Drawing on her own experience with mental illness and the institutions that manage those afflicted by it, Janet Frame creates a novel that is itself a part of her psychiatric therapy: writing used as a path to greater wholeness and self-unity.
To capture the experience of mental illness—the discontinuity between inner thought and outer reality, between actual and imagined scenes—Frame resorts to experimental techniques of carefully minimized punctuation and highly poetic phrasing. This novel shares autobiographical roots with Frame’s first novel, Owls Do Cry (1957), and her third novel, The Edge of the Alphabet (1962); some critics loosely group these into a trilogy.
Janet Frame voluntarily entered a mental hospital when she became severely depressed after the second death by drowning in her family—two of her sisters drowned ten years apart. In Seacliff Mental Hospital, she was wrongly diagnosed with schizophrenia, and as a consequence she underwent more than 200 rounds of electroshock therapy that left her disoriented and terrified. Her memory in particular was affected. In her fictionalization of these experiences, she captures the inner world of the individual at the mercy of an institution she does not understand and cannot control.
Frame creates the persona of Istina Mavet as the first-person narrator of her life at Seacliff and later Avondale, called Cliffhaven and Treecroft in the novel. Istina undergoes shock treatment, insulin treatment, and, like Frame, is scheduled for a lobotomy before a doctor recognizes her storytelling skills and “paroles” her to the outside world. At the novel’s end, Istina presents the story as evidence that she has obeyed the instructions she received on leaving the hospital—to live a normal life.
Frame’s novel exists because, in spite of her own therapy, she continued with her writing and published several stories while confined to the hospital, demonstrating that creativity can be highly resilient under phenomenal stresses.
Bibliography
Delbaere, Jeanne, ed. The Ring of Fire: Essays on Janet Frame. Sydney, NSW: Dangaroo Press, 1992.
Evans, Patrick. Janet Frame. Twayne’s World Authors, 415. Boston: Twayne, 1977.
Panny, Judith Dell. I Have What I Gave: The Fiction of Janet Frame. New York: G. Braziller, 1993.
Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis
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