Graphic Style, Cognitive Style and Avatars

In each of her three graphic memoirs, Bechdel conjures up major cultural figures as an autobiographical echo or a filter, a process this article will explore by focusing exclusively on her second memoir, Are You My Mother? The notion of autobiographical echo first stems from the author’s and reader’s shared impression of common biographical or psychological traits between the author/narrator and the summoned historical figure. It addresses their similarity and distance, similarity despite distance. But at a higher level, autobiographical echo allows the author to develop, through analogies and an enhancing logic, particular features of her self-portrait while exploring this figure’s own narrative, a figure who despite these similarities remains essentially other. Paul Armstrong interestingly notes, ‘Cultural objects enact the paradox of the alter ego because this resonance puts us in immediate but also mediated relation with the agency of others who are both “there” and “not-there”’ (Armstrong: 150). I will examine Bechdel’s use of the figure of Virginia Woolf and the way she is both ‘there and not there,’ similar and yet different, contributing to Bechdel’s own narrative by occasionally exploring new narrative threads while never failing to bring her main subject, the author at a particular age and during a particular period, back to the fore.

To do this, I will borrow the concept of distributed cognition ‘which locates cognitive processes not in individual minds but in cognitive ecosystems, which include other minds, interpretive communities, and artifacts’ (Zunshine, 2022: 9) from the cognitive sciences. More precisely, distributed cognition accounts for how every epistemological phenomenon implies a social dimension, as the way we come into our own as an individual and social entity depends on our social environment. Ronald N. Giere and Barton Moffat underscore this inevitable social dimension and the fact that distributed cognition is often the only type of cognition available to us. They point out that ‘one and the same cognitive system may include a number of humans as well as many external representations and other artefacts’ (303), thus implying that as social creatures we form common cognitive systems. They add: ‘From our point of view, the importance of distributed cognitive systems is simply that they make possible the acquisition of knowledge that no single person, or a group of people without instruments, could possibly acquire’ (305). This is a seminal idea that once again underscores our social nature and that has been the topic of countless cognitive, philosophical and sociological studies. It is also an idea that I’m going to use here to demonstrate that in Bechdel’s case, ‘the importance of distributed cognitive systems is simply that they make possible the acquisition of knowledge’ about herself. Furthermore, this cognition is mostly distributed through Virginia Woolf and Donald Winnicott in Are You My Mother?, although the informational input of other members of her own family is also important. As for her specific use of Virginia Woolf in this eminently autobiographical context, it is both as we will see further down biofictional and biographical.

How do you narrativize a historical figure and a cultural icon in a graphic memoir, ostensibly ‘a re-encounter with iconic historical figures’ (Juko: 234)? Very simply: verbally and visually. Not unlike the way you create a character in a work of fiction, only along two modal tracks, thus generating two different ideas of this person. In S/Z, Roland Barthes writes about the creation of characters: ‘When identical semantic units repeatedly intersect the same proper noun, a character is born’ (600, translations from French texts are my own unless stated otherwise). As Seymour Chatman notes, a proper noun is not necessary: ‘Thus, narratives do not need proper names in the strict sense. Any deictic mark will do’ (Chatman: 130). But when it comes to identifying a historical figure, especially in a verbal narrative, they often are indispensable unless you want the reference to remain indirect or partly hidden. In Are You My Mother?, Virginia Woolf is first identified through words (‘Virginia Woolf seems to have considered her own diary to be more of an external record, and account of “life” rather than “soul”,’ 17). However, it is her visual identity that I would like to concentrate on first.

