49 pages • 1 hour read
Alison BechdelAre You My Mother?: A Comic Drama
Nonfiction | Graphic Novel/Book | Adult | Published in 2012A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Key Figures
Alison Bechdel
Alison Bechdel (1960-Present) grew up in Pennsylvania as the oldest of three children. She moved to Manhattan after graduating from Oberlin College and syndicates the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, about a group of lesbian friends and couples, which appeared in feminist and underground newspapers from 1983 to 2008. A 1985 strip was the inspiration for the “Bechdel test,” a measure of a movie’s treatment of women based on two values: whether there is more than one woman, and whether they discuss topics other than men.
In 2006, Bechdel published the Eisner-winning Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic as a graphic memoir of her father and her sexual awakening. The work became a 2013 theatrical adaptation that won five Tony Awards, including Best Musical. She also won the 2014 MacArthur “Genius” Award. Bechdel’s introspective nature and raw art style allow her to write intricate graphic memoirs combining personal narrative with literary discourse (Ray, Michael. “Alison Bechdel.” Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Alison-Bechdel. Accessed 7/11/2020).
Bechdel begins Are You My Mother? by calling herself “a smarmy, self-indulgent, solipsistic piece of shit” (5). Alison’s first recourse is to blame herself for her problems, and she sees the accidents that delay her work on Fun Home as subconscious punishments. When her therapists try to assure her that she is talented and kind, she rejects their assessment. While she trusts them, she also desires to find her own solutions through readings and dream interpretations. When Jocelyn suggests that she’s angry about her parents, Alison either denies it or only admits to an empty feeling that is a form of Transference of anger.
Are You My Mother? focuses on Bechdel’s relationship with her mother, who she feels both unloved by and indebted to. Craving her explicit love, Alison creates her own mind-psyche to process this information and becomes intensely self-critical to the point of deleting names from her childhood diaries in fear of retribution. This affects Alison’s relationships as an adult as she experiences professional envy and is “acutely unclear” what she means when she tells Eloise that she loves her (221). Alison battles these problems through therapy, allowing her to acknowledge that even if she does not get what she wants from people, it is not her fault.
Bechdel intends Are You My Mother? to be a multifaceted work where each readthrough reveals new insights. The book also depicts her creative process, such as her use of transcribed phone calls and photo references. She admits, however, that she is being deliberate and portrays a version of herself to the reader, suggesting that she is an upfront but unreliable narrator.
Helen Fontana Bechdel
Helen Fontana Bechdel (1933-2013) is Alison’s mother. While her name is visible on some articles, Alison only refers to her as “mother” or “mom.” Are You My Mother? is specifically and solely an examination of the relationship between Alison and Helen told from Bechdel’s point of view. Bechdel doesn’t ask other family members for their perspective or reproduce Helen’s writing output.
Helen initially appears inscrutable, defensive, and prone to tangents. Bechdel values her mother’s editing advice not only for her skill, but because it creates a medium where she has to comment on her work. The theater, Helen’s domain, also serves this purpose. In addition, Bechdel mentions how writing about her mother while she is still alive presents new challenges in comparison to Fun Home.
Bechdel reveals that Helen is as much a victim of circumstances as she is. Helen is separated from her parents during World War II and adapts to a patriarchal mentality that convinces her to freeze her creative aspirations. Bechdel implies there is a family history of depression as Helen needs mental help after the sequential death of her parents, and her lesson from her mother suggests unresolved conflict.
She faces opposition from Bruce about having children, and their toxic marriage drains her energy. While Helen struggles to be Winnicott’s Good-Enough Mother, Alison’s journey of self-discovery allows her to recognize that “there’s no need to jabber” about their love for each other (286).
Some background knowledge from Fun Home can better explain Helen’s motivations. During Alison’s childhood, Bruce has affairs with family friends and his students. Her sentiment that, “Your father came so close to blowing everything” (251) suggests that Helen makes difficult decisions to protect herself and the children (Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Houghton Mifflin, 2006). This recontextualizes her behavior in scenes such as when she discovers Alison’s drawing and when Alison overhears her crying.
As a poet and teacher, Helen is aware that people are curious about a writer’s personal life, so having the Bechdel name on an LGBTQ work will raise questions. This also influences her literary views, which reflect a “Death of the Author” mentality of ignoring a creator’s biography and intent. Her decision to allow Helen to write Fun Home, while limiting her help and cautioning against making the book too negative, represents a compromise between these feelings and a recognition of Alison’s independence.
Jocelyn & Carol
While Alison seeks her own answers through studying psychoanalysis, her biggest breakthroughs come through her therapy sessions with Jocelyn and Carol. Both serve as a framing device for Alison to discuss her mental health.
Alison comes to Jocelyn after a severe bout of depression stemming from her troubled personal life and reawakened childhood wounds. Jocelyn does not receive psychoanalysis training until after Alison leaves Minnesota, so she provides standard therapy where Alison sits on the couch and the two focus on short-term symptom relief. Jocelyn emits an affection that is so new to Alison that she hates “being just another client” (105). While assuming the role of mother is part of the healing process, Jocelyn walks back some ethically improper interactions like revealing personal details about her life.
