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Janet Frame (1924-2004) |
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New Zealand novelist, poet, essayist, short-story writer. Frame published 11 novels. Frame's concern with language and its relation to truth, and her suspicion of conventional "realities", led her to develop a unique kind of narrative, which explores the problems of realizing experience in language. The direction of Frame's fiction is, as she writes in her autobiography, "toward the Third Place, where the starting point is myth." QUESTION Janet Paterson Frame was born in Dunedin, New Zealand's oldest city. She was one of five children of an impoverished railway engineer. Her mother's family, the Godfrey's, had long established in Wairau, Bleheim, and Picton. "As a child, I used to boast that the Frames 'came over with William of Orange,'" Frame wrote in her autobiography, To the Is-Land (1982). "I have learned that this may have been so, for Frame is a version of Fleming, Flamand, from the Flemish weavers who settled in the lowlands of Scotland in the fourteenth century." She grew up in Oamaru (the "Waimaru" of her novels) on the eastern coast of South Island. Her brother's life was affected by epilepsy and two of her sisters died young by drowning is separate accidents in 1937 and 1947. These traumatic events had consequences in her life and left deep traces in her writing. "Grandma Frama," who lived with the family, became Frame's close companion and friend. She had diabetes and one of her legs had been amputated. When she sang 'Labouring hard for Ole Massa', Frame assumed that she was African and had been a slave in America. Frame attended Oamaru North School, Waitaki Girls' High School, and University of Otago Teachers Training College in Dunedin (1943-44). She left teaching in 1945 and earned a living by looking after four elderly women in a boarding house. In 1945 Frame had a breakdown, and misdiagnosed as a schizophrenic, she became a voluntary patient at Seacliff Mental Hospital. From 1947 she spent seven years in various psychiatric hospitals. During this period she was reportedly subjected to over 200 shock treatments. Because of her aversion to ECT (Electroconsulsive Therapy) she was treated largely with insulin shock therapy; it produced comas and convulsions. At this time no anaesthetics or muscle relaxants were used. Patients were restrained manually to prevent injury. Her experiences Frame has dealt with in her novels, where schizophrenia is seen to open doors to personal growth and "madness" becomes a metaphor for escape from the constrictions of society. In 1951 Frame made her debut as a writer with a collection of stories, The Lagoon.
It won the Hubert Church Memorial Award. The book also saved Frame in
1952 from 'prefontal leucotomy' operation, known in the United States
as 'lobotomy.' Frame's doctor had told her that following it, she would
be back home in no time. A hospital worker read that she had won a
literary prize and the operation, which severed the fibres connecting
the front part of the brain to the rest of the cerebral cortex, was
cancelled. From 1954 to 1955 Frame lived on the property of the New Zealand writer, Frank Sargeson. In the evenings she played chess with him, and talked about books. Her first novel, Owls Do Cry (1957), was completed in her friend's garden shed. It was a strongly autobiographical account of growing up in a small New Zealand town. In the center of the novel is the Withers family. The children find on the town dump a "treasure," which affects all their activities and perceptions. Frame left her home country on a State Literary Fund grant in 1956. Afraid that she might be forced back to a mental hospital, she lived in Ibiza, Andorra, and England for the next seven years. During these years Frame published three novels and two collections of stories. Faces on the Water (1961) described a journey through madness, a central theme in Frame's work – the fear the "sane" have of the "mad." Estina, the narrator, writes about the season of peril: "I was put in hospital because a great gap opened in the ice floe between myself and the other people whom I watched, with their world, drifting away..." The narrator observes life in hospitals, the patients and the staff, and eventually faces the ultimate threat, the change of personality - "you'll never regret having had a lobotomy." In The Carpathians (1988) Mattina Beacon, a wealthy New Yorker, moves to a town called Puamahara in New Zealand. The town is known to be the source and setting of the legend of the Memory Flower. She fall under the spell of Kowhai Street, and becomes obsessed the arrival of the Gravity