Nancy Pedri writes that ‘Uri Margolin proposes the notion of “cognitive style” when theorizing how a narrative’s shape and mode of presentation relate aspects of a character’s mind and inner life… the fictional presentation of cognition and personality’ (Pedri, 2023: 117). This is quite similar to what Umberto Eco dubs ‘cognitive types’ or ‘CTs’ of objects, animals and persons (Eco, 1999: 133). Logically and predominantly in graphic narratives, this ‘cognitive style’ or ‘cognitive type’ is accessed first through drawings, that is to say, through a representation of the person as a drawn body. Thus, the author’s drawing style is a fundamental aspect of a visual narrative’s biographical dimension as any historical figure is filtered/altered by the author’s pencil and, by extension, subjectivity. This drawing style can range from extremely realistic to almost childish. Put differently, Eco writes about a spectrum ranging from an ‘alpha modality’ to a ‘beta modality,’ or from a high-definition reproduction such as wax sculptures to pictorial abstraction (Eco, 1999: 401). However, he contends in another text that ‘a simple phenomenological inspection of any representation, either a drawing or a photo, shows us that an image possesses none of the properties of the object represented; and the motivation of the iconic sign, which appeared to us indisputable, opposed to the arbitrariness of the verbal sign, disappears’ (Eco, 1982: 32). There are degrees of arbitrariness, though, and this is why the two modalities he helped theorize are very helpful. It is my contention that, to some extent, the likeness of an author’s visual avatar (likeness to the empirical author, that is to say to her picture(s), which are usually available paratextually) is always measured along this spectrum. As readers of these graphic memoirs, we can range from ‘alpha-modality’ avatars such as Frédéric Pajak’s or Kristen Radkte’s to ‘beta-modality’ avatars such as Allie Brosh’s or Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell’s. As far as they can be from perfect likeness, and again this perfect likeness is in most cases not a visual reference to the actual face of the author, but rather to her photograph, these (purposefully) roughly drawn avatars remain linked to the alpha image of their author. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be avatars, as the purpose of avatars is to establish a multifaceted autobiographical link between the two:

In its presentation of a cartoon avatar of the artist’s self, graphic memoir represents the body visually while also directing attention toward the drawing hand that produced the imaged body. The cartoon avatar views the events that make up the comics universe through its personal perspective, but it is also on view, drawn into the text as an embodied entity rendered in a particular style and presented to look a certain way. (Horstkotte & Pedri: 66)

In other words, the avatar functions as the signifier and the signified of the author.

Whenever a graphic memoir’s author starts working, visually and verbally, the avatar she chooses for herself has to be situated somewhere on the alpha-beta spectrum. Not only does this position reflect an aesthetic choice (often indexed to the artistic skills of the author), it also reveals an autobiographical attitude. As pointed out by visual and comics narratologist Thierry Groensteen, the way an author designs and draws their avatar goes a long way in defining their autobiographical project and the type of reading pact they propose. More globally, it also impacts how the ‘graphic style’ defines the reader’s amount of trust in the autobiographical project: ‘Does graphic style have an influence on the credit we give to a narrator and her narrative? Does a realistically drawn story entail more credibility than one that is not? What is the role played by the encoding process of the drawing in our perception of the facts related?’ (Groensteen: 122). Groensteen answers his own questions by coming up with examples debunking this so-called causal logic between alpha modality and reliability; a childish style or one leaning towards any form of beta modality is far from being incompatible with a high level of factuality or historical indexicality, as demonstrated by works such as Maus or Persepolis. Although the reliability of very realistic drawings as ‘accurate’ reflections of the authorial figure should not be underestimated, it is crucial to note that the beta modality of Maus or Persepolis, their lack of realism, is compensated by other features of the work. Let’s not forget that the avatar (the drawn self of the author) is just one of the semantic units generated by the autobiographical (visual and verbal discourse), granted, one of the most important ones. That self-referentiality is disseminated through several tracks is one of the numerous appeals of bimodal narratives, and more particularly graphic memoirs.

To a degree, this is quite similar to the way our brain shifts into aesthetic and artistic mode: ‘There is no “art neuron” and that aesthetic experience is more complex and distributed widely over the brain than, say, color perception or facial recognition, which have specific locations in the cortex’ (Armstrong: 12). Arguably, our perception of art is distributed throughout our brain similarly to the way autobiographical identity and discourse is distributed across bimodal tracks as demonstrated in ‘the directness of drawn images and small, localized narratives’ (Baetens & Frey: 95) in Are You My Mother? To conclude this reflection on the specific aspect of the bond between avatar and empirical author, regardless of whether the author’s avatar fits an alpha or beta modality, embedding an image of oneself into a narrative, drawing oneself (in both meanings of the verb) into a narrative, creates a strong sense of referentiality. The visual rendition of self enhances the autobiographical experience compared to a non-hybrid memoir. Quite logically, what applies to the autobiographical figure can be extended to the biographical figure and its construction throughout/by the narrative.

