From 1947, she spent seven years in different psychiatric hospitals where she was treated with electric treatment more than 200 times. When she was freed from the hospital, she got herself a job and earned money by looking after four elderly women in a boarding house and stayed at Christchurch with a friend of John Forrest since John Forrest was going to do Ph.D in USA and he suggested that it would be better to talk to Mrs. R. Soon after, she moved back to her family in Willowglen and still had contacts with John Forrest. Isabel, June (another sister) and Frame decided to give their mother a holiday for her hard work. During that period, Isabel had been swimming and had collapsed due to heart problems. She survived it but caused further problems during her mother’s vacation. In the trip, Isabel and her mother went on holiday to Picton. Again, Isabel went swimming in the baths and this time, she drowned. A funeral was held for Isabel, from which Frame’s mental breakdown got worse.
She got back to Christchurch and this time, Mrs.R admitted Frame to the Sunnyside Mental Hospital. In 1954, she was discharged from the hospital and kept returning to the hospital due to fear and unhappiness. She went to Oamaru from where she went to Auckland to her sister, June and her husband. Her mental breakdown became worse enough to lead to the Auckland mental hospital at Avondale where Caxton Press published her first book with a collection of stories, The Lagoon. In 1951, Frame made her debut as a writer for the book and won the Hubert Church Memorial Award, one of the nation’s most prestigious literary prizes. The book save her from getting leucotomy in 1951 when a hospital worker read that she had won a literary prize and therefore, the operation was cancelled. Four years later, Frame stayed with her sister’s family in Auckland and met the New Zealand writer, Frank Sargeson. From 1955 until 1956, Frame lived and worked in an old army hut in the garden of Sargeson’s home in Takapuna where she produced her first novel, Owls do Cry (1957).
Frame left her home country on a State Literary Fund grant in 1956 where she got three hundred pounds. She was afraid that she might be forced back to a mental hospital and therefore, she went off to live in Ibiza in Andorra and England for the next seven years. All of her experiences were written in her novels, where she includes the effect of schizophrenia in her life and the “madness” she had to go through, trying to get away from the conditions created by the society.
An in-depth portrayal of the main character
The main character of this autobiography is Janet Frame, who is from a working class family and is very unpredictable in terms of her public profile due her closed personality. In this book, she writes about her experiences from during the World War I and after the war. Her main focus is not on the war but she focuses on daily life matters, criticising the state of the society from place to place. She connects everyday life to literature and has a strong passion in writing. At the same time, her ignorance for her family has grown due to lack of understanding between family members. Her childhood was packed with poverty, illness and tragedy (her brother Bruddie was diagnosed wit epilepsy and suffered from seizures and violent outbursts; her two sisters Myrtle and Isabel had a heart defect and both died in separate swimming accidents). Janet Frame was in a world of writing and storytelling from which she entertained the family with her poems and stories. Her parents assumed that she would become a teacher, while Janet, who was a deeply private and shy person, had aims of becoming a poet. However writing, especially for a woman, was not regarded as a ‘real job’ at the time. She was desperately unhappy because of the family tragedies and found herself trapped in the wrong career of being a schoolteacher. Her only escape appeared to be in obedience to the society’s judgement of her as abnormal. Therefore, her personality became more isolated. She spent four and half years out of eight years imprisoned in mental hospitals. The part where she is in mental hospitals is a miraculous survival of the horrors and the brutalising treatment she had to face in the unenlightened institutions. When she was scheduled to have a leucotomy, she was horrified at this, and not convinced by the doctors’ reassurances that the operation would make her normal. But fortunately, she was saved from leucotomy by her writing skills of The Lagoon. She returned back to the society, but not as a misfit this time. She sought for support and company of writers and set out to achieve her goal of becoming a writer.
Possible links between the book and Mrs. Dalloway
The main link between this book and Mrs.Dalloway is the term, modernism. The term is used to identify new and distinctive features in the subjects, concepts and styles of literature. The time period of the use of this term was in the early decades of the twentieth century, but it was greatly used after World War I (1914-1918). The three important intellectual precursors of modernism are Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. They questioned the certainties of traditional conventions of social organisation, religion and morality, and the ways of conceiving the human self. In An Angel at My Table, Janet Frame mentions Sigmund Freud in many parts of the book and even names her cat, Sigmund. This immediately gives an impression on the influence of Sigmund Freud on the author.
This book, An Angel at My Table can be classified as a combination of a picaresque novel and as a social or ‘protest’ novel. Mrs.Dalloway is written as a fictional biography of Virginia Woolf and can be classified in the same way as An Angel at My Table. Both of the books have links to their author’s live which the books are clearly part of modernism. When looking at the narrative in each of the books, the authors have conveyed their structure of a monologue in different ways. The narrative in this book is strictly written from the first person’s point of view while in Mrs.Dalloway, the book is written from first person’s point of view but the character in the first person changes from chapter to chapter.
