Female perspectives on the Relationship between Janet Frame's autobiography and fiction

Abstract

Female perspectives on the Relationship between Janet Frame's autobiography and fiction Eva Rueschmann Josephine A. McQuail , ed. Janet Frame in Focus: Women Analyze the Works of the New Zealand Writer. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2018. 207 pp. $49.95 ISBN: 9781476669731 In Patricia Moran's foreword to Janet Frame in Focus: Women Analyze the Work of the New Zealand Writer, she points out that Janet Frame may be more widely known as the [End Page 145] subject of Jane Campion's 1990 film An Angel at My Table , based on Frame's autobiography, than as a prolific writer of fiction, short stories, and poetry in her own right. Born in Dunedin, New Zealand, in 1924, Frame lived a life that was marked by multiple family tragedies, illness, and poverty; a profound sense of marginalization and insecurity; and an eight-year stay in a mental institution in her twenties, following a misdiagnosis of schizophrenia. From a young age, Frame showed an extraordinary literary inventiveness and startlingly original prose. This unconventionality and her painful shyness often resulted in her social isolation and misunderstanding by a conformist society. Yet Frame's literary talent ultimately saved her life and creativity: in 1952, the announcement of the Hubert Church Memorial Award for her first shortstory collection, The Lagoon and Other Stories (1951), was a pivotal turning point and spared her from the looming certainty of a devastating lobotomy at the young age of twenty-eight. Writing became a refuge for what Frame called her "homelessness of self." Today Frame is highly regarded for her complex experimental (some people argue postmodern) writing and her poetic, richly metaphoric use of language—but she is less well known in the United States. This new collection of scholarly essays edited by Josephine McQuail, a professor of English at Tennessee Technical University, reintroduces Frame as a writer of autobiography, fiction, and poetry to an American audience and seeks to redress the dominant preoccupation with Frame as New Zealand's stereotyped "mad woman artist." Janet Frame in Focus features ten essays—eight written exclusively for this book—that offer an array of critical approaches but center on the ways in which Frame wrote about her childhood and life experiences, her quest for an artistic identity and voice, and her preoccupation with language—its conventionality and potential for originality and rebellion—in both her autobiography and her fiction. Overall, the collection follows in a tradition of feminist criticism concerned with social images of the female writer and artist as "mad" and "dangerous." In the wake of the women's movement of the 1970s, two influential works by prominent feminist scholars, Elaine Showalter's The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1890–1980 (1985) and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979), famously critiqued the gendered conception of female creativity as malady and insanity. This critique echoed Frame's own perspective on the gendered social construction of mental illness decades before. Among previous scholarly studies of Frame's writing, Gina Mercer's Janet Frame: Subversive Fictions (1995), which employs Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous as theoretical frameworks, is the most explicitly feminist treatment of Frame's work. Mercer is somewhat dismissive of Frame's autobiography as too linear and transparent compared to the radical feminist potential of her complex prose. In contrast, Claire Bazin, a French expert on Frame at the University of Paris Ouest Nanterre, argues in her book Janet Frame (2011) that Frame's more conventionally narrated autobiography serves as a valuable key to unlock the meaning of her fiction. Claire Bazin is one of the principal contributors to Janet Frame in Focus, with her essay on strategies of avoidance in The Lagoon and Other Stories. Bazin's scholarship on Frame also inspired her former students Aurelia Mouzet, Manon-Lili Morand, Jennifer Boum Make, and Marion Clavier to contribute original essays for this volume. These scholars bring a French perspective to Frame's writing, deploying the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin, Jean-François [End Page 146] Lyotard, Homi Bhabha, and Sigmund Freud in their both modern and postmodern readings of Frame. Janet Frame in...