Virginia’s Avatar: A Biographical and Biofictional Woolf

When it comes to her own and Woolf’s avatar, Bechdel adopts a similar approach that can be characterized as slightly more alpha than beta in terms of visual modality. Both authors are easily identifiable, as their main facial features (hairstyle, overall shape of the head and of the eyes, eyebrows, glasses…) are very similar. Figures 1 and 2 portray Bechdel’s avatar and herself and Figures 3 and 5 show Woolf’s avatar as created by Bechdel, whereas Figures 4 and 6 are photographic portraits of the English author:

Figure 1

Are You My Mother? (200, © Alison Bechdel 2012).

Figure 2

© John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation–used with permission.

Figure 3

Are You My Mother? (18, © Alison Bechdel 2012).

Figure 4

Virginia Woolf by George Charles Beresford, platinum print, 1902 © Copyright National Portrait Gallery–used with permission.

Figure 5

Are You My Mother? (24, © Alison Bechdel 2012).

Figure 6

Virginia Woolf by Barbara Strachey, bromide print, 1938 © Copyright National Portrait Gallery–used with permission.

Thus, Bechdel’s strategy to narrativize Woolf conjures up the British novelist’s image (Figures 4 and 6) through several drawings: one of her portraits on the cover of Moments of Being (Figure 3, the first use of her avatar in the book: 18), then two drawings of Woolf strolling around her neighborhood in London (Figure 4: 24, 25), and then, on the next page, a drawing of Woolf crossing (probably fictionally) Winnicott’s path (26). Finally, Woolf’s drawn image last appears on page 187 (Figure 7), even though she is sitting at a table in the distant background. In relation to this panel, the narrative text specifies, ‘A Room of One’s Own, of course, began as a lecture to women students at Cambridge in 1928. Woolf read from her notes, almost inaudibly, in a darkened dining hall’ (187).

Figure 7

Are You My Mother? (187, © Alison Bechdel 2012).

That her reading was almost inaudible is echoed visually by an establishing shot of the dining hall in which Woolf, again sitting in the background, is equally hardly visible, a lonely figure reading her notes, but still identifiable by her hat, which is very similar to the one she wears on pages 24, 25 and 26 and wore in real life, as seen in the photographic portrait (see Figure 6).

It is important to note that this last use of her avatar ontologically contrasts with the previous one. Indeed, if her ephemeral and unacknowledged encounter with Winnicott very likely never took place and remains mostly counterfactual, despite the visual pleasure Bechdel and her readers take in this remote possibility, Woolf’s speech in Cambridge is documented as having taken place and is thus purely biographical. Through the use of Woolf’s avatar, Bechdel opts for two distinct, even opposed biographical approaches: the biofictional one and the classical one, two forms of narrativization of historical or cultural figures with the former presenting referential issues. In Are You My Mother?, Bechdel taps into the two modalities in order to enrich her autobiographical account with multiple biographical references. Indeed, the aim here is obviously not strict biographical accuracy. To ‘Connect (…) the visual imagery of the comic medium to the fictional level of storytelling’ (236) in her analysis of biofictional graphic narratives, Maria Juko points to Hillary Chute and Marianne DeKoven’s studies on graphic novels, who propose that ‘“graphic narratives usefully challenge the transparency of realism in integrating prose and drawing, rendering the question of verisimilitude productively unstable”’ (qtd. in Juko 236). However, as demonstrated above, whether through genuine quotes or an obvious similarity between the visual avatar and actual photographic portraits of the British author, in Bechdel’s use of biographical figures there is generally a form of respect, a will not to depart too much from Woolf’s official, documented persona. In other words, if inserting a historical figure into your (here autobiographical) work equates a ‘renegotiation of the historical person,’ enabling ‘a re-evaluation of their biography’ with more ‘relevance for modern values’ in mind, then Are You My Mother? offers a mild and respectful form of ‘renegotiation’ and ‘re-evaluation’ (Juko 252) of Woolf as a figure and potential reflection of her own personal and intellectual journey. The fact that references to Woolf remain scarce in her memoir might account for this impression, and, as I will develop further, can be explained by the reverence Bechdel feels toward this obviously mother-like figure.

