FRAME, Janet (Paterson)

Nationality: New Zealander. Born: Dunedin, 28 August 1924. Education: Oamaru North School; Waitaki Girls' High School; University of Otago Teachers Training College, Dunedin. Career: Writer. Lives near Levin, New Zealand. Awards: Hubert Church Prose award, 1952, 1964, 1974; New Zealand Literary Fund award, 1960; New Zealand scholarship in letters, 1964, and award for achievement, 1969; University of Otago Robert Burns fellowship, 1965; Buckland literary award, 1967; James Wattie award, 1983, 1985; Commonwealth Writers prize, 1989. D.Litt.: University of Otago, 1978. C.B.E. (Commander, Order of the British Empire), 1983.

Publications

Collections

The Janet Frame Reader. 1995.

Short Stories

The Lagoon: Stories. 1951; revised edition, as The Lagoon and Other Stories, 1961.

The Reservoir: Stories and Sketches. 1963.

Snowman, Snowman: Fables and Fantasies. 1963.

The Reservoir and Other Stories. 1966.

You Are Now Entering the Human Heart. 1983.

Novels

Owls Do Cry. 1957.

Faces in the Water. 1961.

The Edge of the Alphabet. 1962.

Scented Gardens for the Blind. 1963.

The Adaptable Man. 1965.

A State of Siege. 1966.

The Rainbirds. 1968; as Yellow Flowers in the Antipodean Room, 1969.

Intensive Care. 1970.

Daughter Buffalo. 1972.

Living in the Maniototo. 1979.

The Carpathians. 1988.

Poetry

The Pocket Mirror. 1967.

Other

Mona Minim and the Smell of the Sun (for children). 1969.

An Autobiography. 1990.

To the Is-Land. 1982.

An Angel at My Table. 1984.

The Envoy from Mirror City. 1985.

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Bibliography:

by John Beston, in World Literature Written in English, November 1978.

Critical Studies:

An Inward Sun: The Novels of Frame, 1971, and Frame, 1977, both by Patrick Evans; Bird, Hawk, Bogie: Essays on Frame edited by Jeanne Delbaere, 1978; Frame by Margaret Dalziel, 1981; I Have What I Gave: The Fictions of Janet Frame by Judith Dell Panny, 1993; Janet Frame: Subversive Fictions by Gina Mercer, 1994; The Inward Sun: Celebrating the Life and Work of Janet Frame edited by Elizabeth Alley, 1994; Critical Spaces: Margaret Laurence and Janet Frame by Lorna Irvine, 1995; The Unstable Manifold: Janet Frame's Challenge to Determinism by Karin Hansson, 1996; Gendered Resistence: The Autobiographies of Simone de Beauvoir, Maya Angelou, Janet Frame, and Marguerite Duras by Valérie Baisnée, 1997.

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Although she is known primarily as a novelist and autobiographer, Janet Frame published about 80 short stories between 1946 and 1979, most of them gathered in one or more of her four collections and many of them also anthologized. Among New Zealand writers only Katherine Mansfield and Frame's longtime friend Frank Sargeson have achieved as much international publication and recognition in the short story.

Frame's first publications were short stories brought out in magazines in 1946-47, and her first book, The Lagoon and Other Stories, which was published in 1951 but mostly written in 1946, was a collection of stories and sketches. The Lagoon and Other Stories was published in New Zealand, but her next collections, the matched volumes The Reservoir: Stories and Sketches and Snowman Snowman: Fables and Fantasies (1963), were published in the United States. A one-volume selection, The Reservoir and Other Stories, appeared in England and New Zealand in 1966. Her fourth collection, You Are Now Entering the Human Heart, a retrospective selection from the first three collections and with four previously uncollected stories added, appeared in New Zealand in 1983 and in England in 1984.

The subtitles of the two 1963 volumes indicate something of the different types of short fictions Frame has written. The "stories and sketches" mix realism and impressionism, usually showing from within, through their subjective impressions, the lives of children or of social outsiders in a recognizable, basically realistic modern setting. This mode, reminiscent of that of Mansfield but with Frame's unique tone and feel, is the dominant one in The Lagoon. Some of the stories of children focus on the happy immediacy of positive childhood experiences, as in "My Cousins Who Could Eat Cooked Turnips" and "Child." Most memorable are the clearly autobiographical stories that deal with a child being faced with the death of a sibling, such as "The Secret" and "Keel and Kool." Another group deal with social outsiders: the mental hospital patients of such stories as "The Bedjacket" and "Snap-dragons"; the lost, disturbed housewife of the powerful "The Day of the Sheep"; the lonely, seemingly schizophrenic inhabitant of a boardinghouse in "The Birds Began to Sing"; and the unhappy, isolated writer figures of "Jan Godfrey" and "My Last Story." "Lolly-Legs," an uncollected story of 1954 dealing with a dumb orphan girl, is similar. Some of the stories juxtapose the immediacy and innocence of the child's experience with the pain, anxiety, and confusion of the adult outsider, as in "Swans" or "Pictures."

