Her novels characteristically veer between magic and satire This is a matter which research will show she simplified a good deal, since diagnoses of her case were always various and contradictory; but there can be little doubt that the long incarceration during her youth was needless, and the treatment on the whole barbarous.She became, however, because of this, an icon of the feminist movement, a role she did not enjoy since her literary success had never depended on her sex, but solely on her talent, and she did not like the sense of being segregated into a class of deserving victims.Janet Frame always guarded her privacy and lived alone, though close to her sister and her sister's children. They were collected in 1989 as An Angel at My Table, the title given also to Jane Campion's award-winning film of them in 1990. Here were revealed, in the childhood reminiscences, the extremes of her experience - the wonder of books and language, the shame of poverty, the horror of the accidental deaths of her two sisters.But Frame's overriding purpose in the autobiography was, so to speak, to clear her name of the stigma of madness - to show how she came to be wrongly diagnosed as schizophrenic. In this mode there is a bitter wit which diminishes her fictional characters to the point where the reader's belief in them is sometimes undermined. Her novels characteristically veer between magic and satire.Frame was always respected in New Zealand and by those in the international academic community who knew her work. In America her novels customarily received serious attention in magazines like Time. But she had no great commercial success until the publication of her three volumes of autobiography, To the Is-land (1982), An Angel at My Table (1984) and The Envoy from Mirror City (1985). She was poet as well as novelist; and though she only published one collection of poems, The Pocket Mirror (1967), she wrote them compulsively throughout her life.Her other, and lesser, mode was the satirical one, where she seemed to punish the world which had so misunderstood and damaged her. How marvellous that we should have such toys!Palgrave's The Golden Treasury floats through all her work as the Bible does through the work of those brought up on it.
There can only be tragedy where there is a faith that things might have been different, and better In Frame the darkness is of laughter. Nothing else is appropriate - and there is a pleasure in it, an illicit joy Frame loved language, loved poetry, loved literature. He said, "What I wouldn't give to be in Sussex!" Then he said, "Rinse whilst I'm gone." I hadn't heard anyone say "whilst" and it was that word that prompted me to write the whole book.An anecdote of that kind would always be told in a tone that seemed to tremble on the brink of helpless laughter. Her voice and articulation were bell-clear, almost child-like, and key words were hesitated before and hovered over, as if she and her interlocutor should pause to marvel at the huge pretence they were engaging in, behaving as if they could hold chaos in check by the device of linguistic communication.The same sense of marvelling at itself, and mocking itself, pervades the best of her writing. It represents, I think, a scepticism native to post-colonial societies, where national identity is insecure and the social imprint faint. |
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