As mentioned earlier, in Are You My Mother?, Woolf’s avatar is preceded by her name, but the sudden use of her remediated image forcefully draws her into the narrative. Woolf presents an author whose life has been visually documented with many portraits (among which the most famous one by Gisèle Freund) and personal pictures (also available on the Internet). Some of these images, including Freund’s photograph, have become iconic representations of a major literary figure. Their iconic status is further reinforced by other biographical incarnations in films or plays, the most prominent one no doubt being ‘through’ Nicole Kidman’s bodily transformation in Stephen Daldry’s 2002 adaptation of Michael Cunnigham’s novel The Hours (1998) in which one chapter is a biofictional account of Woolf’s last days.

Thus, Woolf’s image, and by extension her avatar, add an immediate biographical weight to Bechdel’s exploration and appropriation of Woolf’s life and work in her own memoir. But Woolf”s textual presence in Are You My Mother? outweighs her visual one, even if the latter, similarly to Bechdel’s own avatar, remains the most immediate connection between the extraneous figure, the empirical one, and the biographical or autobiographical one. This literal domination of the textual Woolf over the visual one, of her words over her visual avatar, is encapsulated in the panel pertaining to Woolf’s speech in Cambridge in which the discrepancy between her remote and minute physical presence and the imposing speech balloon is obvious (Figure 7). This un-balance between Bechdel’s visual and textual treatment of the British author is present throughout her memoir. In Making Comics. Storytelling Secret of Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels, Scott McCloud writes, ‘Comics is a medium of fragments—a piece of text here, a cropped picture there—but when it works, your readers will combine those fragments as they read and experience your story as a continuous whole’ (129). Bechdel’s use of Woolf’s textual ‘fragments’ thus prevails over her utilization of Woolf’s visual fragments, even though they somehow constitute a ‘continuous whole’ within the work’s overall framework.

Indeed, apart from the rare use of a visual avatar, Bechdel adopts several strategies to narrativize and, to some extent, fictionalize Woolf in her own autobiographical work. I have already pointed out how the apparition of Woolf’s first avatar is preceded by her name. The name ‘Woolf’ is first recorded on page 13 and followed by a quote from her diary, a resource used multiple times by Bechdel: ‘I often think of this passage from Virginia Woolf’s diary: “What a disgraceful Lapse! Nothing added to my disquisition, & life allowed to waste like a tap left running. Eleven days unrecorded”’ (13). These constant references to Woolf’s diary parallel the author’s own journaling habits. Importantly, however, the next quote is presented differently: it is contextualized in the panel’s caption (‘Virginia Woolf seems to have considered her own diary to be more of an external record, an account of “life” rather than “soul”,” 17) and re-registered in the panel. Re-registration is ‘a term that signals the use of other documents or text types (such as newspaper clippings, letters, or photographs) being (re-)presented visually’ (Gibbons: 92). On the same page, the reader can find both the words and a re-registration of a photograph of Virginia Woolf originally reproduced on the cover of her own autobiographical work Moments of Being, which, in turn, is reproduced on the next page with two more re-registrations of Woolf’s autobiographical writing. So far, Bechdel’s reference to Woolf is only factual: quoted words and the reproduction of an existing photograph of the author.

