In “Black Swan Green”, the main character Jason Taylor is faced with a volatile upbringing, partly due to his father, Michael Taylor. In the many family scenes Jason shows the reader, we see Michael constantly try to assert his dominance over the whole family by not allowing his mother to get new decor, hiding bills and pushing his opinions onto others. We are introduced to his strict regimen at the beginning of the book, with the first two lines being, “Do not set foot in my office. That was Dad’s rule.” (Mitchell 1). Additionally, more tension in the Taylor household is revealed to the reader because Michael seems to have a double life - he had an affair with a woman named Cynthia, which added more strain to Michael and his wife, Helena’s marriage.
To me, I found a lot of interesting parallels between Michael and Bruce Bechdel, the father of Alison Bechdel. The first one is that both characters are obsessively devoted to activities outside of their family to the point that it starts to affect home life. For Michael, it's work: when he loses his job he remarks that he never had time to take Julia and Jason to do fun things. For Bruce, it’s decorating his home: Alison remarks that he treats his furniture like his kids. Furthermore, both men have secret lives. Michael has his affair with Cynthia, while Bruce has relationships with his high school students. Both men act in order to advance their “social status” - Michael sucks up to his boss Craig Salt, while Bruce tries to portray himself as a perfect “family man”. Lastly, for both men, their relationship with their kids improves throughout the entire novel. For Michael, he finally starts to talk to Jason and treats him like his kid, instead of a chore. For Bruce, he bonds with Alison over their shared love of literature and their unspoken understanding of each other's identity.
I think it is interesting that Michael and Bruce share so many parallels, despite being from very different stories. In particular, their tense relationship with their kids is something I’ve also observed in other Coming-Of-Age novels, for example, in The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood has a very strained view of her mother. It could be interesting to investigate how tense familial relationships contribute to a Coming-Of-Age narrative.
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