When we think of ‘recoverable’ authors, those whose works have been underread or underappreciated, Janet Frame’s name might not quickly come to mind. The New Zealander whose life began on August 28, 1924, has hardly been lost to time. Janet Frame was prolific. Her work was heavily reviewed, critiqued, and lauded during her own lifetime; there have even been persistent rumors and refutations of her candidacy for the Nobel Prize in Literature. She continues to be widely considered the most famous and influential writer from her home country, alongside Katherine Mansfield. The author of twelve novels (one published posthumously) and two books of poetry (again, one published posthumously), Frame also wrote short stories, children’s fiction (a lone story about an indoor ant who has found himself out-of-doors), and a compelling three-volume autobiography, the contents of which have been mulled over for decades.

It is the obsessive reconstruction and analysis of Frame’s life that makes her, perhaps oddly, a candidate for reevaluation. Her autobiography fed off of and spurred a thread of literary criticism that endeavored, it appears, solely to extract Frame’s experiences, her “real life” from her fiction. Critics and scholars have attempted to determine the extent of both experience and imagination in her work, and it is this ultimately false and misleading dichotomy that has shaped the understanding of an author who deserves better.

Janet Frame’s life—particularly her early and adolescent years—is an absorbing story in its own right. She was the second daughter of five children, born to an intellectually creative mother with little outlet for her literary interests besides the occasional opportunity to write poems and ditties for her children and perhaps the local paper. Her father, a veteran of World War I, worked an itinerant life in the New Zealand railway industry. Frame’s early life was fraught with tragedy; her rebellious older sister Myrtle—who suffered from a heart defect—drowned when she was 16, and Frame was still quite young. Her brother, George, was diagnosed with epilepsy[i] and developed behavioral problems and a drinking habit to cope with the misunderstood affliction. Despite her family’s trials and frequent relocations, Frame’s childhood appears to have been, if not happy, then at least not lonely. By her own account, she stood out in school, but somewhat came to terms with her uniqueness. This despite an almost stifling awareness, expressed in her autobiography, of her own body—from the clothing that grew tighter over her developing breasts as she grew older, to the menstrual blood of which she was almost pathologically aware.

Her performance in secondary school was sufficient to allow her entry into Duendin Teachers’ College, where for the first time she would earn a salary and begin a bizarrely monkish life living with her aunt and ill uncle. Janet’s time was filled with books and what she would later see as ignorant misunderstandings of the world, made worse in turns by the conservative, restrictive attitude of the College’s administration and then by her sister Isabel’s early arrival to the college and the antics that ensued. Eventually, Frame took her first teaching post. Although she describes her time in the classroom positively, Frame spiraled into fits of depression and suicidal thinking due to the anxiety she experienced at the idea of being ‘assessed’ for her competency as a teacher. As a member of the teaching faculty, Frame continued to function as a socially detached child-adult, failing to integrate herself into adult society and break the veil of innocence and easiness she had to that point cultivated:

… I was forced to realize that suicide was my only escape. I had woven so carefully, with such close texture, my visible layer of ‘no trouble at all, a quiet student, always ready with a smile (if the decayed teeth could be hidden) always happy,' that even I could not break the thread of the material of my deceit. [ii]

This overwhelming anxiety marks the beginnings of Frame’s first emotional breakdown of 1945.[iii] It was these seeds of disconnect and alienation that were to define her behavior and her writing thereafter. Frame was admitted to the Seacliff Mental Hospital voluntarily, where she was first diagnosed with schizophrenia. In the subsequent weeks of evaluation and therapy, Frame continued her turbulent decline into the world of mental illness, a period that she would later analyze with a combination of awe and distress. Frame flitted in and out of institutions like Seacliff for eight years. Her experiences there,

in a world I’d never known among people whose existences I never thought possible, became for me a concentrated course in the horrors of insanity and the dwelling-place of those judged insane, separating me for ever from the former acceptable realities and assurances of everyday life.[iv]