However, her own biographical approach shifts drastically a few pages later. Indeed, we switch from a strictly classical biographical mode (based on sources and material evidence) to a biofictional mode that includes imagined, undocumented parts of Woolf’s life, but is still based on biographical data. Pages 24 and 25 are two lusciously drawn full pages displaying Woolf’s imagined (by Bechdel) walks in London supported by several captions contextualizing this period of Woolf’s life, as well as introducing the other major biographical figure of the book, Donald Winnicott. Based on Woolf’s London address at the time and the address of Winnicott’s office, Bechdel envisions how Winnicott might have run into, or at least been on the same street, as the novelist: ‘But today, let’s say he’s coming from the Queen’s hospital for children. He’d probably have taken the underground from Bethnal Green’ (25) and so on. Bechdel even provides the relevant part of the London map so that readers can visualize even further this potential encounter which takes place on the next page, the 5^th and last but one use of her avatar in the book. In a purely counterfactual (‘what if…?’) and fascinating manner, Bechdel draws these two major cultural figures of the 20^th century walking in opposite directions and standing just a few feet apart for just a few hypothetical seconds, freezing them for an infinitesimal pause in time: ‘Donald is twenty-nine, the son of a merchant, in awe of his analysts’ cultivated Bloomsbury world. Woolf is at the center of that world, middle-aged and becoming famous’ (26). This shift from Woolf’s words to her imagined life and encounter with the other tutelary figure of Are You My Mother? logically generates a very different experience for the reader, underpinned by the two spreads (24–5).

Virginia Woolf famously made a clear distinction between fact and fiction: ‘Let it be fact, one feels, or let it be fiction; the imagination will not serve under two masters simultaneously’ (2008: 99). They certainly do not ‘serve under two masters simultaneously’ in Bechdel’s book, but they do so alternately. In the two spreads aforementioned, the author takes full advantage of her poetic and biofictional license to imagine what could have been, to be slightly less respectful of Woolf’s writings and biography in order to let her imagination take over and above all strikingly visually recreate Woolf’s world. Not surprisingly, it is first and foremost Bechdel’s visual imagination taking over, as the balance evoked above regarding the Cambridge speech is reversed here: Woolf’s avatar, and more precisely her body, prevails and her words recede, the text in these pages being limited to brief floating captions. It’s interesting to note that in Are You My Mother?, the biographical is textual and the biofictional is visual, despite again the obvious resemblance between Woolf’s portraits and her avatar. However, contrary to the numerous forays into Winnicott’s life, biofictionally imagining him in various domestic settings or even intimate situations (190–191) and drawing his death (278), Bechdel never opts for a similar approach when it comes to Woolf, letting the latter’s words regularly surface in the memoir while parsimoniously resorting to her visual representation. Lacan underlined the importance of the words of the father, what he called the ‘father’s insignia’ (‘les insignes du père,’ 1998: 294) in the socialization process of a child. In a feminist reversal of Lacan’s role attributions, Woolf logically personifies in this memoir the mother’s insignia, the intellectual mother whose words educate you.

The numerous textual references to Woolf and Woolf’s work can be divided between quotes in captions and re-registrations of her various referential and fictional writings. To be more specific, in Are You My Mother? there are four citing strategy categories and integration of Woolf’s intellectual universe:

• - Novels quoted or discussed in captions (To the Lighthouse: 28, 29, 136, 255, 256, 257, 258).

• - Novels re-registered (To the Lighthouse: 29, 136, 255, 257 [re-registration of an excerpt of the draft of the novel])

• - Nonfictional writings quoted or discussed in captions (The Diary of Virginia Woolf: 13, 17, 28, 152; Moment of Being: 18; “Modern Fiction”: 83; her unpublished memoir A Sketch of the Past: 135; A Room of One’s Own: 171, 172, 187)

• - Nonfictional writings re-registered (The Diary of Virginia Woolf: 17, 18, 152; Moment of Being: 18; her unpublished memoir A Sketch of the Past: 135; A Room of One’s Own: 171)

Two additional references to Woolf’s life and work that do not fall under one of the categories above can be found in Bechdel’s memoir: The first one is a re-registration of some of her books’ covers (17), and the second, which is very different, consists in a reference to Woolf’s biographer: ‘Woolf’s biographer Hermione Lee reports that even in the mid-sixties, Woolf wasn’t “read” in the academy, and was considered “a minor modernist”’ (173).

