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.
An interesting thread between both of the fathers in these books is in fact their harshness to their children. This relationship they developed with them though was not just because that's how they thought to raise their children, they came from deep down insecurities. Michael and Bruce both struggles internally and were beaten up in their own lives and unfortunately made their children feel similarly. Coming of age is most definitely influenced by family and you did a great job breaking this down!
ReplyDeleteHi Renee,
ReplyDeleteThis post makes a lot of interesting comparisons. I had never thought about just how similar Bruce and Michael were, but now that you've listed everything out, it seems totally obvious. I will add, though, that even though Bruce and Michael share a huge number of traits, Alison and Jason don't seem to have nearly as much connective tissue as they deal with very different internal problems within their respective books. I would also argue that Jason's relationship with Michael is portrayed in a much more positive light than Alison's relationship with Bruce. The entirety of Fun Home is coated in a layer of melancholy; from the get go, Alison doesn't hesitate to express her negative feelings towards her father. This might partially be a result of Bruce playing such an important role in Fun Home. Meanwhile, Jason has so much other stuff going on in his life, that the issues he has regarding his relationship with his father are often overshadowed by the more in-your-face problems he faces at school.
Hey Renee! I just want to start off by commenting on your comparison between Michael Taylor and Bruce Bechdel, because the parallels you pointed out about control and image make the connection feel really convincing and substantiated. Your point about both fathers investing so much of themselves in things outside the family was especially interesting to me, and it made me wonder whether their children come of age partly by learning how to see through those performances. Since I also did my post on Michael Taylor, this post really resonated with me and I agreed with almost all of your takes! Overall, good blog post Renee!
ReplyDeleteHi Renee! I definitely agree that there are so many similarities between Bruce Bechdel and Michael Taylor. Your example about how they both treat their families due to outside distractions is one of the biggest connections. Both Bruce and Michael put so much time and effort into their jobs that they forgot about their responsibilities as fathers to spend time with their kids. Your observation about tense relationships between kids and their parents in every coming-of-age novel is also something I never realized, but is definitely very true. Overall, great blog!
ReplyDeleteI find it interesting how Bruce Bechdel and Michael Taylor are both trying to live up to the same patriarchal standard of straight manhood, but have trouble fitting that mold for different reasons. While Bruce is excluded from hegemonic masculinity because he is gay, Michael is excluded because of his socioeconomic status and his place in the hierarchy of his peers. So, they are trying to perform a similar vision of masculinity, but have very different experiences doing so.
ReplyDeleteHi Renee, this is a really interesting comparison. One part is how their actions affect their child: secrecy in both cases makes them less confident in their identity and self-expression than if they had an unmasked father. And by the end, both characters have deep necessary conversations with their father that help them understand each other more than in the alienated start.
ReplyDeleteHi Renee! I really like the topic of this book as I always like comparing characters and themes between different books. I definitely agree about all your points drawing comparisons between Michael and Bruce, and I especially like the part about their relationship growing throughout the book, and I wonder if that is a consistent theme of coming of age novels (relationships with parents). I also think that the mother in both books have very similar roles, with them both being alienated and sometimes having toxic relationship with with the father.
ReplyDeleteHi Renee! You draw a really interesting comparison. I think it's interesting that, in both books, a development in the relationships between Jason and Alison and their respective fathers seems to be a crucial part of their coming of age. In both books, the kids get disappointed by their fathers (both happen to be having affairs), but they also both eventually seem to reach a point of understanding (Jason's moment in the driveway with his father, and Alison coming out to her father). Overall, great blog!
ReplyDeleteThese are indeed some compelling parallels between these ambivalent father-figures, and I'm especially struck by the "double life" component of both. (Stay tuned for Benji's commentary on the surprising number of families in his orbit wherein fathers had been leading double lives--it seems like a much more common phenomenon in these books than in my own experience of the 1980s!) In Michael's case, as the novel unfolds, we get the clear sense that his situation with Cynthia (which ends up being much more complicated and much less of a cliche "middle-aged man with mistress" situation than we might initially suspect) overlaps with his work life: all of these work-related trips he's going on throughout the novel, the fact that they'd reconnected through a work-related connection. Going all the way back to the first line of the novel, we have to understand Michael's "control freak" approach as being motivated by his fear of exposure: he might seem like a tyrant about his personal space, with his "iron-clad" rules about the office, but when we reread these early scenes, it's pretty obvious that he mainly wants to control who does and doesn't answer the phone. We get the sense that Michael isn't "naturally" disposed to be a tyrant around the house (although this sure seems like Bruce's main mode); he is dealing with a sketchy situation and doing his best to conceal those activities from his family. Does this make his "tyranny" more understandable or sympathetic? Maybe.
ReplyDeleteHi Renee, I'd never noticed those parallels you described before. This was a really interesting blog! I wonder if these common traits seen across the fathers have something to do with the gender norms of the time (as well as the fathers' own upbringings). Perhaps their cold, secretive affect is related to the conventions as to how men of that time period should act ("boys don't cry" or "man up")? Overall, I think the topic is fascinating!
ReplyDeleteHi Renee,
ReplyDeleteI like the idea of comparing both parental figures in the past two books we've read, especially since The Belljar and Catcher In The Rye barely featured their father characters. Michael Taylor and Bruce Bechdel have a lot of parallels, but they are also foils to each other because one of them is doing everything in their power to control their house's appearance and the other is doing everything in their power to stop the control of their house's appearance. Great blog!
Hi Renee! The clear connection between Michael and Bruce, especially in how their secret lives and controlling behavior hurt their families I think is really important. Not the first book we've read that a strained parent-child or sibling relationships hint to the coming of age part.
ReplyDeleteHi Renee,
ReplyDeleteI'm glad you wrote on this argument, and I think there is so much more to be said about it. Both fathers are super insecure, pretty neglectful of their children, not romantic, and looking for validation from the external world (not their family). I also love the additional detail you put in about them both having secret lives, and I find it so interesting that their secret lives both involve cheating. There are so many parallels to be drawn between the fathers even though the families they are in are both depicted very differently.
Hi Renee!! I really enjoyed reading your blog post. I never really thought that Michael and Bruce could be similar, but after reading your post, I see it. One of the interesting similarities that you mentioned in your blog is the complicated relationship with their kids. Both parents struggle to sort of connect with their children because they are doing other things. It is also a coincidence that they both cheated on their wives. I enjoyed all the points you made. Good Job!!!
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