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![]() ![]() The closing reference to Daedalus and Icarus underlines this complication. This unclear relationship is further distorted by Bechdel’s act of writing a story about her father, in which she has ultimate control over how she crafts his character. The mixed-up parallels between Alison, her father, Icarus, and Daedalus highlight the unclear relationship of power between Alison and her dad. This confusion recalls the opening comparison to Icarus and Daedalus. While her father formally holds authority as the one who makes family decisions, Alison feels confused about who really parents whom. ![]() “Which of us was the father?” she asks herself (221). As she and her father share stories about their queerness, she feels “distinctly parental listening to his shamefaced recitation” (221). ![]() Despite this power, as Alison matures, her relationship with her father changes so that she doubts his ultimate authority. In this way, Bechdel establishes the dominion her father has over her family and her in a traditional head of the household way. She recalls that “something vital was missing…an elasticity, a margin for error” (18). Images show him spanking her presumably for an imperfectly completed task and him asking her to change her clothing because the necklines do not match (18, 15). Throughout the first chapter, most of the action consists of him ordering Alison and her siblings to do various household tasks. On one hand, Alison’s father’s authority is dominant in the family. This ambiguity emphasizes the confused distribution of fatherliness between her and her dad. Here, common sense and the image contradict text, leaving it ambiguous who is who. However, the text goes on to say, “it was not me but my father who was to plummet from the sky,” casting him as Icarus and her as the senior Daedalus (4). This assumption is strengthened by the image in the panel in which she establishes the parallel: Alison loses her balance on her father’s legs and falls to the ground. When she explicitly describes her connection with her father as a “reenactment of this mythic relationship” between Daedalus and Icarus, it would be logical to assume that Daedalus is to her dad as she is to Icarus, since she is the child (4). She notes that in the circus, this kind of acrobatics is called “Icarian games” (3). The graphic novel begins with Bechdel elevated on her father’s legs and hands, playing airplane. In the parallels that Bechdel draws between her relationship with her father and the Daedalus-Icarus story, the author makes it unclear which figure represents her and which her dad. Her relationship to the authority of her father is further complicated within the meta-narrative of the novel, in which she struggles with the ultimate dominion over her father’s identity that she has as an author creating him as a character in her work. In her childhood as she describes it, sometimes Bechdel feels more powerful than her father, whereas sometimes she feels her father’s authority was decisive. Bechdel distorts the Daedalus-Icarus narrative to illuminate the confusions of power she experiences in her relationship with her father. ![]()
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