A brief comparison of these references to Woolf’s life and work with the use Bechdel makes of Winnicott’s avatar and writings in the same book underscores that even though the link between Woolf and Bechdel is more obvious and immediate, through the feminist prism for instance, Winnicott is a more recurring presence in Are You My Mother? Indeed, Winnicott’s avatar is summoned on multiple occasions and at various stages of his life (26, 27, 154–55, 177, 190–91, 192, 277 and 278). Similarly to the integration technique applied to Woolf, his work is mentioned, quoted and re-registered throughout the book, not surprisingly as therapy and the author’s relation to her own mother are the central themes of the book. Very early in the book, Alison states the importance of both Woolf and Winnicott in her intellectual and personal construction, for instance emphasizing the importance of psychoanalysis in her life: ‘One reason this memoir is taking me so long is that I’m trying to figure out—from both sides of the couch—just what it is that psychoanalysts do for their parents. In particular I have been studying the work of British psychoanalyst and pediatrician Donald Winnicott’ (21). In response to her therapist’s question, ‘What is it about him [Winnicott] that you’re so drawn to?’, Alison goes as far as to confess: ‘I want him to be my mother’ (21). And, similarly to how Bechdel works and plays with Woolf’s biography, she also visualizes Winnicott in documented and more apocryphal situations and stages of his life, alternating between classical biography and biofiction.

The phenomenon of re-registration to which I have alluded is a major phenomenon when it comes to integrating various documents into the work, even though this very useful concept, coined by Alison Gibbons, hasn’t been theorized very much (one can find multiple examples of re-registrations in contemporary memoirs such as Artificial: A Love Story by Amy Kurzweil [2023] or Murder Book: A Graphic Memoir of a True Crime Obsession by Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell [2021]: personal letters, diaries, emails, newspaper articles…). Re-registration consists in visually embodying documents that are textual and that could easily be simply quoted. In these cases, to opt not to quote but to draw words, sentences, and sometimes whole pages is an obvious means of visually embodying the work, of integrating it further into the aesthetic identity of the work. Obviously, in an auto/biographical framework such as Bechdel’s in which multiple references are made to seminal intellectual figures, re-registration is quite an important aesthetic statement or gesture (literally and figuratively). It reflects the choice of labor, of time spent on a work, as opposed to the easier option of simply quoting words in captions. Put differently, it is a way of making somebody else’s words yours through your drawing pencils, to turn Woolf and her writing into another visual element of a partly visual work.

Bechdel has devised several biographical strategies for integrating these two tutelary intellectual figures, going back and forth on a spectrum ranging from documented to apocryphal and calling up their words and works in several ways. Even when the situations represented are documented, such as Woolf’s speech in Cambridge or Winnicott’s therapy sessions, the use of an avatar (certainly more alpha than beta, but still far from the most extreme cases of alpha modality, the ones verging on photorealism) immediately and paradoxically conjures up the biographical figure while reminding readers that an avatar is by definition, just that, an icon, a figure, a drawing representing a real person. Put differently, an avatar connects and disconnects, which is in keeping with biography within an autobiographical narrative, as the author uses biography to enlighten aspects of her own life, not the biographical figure’s.

My Life, Her Life, My Work, Her Work

Beyond its many features, Are You My Mother? is first and foremost a metatextual project, a memoir about what it means to draw and write a memoir and about the numerous stakes of life writing. The question seemingly addressed by Bechdel to her mother is, in fact, first and foremost a question addressed to herself, and her whole memoir is composed of recurring questions and doubts regarding her autobiographical projects. This metatextual dimension logically gives way to a host of mises en abyme, reflecting strategies, and more particularly, among the several types defined by Lucien Dällenbach, Bechdel constantly resorts to what the Swiss theorist calls ‘mises en abyme of the context of enunciation’ (61). In a novel, a mise en abyme inevitably implies a break in the fictional continuum, such as a metalepsis of the author whereby the author directly addresses the reader. In an autobiographical context, the results achieved are not fundamentally different: Bechdel repeatedly introduces a break in the narrative continuum to invite us to ponder the question of the interconnection between her own life and the persons close to her (her mother here, but also her deceased father, as Are You My Mother? tackles the difficult context leading to her writing Fun Home) and the ethical issues inherent in any autobiographical narrative.