Alison resists Jocelyn’s suggestion that she is angry at her parents, and Bechdel mentions Winnicott’s warning in “The Use of an Object” that psychoanalysts who jump to conclusions can impede their patient’s growth. At the same time, Alison needs to see herself as a bad person and brushes off Jocelyn’s attempts to praise her. Jocelyn is able to break through Alison’s defenses and later hugs her when Alison starts to cry during a session—an acceptable ethics violation in the therapist’s eyes.
In contrast to Jocelyn, Carol is already a trained psychoanalyst who provides long-term support, often with the patient lying on the couch to better access their unconscious. Carol uses the term aggression instead of anger, which Alison responds to better, believing that it “broke the grip of the terrible feeling” (72). Carol also asks open-ended questions and provides technical definitions that Alison writes down.
Alison never develops maternal love for Carol and complains about retreading old ground. This is because Alison has made progress thanks to Jocelyn. Jocelyn’s passing without Alison’s knowledge is tragic, but a pre-breakthrough Alison would’ve obsessed over her disease and Cathect to her even more. In that sense, their sessions were a success.
Donald Woods Winnicott
Donald Woods Winnicott (1896-1971) began his career as a pediatrician before undergoing psychoanalysis training, eventually becoming the first male child psychoanalyst. Working with patients across age groups, Winnicott shifted the field’s focus from Freudian psychosexual theories to parent-infant relationships and served two tenures as president of the British Psychoanalytical Society. His research included three phases: a search for the human condition that begins at childcare; the use of the transitional object to separate the child from the parent; and “The Use of an Object” as a means to explain human aggression (“Donald Woods Winnicott.” Institute of Psychoanalysis. https://psychoanalysis.org.uk/our-authors-and-theorists/donald-woods-winnicott. Accessed 7/13/2020).
Winnicott is not the first psychoanalyst that Bechdel goes to for answers, but the two have a lot in common. They both display mannerisms that defy gender norms, experience a sexual awakening, enjoy Virginia Woolf, and are fixated on their mothers. Winnicott is also willing to speak to children at their level and explain their ideas in an animated way. While adhering to some period norms, Winnicott supports women’s rights and is the first to use “he or she” as a neutral pronoun in his papers, with Bechdel noting “this alone makes me love him” (174). However, she does push back on some of his ideas, such as the lack of magic in the mother-child bond and his habit of linking everything back to childhood memories.
Are You My Mother? is partly a biography of Winnicott’s professional career, but he also serves as the cohesive element that unites Bechdel’s subjects. Each chapter’s name comes from a Winnicott paper, and Bechdel applies his work to real-life situations, such as Helen’s mirror ritual. When Alison says that she is writing around something during her first draft, a picture of Winnicott is in the background, and her desire to incorporate his writings influences her decision to restart the book. The psychoanalyst’s papers allow the reader to connect academic text to real-world events and better understand Alison and Helen’s relationship.
Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was a pioneer in modernist literature and feminist thought. While benefitting from an upper-class education and lifestyle, Woolf developed an intense depression stemming from sexual assault and the death of her mother. She published her first novel, The Voyage Out, in 1915, and in 1917 she and her husband established Hogarth Press, which released both her works and those of psychoanalysts like Winnicott. She developed a lifelong friendship and brief affair with the author Vita Sackville-West, which became the inspiration for the genderbending satire Orlando. Suffering from depression and fearing Nazi takeover, Woolf committed suicide after losing her home during the Blitz. (“Virginia Woolf.” Biography.com. https://www.biography.com/writer/virginia-woolf. Accessed 7/14/2020)
Bechdel mirrors Woolf with a writing style that focuses on stream-of-consciousness narrative, autobiographical details, and transgressive ideas. In Are You My Mother?, Bechdel focuses on Woolf’s diaries, her feminist writings, and the autobiographical To the Lighthouse, which is the source of the preface quote: “For nothing was simply one thing.” This foreshadows the difficulty of explaining her relationship to Helen within the book.
Early on, Bechdel is jealous that Woolf writes a book that frees her from her family issues. The Ramsays in To the Lighthouse are stand-ins for Woolf’s parents, and Bechdel compares them to her own parents—the domineering, plate-throwing Bruce, and the restrained Helen. Bechdel also compares herself to Lily, the painter in charge of creating a portrait of Mrs. Ramsay. Like Lily, Alison struggles to capture her mother’s spirit, and the 17-year-gap when she stops writing about herself mirrors the decade-long intermission between the book’s major parts.
The only writing by Woolf that Helen reads is “A Room of One’s Own,” an essay originating from a 1928 lecture to Cambridge University students. In it, Woolf argues that women cannot write literature without personal and financial freedom. Bechdel includes a passage on 16th century literature, where Woolf writes that it’s “obviously impossible” for women to write poetry at the time of Shakespeare when they are the ones tending to sick children, dying young, and living in cramped spaces (187). The academics of the 1950s downplay Woolf’s importance, so Alison assumes Helen reads the essay during her revival period in the 1970s.
Bechdel also summarizes Adrienne Rich’s critique of the essay, noting that it is “in the tone of a woman almost in touch with her anger” and that Woolf still writes in the detached manner that the patriarchal literary world favors (170). This relates to Helen’s own creative output as she has feminist leanings but ultimately sides with traditionalism.
