Accuracy, Truth, and Morality in Fun Home and The Bell Jar

I don’t think anyone can call the depiction of Bruce in Fun Home completely accurate. Alison Bechdel shapes his story to fit hers, makes him a character in her narrative, and she doesn’t try to hide it. She’s incredibly open about the fact that she occasionally makes wild assumptions, or interprets events or aspects of her father in specific ways to find parallels between her and her father. She presents his death as a suicide because that’s what she believes - in a way, what she wants to believe. Alison makes the assumption that he’s gay, not bisexual or any other sexual orientation, because that’s what fits in her own narrative the best, it’s what draws the tightest and most interlinked connection between their two stories. Again, she acknowledges this. Many parts of Bruce’s story are likely left out and never told, because Alison picks the parts of his narrative that are meaningful to hers. So yes, it’s not even a question that we’re not getting a fully accurate or comprehensive view of Bruce. But does this lack of accuracy matter, when it's Alison’s story, from Alison's point of view, that's the focus? 

From the very beginning, Alison makes it very clear that she abhors that which obscures the truth, and that this story is, in a way, an attempt to find and show the truths about herself, her father, and their relationship. Here’s where I think there’s a distinction - accurate is not the same as truthful, and Alison’s story does not need accuracy in order to tell the truth - or at least, in order to tell her truth. She’s not writing some exposé  about her father’s life and actions, and it’s not her father’s story she’s trying to tell. I don’t think she’s really trying to tell the reader much about her father - she’s trying to tell them about the complex and tangled relationship she has with him, and the connections she feels are present between them. Whatever we are shown about Bruce, we are shown because that’s what Alison thinks is important and true. Perhaps it’s not purely accurate in the sense a history textbook would be accurate, but for Alison and her story, it’s true. If Alison were to tell the reader all these things about her father that she does not believe or think important to her coming-of-age and their relationship, the reader would be getting an untruthful account of Alison and who she is. 

Similarly, in The Bell Jar, Plath often makes cruel and likely “inaccurate” caricatures of the people in her story - her mother and Joan, to name some. From the letters written by Plath’s mother, and the fact that she was planning to write a second novel acknowledging all the help these people had given her, there’s no doubt that the people likely aren’t exactly how Plath made them out to be. However, if Plath were to have acknowledged this in The Bell Jar, or if she had simply portrayed them “accurately”, we’d be getting an entirely untruthful account of what it’s like to be under the bell jar. We’d be reading a lie about Plath’s experience. 

But is it fair? Is it morally right to write these people to fit the author’s truth when it’s not an accurate representation of the actual person? And that’s not even getting into the violation of privacy (fun fact: A Harvard Medical School psychiatrist who said she was the basis for Joan sued the moviemakers of the film adaptation of The Bell Jar for defamation. She said she was “shocked and outraged” that Plath had revealed that they’d been in a psychiatric hospital together, and said the movie falsely portrayed her as “homosexual and suicidal”). Anyway, the point is one we’ve already touched on briefly in class: Is the art morally suspect? At least in this sense of memoirs or novels based on life experiences, is it morally wrong to depict people in inaccurate ways in an attempt to be entirely truthful to your own experience and feelings? There’s no doubt that both Fun Home and The Bell Jar are incredibly personal stories, and their impact would be severely detracted from if the author’s had focused on being accurate rather than truthful. But is the creation of these great, personal works of art worth the possible moral “injustice”?