Star, which would destroy the concept of nearness and distance, and overturn all thought. The inhabitants of Kowhai Street suffer under the influence of Gravity Star demolition of their minds and their words. "She stared at the heap of letters. They looked faded, used, yet the morning sun, striking them, made them sparkle and shine, reflecting, perhaps, and old thought lying between letters. Mattina wondered why she felt afraid to touch them, to brush them into a pan and drop them in the trash. After all, they were only a pile of old letters of old alphabets with a sprinkling of full stops and commas, seedlike with tiny sprouts not of life but of the final decay of the old language that had lasted well, magnificently, but were now like the old gods and goddessess who no longer could change or accept new growth and must perish to feed the birth of the new." Everybody in Kowhai steet disappears - they have died or been killed and removed - except Mattina. She returns to New York, dies there and her husband makes a pilgrimage to Puamahara. The radical questioning of language and the flexible use of time were reworked in Frame's later fiction. Opinions differ whether Frame is a postmodernist writer, or whether she remains closer to modernism. Diane Caney has argued in her article "Janet Frame and The Tempest" (1998) that Frame's writing is iridescent with imagery drawn from Shakespeare's play The Tempest and mirrors the tale of Prospero with the notions of Storm, Sea, Island, Exile, Magic, Otherness and Return. The author herself considered the best thing she ever wrote to be a fable entitled 'Bird, Hawk, Bogie.' In it the bird (inspiration and imagination) is eaten by a strong hawk (materialism), which in turn is eaten by the bogie (repressed imagination and individualism). This triangle provides the recurrent symbolism for majority of her work. In 1960s Frame returned to New Zealand, but several of her later novels were set in the United States, where she made extended visits. Intensive Care (1970) was antiutopian novel, which described a society after a nuclear World War III ruled by supertechnocrats. Daughter Buffalo (1972) grew from periods she spent at a writers' colony. Frame won several awards for her fiction, including an Honourary Doctor of Literature from the University of Otago, a C.B.E. in 1983, and the Turnovsky Prize for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts. Frame settled in the 1980s in New Zealand. Deeply shy, she grew increasingly reclusive, but for her close friends she also could reveal her unique sense of humor. In 2007 a New Zeland rehabilitation physician argued in an article published in New Zealand Medical Journal, that Frame may have suffered from autism. Janet Frame died of leukaemia on 29 January, 2004 in Dunedin Hospital. She was 79. Her early novel, Towards Another Summer, which she wrote while living in London in 1963, was published posthumously in 2007. Frame's three-volume autobiography, To the Is-Land (1982), An Angel at My Table (1984), The Envoy from Mirror City (1985) was adapted in 1990 into a film, called An Angel at My Table. Originally it was produced as a three part television series. Directed by Jane Campion, the film won seven prizes at the Venice International Film Festival, as well as the Special Jury Prize, and The Four Season's International Critics' Award at the Toronto Festival of Festivals. In the filmization shy and introverted Janet, an ugly duckling, grows up in a materially poor but intellectually intense family, that provides understanding and encouragement for her poetic tendencies. While at a teachers' college, a nervous breakdown is misdiagnosed as schizophrenia. She spends 8 years in a hospital, receiving the full service of over 200 shocks of electrotherapy. After publication of her first book, she is saved from lobotomy. With the help of a grant Janet travels to Europe in the 1950s. In London she is assured by a psychiatrist that she never had schizophrenia. She returns to New Zealand when her father dies. For further reading: Wrestling with the Angel: A Life of Janet Frame by Michael King (2000); Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, Vol. 2, ed., by Steven R. Serafin (1999); The Inward Sun, ed. by Elizabeth Alley (1994); The Janet Frame Reader, ed. by Carole Ferrier (1994); Janet Frame: Subvesive Fictions by Gina Mercer (1994); I Have What I Gave: The Fiction of Janet Frame by Judith Dell Panny (1993); Bird, Hawk, Bogie: Essays on Janet Frame, ed. by Jeanne Delbaere-Garant (1978, rev. ed. as A Ring of Fire, 1992) - See also: The Self as Other/Othering the Self by Tara Hawes Selected works:
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