The stories in The Reservoir continue in the mode of The Lagoon but with an expanded range. The first eight all deal with childhood, but with less immediacy and less use of the child's idiom and more retrospection, as in "The Reservoir" or "The Bull Calf." After these stories Frame returned to childhood only in the uncollected "A Boy's Will" of 1966, a quite different kind of story about the pressures put on a bright and individualistic boy by his anxious, conformist family. Another group focuses on outsiders: the lonely spinsters of "The Teacup" and "An Incident in Mid-Ocean," or the isolated writer-observer figures of "The Windows" or "The Linesman." This gallery is enlarged somewhat in the later stories with the lonely old people of "The Bath" (1965) and "Winter Garden" (1969) and with the economic loser, who interacts with the writer-observer, in Frame's last published story, "Insulation" (1979), all three collected in You Are Now Entering the Human Heart. A more restricted group of stories is primarily satirical. In The Reservoir, "The Triumph of Poetry" and "Burial in Sand" depict self-deceiving would-be artists, as does the later uncollected "They Never Looked Back" (1974), while the uncollected "The Painter" skewers the unimaginative suburban male, and "A Relative of the Famous" from The Reservoir uses a mad outsider to show up a shallow society woman.

The "fables and fantasies" of Snowman Snowman are very different in mode. All break the boundaries of realism while pointing parabolically at certain recurring themes, most having to do with death and the knowledge of death, but they do so in a variety of ways. The title work is a fully developed allegory of novella length that uses the figures of the snowman and his teacher, the Perpetual Snowflake, to comment on the cycle of life and death. "The Red-Currant Bush, the Black-Currant Bush, the Gooseberry Bush, the African Thorn Hedge, and the Garden Gate Who Was Once the Head of an Iron Bedstead" is a playful fable and "The Mythmaker's Office" a satirical parable, while others such as "The Press Gang" or "Visitors from the Fields" are not much more than developed metaphors.

Whatever their mode, Frame's short fictions are united by a verbally inventive style and a constant vision of life and death. The style is marked by a play with language and a rich flow of metaphor. For instance, in "The Pleasures of Arithmetic," in Snowman Snowman, the television news bulletins become little bullets of the same thoughts fired into the brains of thousands of users, all "in the end hosts only at the point of a gun to thoughts donated to them by courtesy of the television company." The tone shifts from the ironic to the seriously oracular or to the vivid, innocent, free indirect discourse in the idiom of children, but the language is always rich, imagistic, and suggestive. The vision of life presented is dark and intense. At the center is the sense of the relentless power of time and death. Human beings in Frame's world are conscious creatures desiring life and continuity but caught in an unconscious universe that operates in a cycle of birth and death that will always defeat their wishes. Although we try to deny and evade the knowledge, we know that we must die, as the narrator of "The Press Gang" admits in typically metaphorical language: "… I know the Press Gang waits for me … until the three score and ten are concluded, and the ship and the sun go down together, and Death at last subdues the piratical activities indulged in by Life."

In Frame's world children live in an imaginative present at first free of the knowledge of death, but gradually the darkness impinges on their world of light. Adult society uses social status, consumer goods, and power to try to cover over its knowledge of death, with the mass media the primary agents of encouraging conformity to this false vision. In the dark parable of "The Mythmaker's Office" a law is passed forbidding the public mention of death, but "the avoidance of Death, like the avoidance of all inevitability, overflowed into the surrounding areas of living, like a river laying waste the land which it had formerly nourished and made fertile." Only by accepting time and death and by honestly facing the human situation can individuals give life meaning. But in Frame's world only artists and other visionary outsiders face this knowledge and, like the narrator in "One Must Give Up," integrate the knowledge into their inner imaginative world, "using the panel in the secret room" to "make one's escape to fluid, individual weather; stand alone in the dark listening to the worm knocking three times, the rose resisting, and the inhabited forest of the heart accomplishing its own private growth." But as "Two Sheep," the next parable in Snowman Snowman, shows, such knowledge is painful and difficult to live with, and the price of imaginative vision in Frame's world is always alienation.

In Frame's autobiography the compensation for living alone in the "mirror city" of the imagination is the power of creation, which if it cannot defeat death can at least incorporate it into the design. Such an option is denied most of the characters in her short stories, but its presence is still felt in the author's language, an imaginative light in an otherwise dark world.

—Lawrence Jones

See the essay on "Swans."