By reading The importance of being earnest we can draw parallels to one another and that by understanding why characters from this play behave the way they do we can then draw parallels to Fun Home.
In The importance of being earnest, the main idea of the play is of the characters taking on different names in order to make themselves more appealing such as the name Earnest which is seen as a much better and higher stature name than Jack. This idea of becoming another persona is there to hide the daily activities of the character, but it could also show a sign of not fully being confident or loving yourself and how because you don’t believe in yourself you want to be someone who is better and so having a name like Earnest can bring up your self-esteem. This is connected to the dad from Fun home where he is creating this persona of a person who is very talented, calm and overall looked at as a cool figure. All this is done to hide his real homosexuality because he is not fully confident in expressed himself out to the public like this. By understanding the reasoning for why characters from The importance of being earnest take on a different persona we get a deeper feeling of why characters (dad) from Fun home take a different persona.
The importance of being earnest involves many satires as well with one in particular where Lady Bracknell questions the tradition of marriage or more like shows how does not like the idea of marriage. We see how she is all for marriage which leads to higher amounts of money and social status but very against marriage for love which is the common ideology of marriage for most people. We can see how this relates to Fun home because we see how the wife of the husband knows about his sexuality for a long time and also knows that he is basically an angry person (someone you might not want to live the rest of your life with) but despite this, she stills stays in the marriage to maintain the social status that has been gained even if it is a very one-sided relationship in terms of power over choices.
Good – two effective connections between the works and their implications for our understanding. Try to make your expression more precise by naming the characters (Helen and Bruce), and consider how Lady B and Helen are also notably different as characters…what might this add to our understanding of Bechdel’s mother Helen?