks to dismantle the conventional containers and conventions of the genre: ‘Generic disruption may in fact be the most prevalent distinguishing characteristic of lesbian memoir or autobiography’ (Pearl 2015, 169). In revolutionising the comics form, Bechdel has also revolutionised the genre of lesbian memoir, and this project is told overtly in scenes of lesbian reading in both Fun Home and Are You My Mother?. Readers should also be aware of William J. Camponovo’s 2020 dissertation, ‘“An Instrument in the Shape / of a Woman”: Reading as Re-Vision in Adrienne Rich’ (Graduate Centre of the City University of New York). Camponovo offers a detailed analysis of Rich’s poetry and prose, as well as her teaching archive at CUNY, to show that reading, not just writing, is an integral part of her process of constructing an autobiographical self—another critical point of contact with Bechdel that would certainly be worth exploring further.

10 For lines from ‘From a Survivor’, see Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and Prose (Rich 1993b). The significance of these lines resonates all the more strongly when one considers the final image of Fun Home, wherein the child Alison leaps into a swimming pool towards the waiting arms of her father.

11 Bechdel revealed the original title of what would become Are You My Mother? on her blog (Bechdel 2008).

12 See also Watson (2008, 29).

13 Italics mine.

14 In addition to the collection of interviews Alison Bechdel: Conversations, edited by Rachel R. Martin (Martin 2018), see interviews even earlier than those gathered, such as with June Thomas (Bechdel and Thomas 1988). Bechdel details the origins of Dykes to Watch Out For, the development of her career as a cartoonist, and her early forays into autobiographical comics in the self-assembled anthology The Indelible Alison Bechdel: Confessions, Comix, and Miscellaneous Dykes to Watch Out For (Bechdel 1998).

15 See also Ball, who studies Bechdel’s own intertextuality with herself as a form of intersubjectivity in narrative.

16 Bechdel observes that this line does not appear in the published version of ‘Blood, Bread, and Poetry’, with the comment, ‘Rich seems to have reconsidered it’. This passing reference to the possibility of revision is worth noting, though so is the fact that the line actually does appear in the 1969 poem ‘The Blue Ghazals’, published in the 1971 book The Will to Change (Rich 1971).

17 In ‘Not How to Write Poetry but Wherefore’, Rich writes: ‘I was exceptionally well grounded in formal technique, and I loved the craft. What I was groping for was something larger, a sense of vocation, what it means to live as a poet—not how to write poetry, but wherefore. In my early twenties I took as guide a poet of extreme division, an insurance salesman possessed by the imagination. But if I was going to have to write myself out of my own divisions, Wallace Stevens wasn’t the worst choice I could have made’ (195–196). In What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (Rich 2003).

18 For Tyler Bradway, Are You My Mother? ‘stag[es] … the conflicting cultural pressures of heteronormativity and queerness’ and ‘visualizes the double binds of heteronormative kinship that impinge on the lesbian author’. In The Comics of Alison Bechdel (Bradway 2019, 149).

19 Interestingly, it was in an attempt to answer this question that I visited the archives at Smith College, where I found Bechdel’s letters to her mother, but none in return.

20 Helen is depicted as pregnant during the writing of this poem. In a sequence of panels that appears earlier than the page discussed here, in chapter 4, Bechdel intercuts images of Helen typing the poems with Alison making her way through a box of letters. The sequence concludes with a small square panel depicting a foetus, atop a longer horizontal panel depicting Helen at her typewriter, and an arrow breaking through the top border of the longer panel pointing from the foetus panel to Helen’s body, drawn with a cut-away to indicate where the foetus would be (138). As far back as 1994, Bechdel had been trying to figure out how to depict pregnancy and childbirth in comics. Upon developing the storyline in Dykes to Watch Out For wherein longtime partners Clarice and Toni give birth to their child Raffi, Bechdel enlisted the assistance of the librarian in charge of the Russel B. Nye Popular Culture Collection at Michigan State University to identify theories and techniques of comics art that would facilitate this work (personal communication via email, July 16, 2019). I am comfortable extrapolating this into the possibility that Bechdel herself was looking to formulate a feminist theory of comics art. How might one, for instance, develop a feminist counter to Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics (McCloud 1994) or Nick Sousanis’s Unflattening (Sousanis 2015)?

21 rpt. in Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and Prose (Rich 1993b, 299–300).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by faculty development funding provided by Widener University, Chester, PA, USA.

Notes on contributors

Janine Utell

Janine Utell is author of several books, most recently Howard Cruse and Literary Couples and Twentieth-Century Life Writing, as well as the editor of The Comics of Alison Bechdel and Teaching Modernist Women’s Writing in English.