Frame’s creative energies from this point forth seem to take as their center this moment of unselfreflective observation of the mad and incapacitated. For a girl whose existence had, in her own words, been defined by anxiety and confusion manifested as outward happiness and being ‘no trouble at all,’ the weeks among those who were unable to exercise the rational choice to be unobtrusive was shattering. It made real the possibility of deviance in a way her sister Isabel’s mild misbehavior and coming-of-age rebellion had not. Isabel’s death by drowning at 21, in the midst of Frame’s treatment and coping with her mental instability, is swathed in Frame’s autobiography with stark confusion, grief, and denial, so much that the traumatic moment, the “double lightning strike,” seems almost normal and passes quickly.[v]

Over the course of the next several years Frame’s physical body began to fall apart; her teeth rotted, she worked sporadically, lived in and out of mental hospitals, with her parents, at one point with her sister June and her husband. Frame makes stumbling, impulsive decisions; six years of her life pass in a few pages of her autobiography, compressed, confused. During a series of treatments using electroshock and insulin therapy, which Frame describes detachedly and philosophically, Frame continues to falter her way into literary publication. In 1951, Frame was scheduled to receive a lobotomy, an experimental procedure meant to normalize the behavior of mentally ill patients in the hospital where she was residing. As the procedure approached, she was visited by Dr. Blake Palmer, whose opinion she solicited about her upcoming operation. It was only through the doctor’s surprise, and his strong admonition that she should “stay as she is” “unchanged” that she learned her book of short stories The Lagoon, had won the Hulbert Church Award.

Nearly from this moment Frame embarked upon the literary career she had often dreamed of, and to a new phase of life. She is unable, however, to escape the haunting spectre of her past. A friend from the hospital, Nola, “who unfortunately had not won a prize, whose name did not appear in the newspaper,” underwent the procedure and fell victim to the “dehumanizing change” the operation wreaked.[vi] Inasmuch as Frame recognizes the danger her own difference brings to her, she bears Nola’s injury and death as a reminder of the potential consequences of aberrance. As if she needed additional admonitions towards outward normalcy (she speaks of how people constantly advise her to straighten her frizzed and unruly red hair, as if the disorder itself is a threat), this lucky dodging of that ultimately fatal experiment wrests her into the semblance of adulthood and independence.

From 1955 onward, Frame’s life is spattered with stints of writing, new literary and personal acquaintances, travel, and almost frenetic movement from residence to residence. Still haunted by anxiety and depression, she sought treatment in both the United States and the United Kingdom through traditional therapy and psychotherapy. She also used her novels as exploratory sojourns into strangeness, madness, alienation, and nonlinear thinking. She never married, and avoided her mother’s life, which she viewed as “awful”[vii] (with no small touch of disdain), and which served as a counterbalance and a push towards exceptionality, away from the slavish domesticity she observed in her primary female role model, but also away from intimate partner and mother-child relationships.

If Frame used her life as an exploration, manipulation, and reassessment of mental illnesses, of strange perspectives, and of othering situations, her critics and biographers have often taken up this thread and plundered its riches in the most pedantic of ways: diagnosis. The speculation around Frame’s mental illness is perhaps spurred by her diagnosis of schizophrenia, later rescinded by a “panel of psychiatrists.”[viii] In 2007, Sarah Abrahamson, a New Zealand rehabilitation physician, published an article in the New Zealand Medical Journal, contending that Frame was afflicted with a mild form of Autism, or perhaps Asperger syndrome.[ix] Douglas Martin’s article in the New York Times following Frame’s death perhaps most perfectly encapsulates the question so many have asked of the author’s body of work. He writes,

Ms. Frame created romantic visionaries—eccentrics, mad people epileptics—and pitted them against the repressive forces of a sterile, conformist society. Or maybe she was just reporting on her life. A continuing discussion among critics was whether her autobiographical work was mostly fiction or whether her fiction was mostly autobiographical. [my emphasis][x]

Equally, the otherwise even-handed Bruce Allen writes that “Frame wrote fiction crammed with autobiographical detail and infused with deeply personal feeling. The key to understanding her work is the mystery (no other word seems right) of her difficult life.”[xi] What Allen seems to miss here (though he admirably recovers his footing later on in the piece) is that Frame does not only infuse her fiction with autobiography. Rather, her fiction is the imaginative exploration—not exploitation—of a felt experience of madness, one that did not trap but rather freed the author. He is right to note that “Janet Frame’s fiction challenges the truism that communication and human connection are unqualified good things,” as her characters consistently encounter authority figures “who ‘communicate’ in order to influence and control.”[xii] Frame’s characters evade and elude the overbearing presence of conformist and dangerous authorities[xiii] by escaping to the imaginary, the disjointed. Eventually, Frame resorts even to the degeneration of sensible language into a jumble of letters (as in her novel The Edge of the Alphabet, Brazillier, 1965).

