Janet Frame Biography and List of Works

New Zealand novelist, poet, essayist, short-story writer. 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

Wayward as dust when the wind blows around corners
into blind eyes; petrifying as stone
that sinks the heart of thistledown.
Grave as gravity denied
supremacy in outer space,
tall metaphor, explain me,
describe my shape.
(From The Pocker Mirror, 1967)

Janet Frame was born in Dunedin one of five children of an impoverished railway engineer. 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, drowning in separate accidents in 1937 and 1947. These traumatic events had consequences in her life and left deep traces in her writing. 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 1947 she became a voluntary patient at Seacliff Mental Hospital. She spent seven years in various psychiatric hospitals. This experience is treated in several of 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. From 1954 to 1955 Frame lived on the property of the New Zealand writer, Frank Sargeson. Her first novel, OWLS DO CRY (1957), appeared in 1957. It was a strongly autobiographical account of growing up in a small New Zealand town. In the centre of the novel is the Withers family. The children find on the town dump a 'treasure', which affects all their activities and perceptions. The radical questioning of language and the flexible use of time were reworked in Frame's later fiction.

Frame left her home country on a State Literary Fund grant in 1956. 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'. THE ADAPTABLE MAN (1965) was about alienation and the social role of the outcast "witch-novelist." In Frame's writing, the relatively powerless are shown as deprived of speech.

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 falls 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 the Gravity Star's 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, seed like 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 goddesses who no longer could change or accept new growth and must perish to feed the birth of the new." Everybody in Kowhai Street 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.

Opinions differ whether Frame reproduces the ideology of postmodernism in her fictive strategy in which narrative authority is continuously deferred, 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 considers the best thing she ever wrote to be a fable entitled "Bird, Hawk, Bogie." In this fable the bird (inspiration and imagination) is eaten by a strong hawk (materialism), which in turn is eaten by the bogia (repressed imagination and individualism). This triangle provides the recurrent symbolism for majority of her work.

In 1965 Frame returned to New Zealand. Several of her later novels were set in the United States, where she made extended visits. INTENSIVE CARE (1970) was an anti-utopian novel, which described a society after a nuclear World War III ruled by super technocrats. DAUGHTER BUFFALO (1972) grew from periods she spent at a writers' colony. Frame won several awards for her fiction, including an Honorary 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's three-volume autobiography, TO THE ISLAND (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 screenplay 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 a psychiatrist assures her that she never had schizophrenia. She returns to New Zealand when her father dies.

For further reading: Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 2); The Inward Sun, ed. by Elizabeth Alley (1994); The Janet Frame Reader, ed. by Carole Ferrier (1994); Janet Frame: Subversive 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

Books by Janet Frame