For instance, the book opens on the difficulty of beginning to write and draw the book we are currently reading (thus these hesitations were somehow solved at some point), creating a sense of work in progress, which is an illusion as the work is now finished and finite: ‘This story—a memoir about my mother—could begin with either of those scenes. But as I consider moving the beginning further back in time, before the coming out, before the first period…’ (6). Another disruption in the narrative continuum occurs with a panel of Alison’s mother reading the biographical narrative about her that we are reading (bottom panel, 15). Bechdel also includes some authenticating practices that, to some extent, back up all the very accurate memories she has of her youth (she had a journaling compulsion) or of various conversations she’s had with her mother over the years: ‘I talk to my mother almost every day. That is, I call, she talks, I listen. That’s our pattern. I must confess that I have taken to transcribing what she says. I don’t think she knows I’m doing it, which makes it a bit unethical’ (11). A substantial amount of her memoir is devoted to the contextualization of its creation (and again of her previous and first memoir’s), and to justifying or at least explaining how it came to exist as a published text. Gibbons rightfully points out the ‘memorial and authenticity functions’ of ‘photographs, facsimiles, and handwriting’ in memoirs (Gibbons: 99), and this certainly is one important dimension of all the quotes and re-registrations in Are You My Mother? However, one should keep in mind that these documents, which amount to ‘deictic references’ as they refer to actual documents existing in a particular place and time, ‘can be exploited to disrupt the reader’s immersion in the story, and draw her attention to the act of processing the material text, thereby highlighting the fictionality and constructedness of the story’ (Macrae: 55). Indeed, as made evident by Bechdel in all her memoirs, authenticating processes are double-edged: they undeniably enhance the referentiality of the narrative but also simultaneously draw readers’ attention to the ‘constructedness’ of the narrative.

Avatars and re-registrations of biographical figures and their work contribute to this opposite movement. Indeed, they add referentiality to the narrative beyond the author’s self-narration, but, as made obvious in this article, they also display the stakes and issues of visually and textually integrating these figures. The multiple references to Proust and Joyce in Fun Home or Woolf in Are You My Mother? encapsulate the very tensions I have just brought to light. As Ariela Freedman writes, ‘But this ostensible rebellion is only the first move in a more profound working-through—a working-through of her reading of Ulysses, of her relationship with her father, and of the relationship of the low-brow genre of the comics with the high-brow predecessor of literary modernism’ (128). ‘Working-through’ is a key term that characterizes Bechdel’s whole autobiographical adventure and more particularly her use of biography within her own autobiography. Within her memoir, Bechdel works through her own issues, her family issues and emotions (or lack thereof), her own relations with key intellectual figures such as Woolf, and also through how she can best integrate these figures within a work drastically opposed (due to its visual dimension) to Woolf’s own work for instance and finally how this integration to some extent fictionalizes aspects of their lives.

As for this double status to which Freedman alludes, both high-brow and low-brow, it is one that has characterized graphic narratives since the dawn of the graphic novel and graphic memoir, even the most ambitious ones such as Bechdel’s. Avatars perfectly illustrate this double status as do cartoons based on photographs of very serious and official intellectual figures such as Woolf or Winnicott. Let’s not forget that an avatar is first and foremost the embodiment or manifestation of a person or idea in a particular environment, such as a game or a work of art. It is by definition not the thing or the person it stands for; rather, it is meant, as we saw with the modality chosen by Bechdel, to represent Woolf in her own memoirs, to remind us of the photograph of this person and to conjure her up as far as possible. There is still a fundamental difference between biography based on facts, documents, evidence and research and biofiction, and Are You My Mother? makes use of both, but an avatar, at its very core, remains an imperfect icon of someone or something that is not here and that has to be reconstructed, visually or textually.

