Helen and "Sunday Morning"

In chapter three of Fun Home by Allison Bechdel, there is a scene where Allison and her girlfriend Joan have a visit with Allison’s mother, Helen, after the funeral of her father, Bruce. In this particular scene, Helen is giving away books from Bruce’s library and tells Joan she can have anything from the collection. Joan chooses a book of poems, which Helen is excited to say contains her favorite poem “Sunday Morning” by Wallace Stevens. She then reads the first stanza out loud with what I saw as a great understanding, so much so that Joan tried to convince Helen that she should keep it. (here is a link to the poem if you would like to read it: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/13261/sunday-morning)

The poem “Sunday Morning” is about a woman who is staying home instead of going to church on a Sunday morning. She seems both guilty for skipping church but also extremely appreciative of the calm of a Sunday morning that she would have missed had she gone. Throughout the poem, she is also seeming to have some sort of realization of the role of religion in her life, and wondering why she should spend all her time focusing on religion and getting into heaven, instead of appreciating all the wonderful things in life that come before heaven. In a way, she is viewing going to church and focusing on the afterlife as giving herself away to it, instead of giving her life to things that are much more real to her, like nature and the earth.

At first glance, it was hard to identify the connection Allison sees between this poem and her mothers life. Allison tells readers that “Sunday Morning” is about crucifixion and that Helen possibly liked the poem because it correctly represented her relationship with religion, as in being Christian more in character rather than actual practice. Additionally, Allison hints that Helen enjoys it because she understands sacrifice, most likely meaning within her marriage. Allison even compares the contrast between the pleasant Sunday morning and morbid thoughts of the afterlife with the contrast between Bruce’s obsession with perfection in appearances and the secrets he was hiding.

I also think there are some other connections to be found. For one, I wonder if in some sense it’s symbolic that Helen is reading this poem out loud following Bruce’s funeral. The fact that the poem is about enjoying your life before death is sad to think about considering Bruce most likely spent all his life in a sort of secret anxiety. It’s also symbolic because I can imagine Helen having a sort of somber freedom now that Bruce is dead. Now she can find a fulfillment in life that was impossible to achieve with Bruce controlling every aspect of their appearances.

Esther and the Writing Course

If Esther had been accepted into the writing program after New York, would she ever have fallen into a depression and tried to commit suicide? Is that a defining point in the novel that leads to the events in the rest of the story?

When Esther gets back from New York, she is under the impression that she will be accepted into a writing course and will only have to stay at home for a little while before leaving for the rest of the summer. When she gets the letter from her college and realizes she must spend the rest of the summer with nothing to do, she falls into a sort of pit of despair. She is desperately looking for things to distract herself with, like writing a novel. However, there comes an issue when she faces writer's block and is unable to keep busy by writing this story. With nothing to write about, she is left to sit with her own thoughts, something she never really did before. She was constantly jumping from school to writing programs, etc. I think Esther was doing this because she needed to stay busy and away from her own thoughts, but also because she needed writing material. 

When Esther tries writing a novel, her idea is to create a sort of parallel story to her own life with small changes. I think this tells us a little bit about Esther’s inspirations for writing being that she tends to pull a lot from her own experiences. When Esther gets back from New York, she doesn’t have any experiences to find inspiration in because the events in New York held bad memories she didn’t want to think about. She finds herself in a position where she is unable to pull inspiration from her life, but she is also stuck in the suburbs and therefore has no other experiences she can write about. Because she was rejected from the writing program, she is stuck with nothing to do because she can’t write, and only has her thoughts for company. I think this is a situation she direly wants to avoid, especially when she has just had a traumatic experience in New York and likely doesn’t want her mind to stray there. In a way, she is trapped with the thoughts New York leaves her with, yet unable to write about them. She is also left in an identity crisis, because she centers her life around writing, and is now unable to do it.

Ultimately, Esther being rejected from the writing program left her mind undistracted, which led to her falling into a sort of rabbit hole into depression, leading to her suicide attempt. And I wonder, if Esther had been accepted into the writing program, would she have ever gone through these events? Would being able to distract herself from the events in New York help her eventually work through them in a healthy way, or would it only delay the events of the second part of The Bell Jar?