What does knowing the play that Bechdel references in Fun Home contribute to our understanding of it?

The Importance of Being Earnest is a play of deception and pretending, by how Jack and Algernon are deceiving their partners because of their obsession to names and not love. The same goes with Fun Home, where one of the reasons Bruce married Helen was to hide his sexuality, and the marriage barely had much love in the end. The deceitful and love-less marriage being satirised in the play, Bruce’s marriage can be also thought as an absurd and an almost ridiculous thing at some point too.

How Oscar Wilde spends a double life can be connected to the members of Alison’s family. Bruce, being a homosexual trying to hide his sexuality using marriage, has constantly worn a mask throughout his life, pretending to be a good father and husband. Helen, who is also barely holding herself with the unhappy marriage and her busy real life, uses the play to be a confident proud woman where in real life she is not. In chapter six where the reference of The Importance of Being Earnest is used, even Alison is seen pretending to be someone else, for example the police, clowns, and men in formal clothes. When Alison wears his father’s clothes, she describes the sensation saying it was like being ‘fluent in a language’ that she’d never been taught. Just like how Oscar Wilded needed to spend a double-life being a play-write for both middle-class heterosexuals and homosexuals, it seems as though the family members were in need of pretending to be someone else, and spending a double life.

Also, knowing that the play has gay codes that Wilde has hidden, it is somewhat interesting how Helen shows much obsession in preparing and rehearsing for it as she does in all of her productions. In result, what Helen obsesses about is similar to what she is always doing in real life-supporting her husband who is hiding his homosexual identity. It is ironical how although Helen turns out to be a complete different person as a stage actress, she is still contributing to a play which has hidden meanings of being gay.

The reference of the cucumber sandwiches appear in quite a length in Fun Home. Although at face value, the cucumber  sandwiches are just a symbol of aristocracy, they can also be a very suggestive symbol, one reason being the cucumbers having a phallic shape. Although the sandwiches are made for Lady Bracknell, it is constantly consumed by Algernon which makes the sandwiches look more of a gay symbol. In Fun Home, although it says that it was Alison’s mother who made the sandwiches, the scene that is emphasised and drawn as a picture is where Bruce is trying to eat the sandwiches his children are making. How Bruce is ‘Eating them faster’ than the children can make them, can hint how Bruce’s affairs were no way to stop, whatever the children did and thought of him.