Woolf’s avatar is primarily Bechdel’s: it is her own vision of the body of the British author and also an index of her skills as an artist. With this constant dialogue between her life and the life of others, between her work and Woolf’s, between facts and imagination, Bechdel illustrates an ontological truism: ‘Who we are ultimately taken to be as individuals derives […] from the way we story ourselves, the textual material available for storytelling, and the way stories are “read” and “heard” […]’ (Gubrium & Holstein: 205), and the way we ‘story ourselves through others,’ such as biographical figures. This generates a constant back-and-forth movement between internalization and externalization processes: exploring, pondering and literally reproducing Woolf’s words and imagining the context in which these words were uttered or written, while considering how these words echo, reflect or even mold her own words and images. Bechdel debunks the idea that ‘unlike first-person narration, which works from the inside out, describing events as experienced by the teller, cartooning ostensibly works from the outside in, […] comics tend to present rather than narrate or, at times, alternately present and narrate’ (Hatfield: 115). By contrast, she demonstrates that comics can also work from the inside out, through the use of biography, for instance, by setting up a dialogue through time with tutelary figures that readers benefit from, intellectually and aesthetically.

More interestingly, Bechdel sets up an indirect dialogue between her own mother and Woolf, who embodies for her an intellectual mother-like figure, creating a thought-provoking contrast between the recurring lack of motherly warmth the young Bechdel suffered from and complained about and Woolf’s visual placid figure, suffused with an imagined calm and benevolence in all her apparitions in the memoir. Her mother’s angular avatar, her lack of communication with her children, the dryness of some of her remarks and above all her reaction to her daughter’s coming out clash with Woolf’s ubiquitous words, appropriated through numerous re-registrations and a rare but reassuring avatar who has become a feminist and queer icon. However, Bechdel’s own relation to Woolf also echoes the one she had with her parents: an intellectual, mostly logocentric one. Julia Novak stated that ‘while some feminist critics deplored biography’s obvious relation with “greatness,”’ it seems that ‘feminist biographers on the whole adhered to the established model and added their share of “exemplary women” to the biographical canon.’ She adds that ‘the same is true for biographical fictions of women, which have mostly been devoted to the lives of “notable” heroines’ (84). In a way, Bechdel’s Woolf falls under this category, but if Woolf’s life is exemplary here, it should be understood as a personal example for Bechdel, a substitute motherly tutelary figure. Writing about biofictional representations of the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Novak distinguishes between two possible questions stemming from these representations: ‘what these fictions do to her—how they contribute to and shape her posthumous reputation as a woman writer—and […] what they do with the poet’ (101). In the final analysis, Bechdel’s memoir, being logically first and foremost autobiographical, does very little to Woolf beyond the brief counterfactual passage analyzed above and its intrinsic visual strength. On the other hand, what it does with her is to depict Bechdel’s intellectual coming of age and reevaluate her relationship with her own mother.

In his first seminar, Jacques Lacan pointed out one of the pillars of his psychoanalytic thought, the fact that I is a term learned and used by referring and speaking to the other: ‘I is born as a reference to you’ (Lacan: 188). It is fascinating to see how Bechdel in Are You My Mother? relates to Woolf—and how Woolf relates to the ‘you’ in the eponymous question—appropriating her fictional and nonfictional work in order to better understand her own education and relation to the imperious you of her mother. In her very recent graphic memoir which presents many similarities with Bechdel’s books, Amy Kurzweil reflects upon her own re-registration practices: ‘If my redrawings change the meaning of the original work, or function clearly as a reference, then they are a part of a new work that’s mine’ (195). Whether through her words or avatar, the British novelist certainly becomes part of a new work that is Bechdel’s.

Editorial Note

This article is part of the Special Collection: Graphic Biographical Fiction, edited by Nancy Pedri and Maria Juko, with assistance from the editorial team.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.