Alan Tinkler in his article, “Janet Frame,” does much to rehabilitate Frame’s literary output as a project rather than an outpouring of self or a blundering mélange of experience and “eccentric and unreadable” fiction.[xiv] Tinkler disputes Gina Mercer’s assessment of Frame as ‘other’, a haphazard political and ethical category. He is equally frustrated by the prolific criticism of Patrick Evans, who insists upon almost exclusive biographical criticism of Frame’s work. Instead, he proffers Judith Dell Panny’s argument, in which she chooses to analyze the experience of Frame’s readers, who are, in Panny’s judgment, allowed to “connect images and ideas and to draw individual conclusions,” subverting even the authority of Frame’s own voice in deference to the uniqueness of the human imagination.[xv] He also asserts that, while drawing upon experience, “Frame was aware that writing is a construction,” effectively shutting down the unreasonable attention that has been paid to Frame’s autobiographical voice.[xvi] He argues that she was not merely a ragdoll spewing forth her digested memories, but rather that she, in both her fiction and nonfiction, “participates without reservation in literary discourse, specifically high modernist discourse,” and that she “felt her creative project wholly justified and unabashedly situated” within that discourse.[xvii]

Tinkler asserts, quite accurately, that Frame empowers her readers when she asks them, through the constructed framework of her fiction, to “participate in the imaginative process.”[xviii] As her autobiographical description indicates, however, Frame also allowed herself to be empowered by the experience of maintaining a disordered fictional construction. Frame replays her life’s events, not out of exploitation, but experimentation. Her fiction is an experiment in which she holds particular kinds of madness still in her own mind for a moment and allows them in all their uniquely human disorder to take hold on the page. Frame’s intensely felt childhood anxiety about normalcy, her own body, and her obtrusiveness in the world was exploded after her experience in the psychiatric hospital where she encountered the truly mentally ill. Her coincidental disenchantment with authority and intimate experiences with both insanity and the insane propelled her into a fictional voice, and perhaps a life, where personhood and personal identity were themselves in flux.

---

[i] This in an era when the disease was nearly uncontrollable and still viewed with a tinge of disconcerted superstition as a result of its sudden and frightening seizures, which were suspected not long ago of indicating demonic possession.

[ii] Janet Frame, Autobiography, p. 188

[iii] Frame had multiple mental breakdowns and institutionalizations that year and over the subsequent decade.

[iv] Frame, Autobiography, p. 193

[v] Frame, Autobiography, p. 207

[vi] Frame, Autobiography, p. 223

[vii] Frame, Autobiography, p. 261

[viii] Douglas Martin, “Janet Frame, 79, Writer Who Explored Madness”, New York Times, January 30, 2004.

[ix] “Janet Frame” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janet_Frame May 21, 2008

[x] Douglas Martin, “Janet Frame, 79, Writer Who Explored Madness”

[xi] Bruce Allen, “‘Divinest Sense’: The Life and Art of Janet Frame” Contemporary Literary Criticism 237, Jeffrey W. Hunter, ed. Farmington Hills, MI: Thompson Gale, 2007.

[xii] Allen, “‘Divinest Sense’”

[xiii] Frame has a dim view of authority figures, which her nonfiction sketches of her mother, the doctors and nurses at the mental hospitals she stayed in, even the presidents of her teaching college in Duendin makes clear.

[xiv] Allen, “‘Divinest Sense’”

[xv] Alan Tinkler, “Janet Frame,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 24, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 89-124

[xvi] Tinkler, “Janet Frame”

[xvii] Tinkler, “Janet Frame”

[xviii] Tinkler, “Janet Frame.”