5 - An Angel at My Table

Summary

TO THE IS-LAND

The writing of an autobiography might seem surprising in Frame's case as she was sent to a psychiatric hospital on the strength of an autobiographical essay in which she had related a suicide attempt. She could have developed a legitimate distrust for a genre that had cost her so much. However, the Autobiography can also be read as the revenge of an ‘I’ that had been silenced for so long: ‘with the autobiography it was the desire really to make myself a first person’ Frame says in one of the rare interviews she gave. For years – between twenty and thirty – she was a non-person, sharing the lot of children and mad people who are forever ‘they’ or the alienating, destroying third person.

The trilogy is built along the lines of a Bildungsroman – ‘The Sorrows of Janet Frame’ – in that it follows the heroine/narrator/ author from her birth till the age of 40 or so. Frame seems to abide by the ‘autobiographical pact ’ as defined by Lejeune: author, narrator and character must be one and the same. But like any autobiographer, she also subverts some of the rules, giving her own definition of an autobiography: ‘Writing an autobiography, usually thought of as a looking back, can just as well be a looking across or through, with the passing of time giving an X-ray quality to the eye’ (II 67; JF's italics). According to Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani in her book La Scène Judiciaire de l ‘Autobiographie, metatextual commentaries are part and parcel of autobiographical writing.

Volume I hinges on the discovery of – and passion for – words that brings to light Frame's wish to become a writer together with a feeling of difference that works both ways: either as a handicap or as a prestigious aura. The first leads her to a psychiatric hospital and constitutes the subject matter of the second volume, whereas the second is linked to creation: the ‘mad woman’ has become a famous artist. The title of volume I of the Autobiography, is To The Is-land, but it could also have echoed Jean-Paul Sartre's own Autobiography entitled ‘Words’, as it focuses essentially on Janet Frame's fascination and taste for words. At the beginning were words.