ABSTRACT
Alison Bechdel’s “autographic” narrative Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama (Bechdel, 2012) creates an allegory, a “pilgrim’s progress” of psychoanalysis (Bunyan, 2008).1 Bechdel contemplates the mystery of human identity itself, told through her personal experience and study of psychoanalysis. Against her mother’s implicit charge of narcissism, Bechdel defends her focus on herself as subject matter: “But don’t you think that . . . that if you write minutely and rigorously enough about your own life . . . you can, you know, transcend your particular self?” (p. 201). Highly particularized self-depiction leads, she hopes, to a universal “I.” There is an intense abstraction, an erudition in her text, devoted as it is to conveying clinical theory and dramatizing the practice of psycho - analysis, which at the same time renders these concepts incarnate within the minute and rigorous portrayal of her subjectivity. Her particular experi - ence thus comes to embody a transcendent truth. The frank didacticism of Are You My Mother? has distanced some of Bechdel’s fans, who find her recent work “therapized and flat” (Garner, 2012) as compared with her first graphic memoir, Fun Home: A Tragicomic-a book so popular it inspired a hit musical that ran for nearly half a year at New York’s Public Theater and is now heading to Broadway (Brantley, 2013)! Other readers, however, bask in the glow of Bechdel’s capacity to achieve “the most humane kind of genius, bravely going right to the heart of things: why we are who we are.”2 A recent review in the Journal of the American Psycho analyic Association is one measure of contemporary analysts’ enthusiasm for Bechdel’s rendering of psychoanalytic theory and clinical experience (Chaplan, 2014). The utile et dulce that long held court as an
unembarrassed artistic measuring rod in previous centuries is revived in her use of allegory as a mode of expression that is intensely human while edifying and downright educational. There is pleasure in knowing, and there is pleasure in narrative: when the two come together, as they do in Bechdel’s most recent triumph, the result may well be called an allegory for our time.