The themes, issues and ideas are very similar in both of the books in consideration with modernism. They both emphasize criticism towards society and notified neglected themes. In Mrs.Dalloway, the time span of the story is set in one day and therefore, Clarissa Dalloway (main character) gives criticism of the society for that whole day of the story. Since An Angel at My Table occur in a longer period of time starting from the middle of World War I and the story continues even after 1945, the criticism of the society was given for that time period. However, both of the books allowed their characters’ thoughts to travel back and forth in time and, to reflect on their emotional experiences. The criticism towards society was on the repressed social and economic position of women and the treatment of those driven by depression to the boundaries of sanity which then became the neglected themes. The themes that I found most common between these books were sane and insanity, life and death, relationships and, the self and the unconscious. The main characters of both books suffer from psychological problems but to diverse extents. Janet Frame, the author and the main character in this book, experiences to an extreme extent in suffering from schizophrenia. The author of Mrs.Dalloway, Virginia Woolf suffered from mental problems more than the main character in the book but she portrayed herself through the character, Septimus Warren Smith. An extract taken from An Angel at My Table shows how much Virginia Woolf influenced Janet Frame which caused Janet Frame to appear as a schizophrenic:
“I remembered once instance of a letter written to my sister June where I was actually quoting from Virginia Woolf, in describing the gorse as having a ‘peanut-buttery smell’. This description was questioned by the doctor who read the letters, and judged to be an example of my ‘schizophrenia’.”
This extract also indicates that Virginia Woolf’s works are written in the mind of a schizophrenic and it requires the mind to understand it. The theme of death was clearly indicated through the following sentence:
“Loss, death, I was philosophical about everything.”
This sentence instantly gives an impression of depression which has been the reason for Janet Frame’s mental breakdowns. In Mrs.Dalloway, the death of Septimus Warren Smith was the major mental breakdown for Clarissa Dalloway.
The society and the setting of the books are structured in different ways. In Mrs.Dalloway, Virginia Woolf includes a map of London along with the book and the events are taken place in various ‘streets’ in the city centre. In An Angel at My Table, Janet Frame used four places located in New Zealand of where she grew up: Dunedin (urban city), Oamaru, Willowglen (countryside) and Auckland. The way the main characters in the books are structured to portray the society is quite extraordinary. Mrs.Dalloway gives an overview of the struggles of World War I through the eyes of Septimus Warren Smith with Clarrisa Dalloway’s narration. An Angel at My Table portrays less about the war but instead it depicts the modern literature through time. It also gives some description of Janet Frame’s surroundings due to war, where there were few men at college and men who returned from the war limping with one leg or one arm.
The language and style used in both of the books have characteristics of modernism. One important feature of modernism is ‘stream of consciousness’. It is a modernist style of writing evolved by authors at the beginning of the twentieth century to express in words the flow of a character’s thoughts and feelings. The purpose of the technique was to give readers the impression of being inside the mind of the character. Its origin of technique initially comes from psychology by an American psychologist, William James in the late nineteenth century. In Mrs.Dalloway, Virginia Woolf used long sentences with less consideration to punctuation. Some traces of this modern feature were also used in An Angel at My Table where Janet Frame also uses long sentences but has some consideration to punctuation. The vocabulary in Mrs.Dalloway often refers to some of the terms used by Shakespeare and uses a wide range of metaphoric language throughout the book. In An Angel at My Table, a wide range of adjectives were used and a lot of metaphors starting initially from the first line of the book, “The future accumulates like weight upon the past”. Janet Frame questioned herself very often with rhetorical questions during her ‘stream of consciousness’. She also used comic exaggeration when expressing her personal feelings in brackets. A symbolic imagery of modernism was used when Janet Frame named her cat after the intellectual precursor of modernism, Sigmund. During the coarse of the book, she mentioned Sigmund Freud in a number of areas but this kind of symbolic imagery in connection with modernism was rarely used in Mrs. Dalloway. I also found a very important motif throughout this book which connected to Virginia Woolf’s life. The motif used was drowning because Isabel and Myrtle drowned as well as the author of Mrs.Dalloway herself. From this I found that there is a lot of links between these two books mainly due to similar situations in life and to the type of literature both authors have been reading.
Personal perspective: In what way has this book had an effect on you?
This book, An Angel at My Table has had a great effect on my personal opinions when it comes to psychological problems. Before I read this book, my views on psychological problems were not so strong but I thought of their causes. My first thought went to the proverb, “Prevention is better than cure”. If Janet Frame’s family had cared for her or talked to her as a family, she would not have had to face the horrors of the mental hospitals. This has caused a negative effect on the main character. The relationship with her family has made Janet Frame to distant away from them and therefore, she studied abroad and away from the people she knew. Another problem she had was timidity. This emotional problem has had a greater effect on me because I have had similar problems with timidity around other people when I was younger. Due to some motivation, I had been able to get out of it to become a more confident person. In this book, Janet Frame was not given the same motivation by her family or by the people around her which was a reason for why she kept her thoughts and feelings to herself. It has not only made her isolated but has also led to a bigger problem of schizophrenia.
Some parts of this book have made me realize how small emotional problems can become greater problems in life and success can only be gained if we hold on to our ambition. According to the book, Janet Frame kept her passion for literature and had a strong ambition in becoming a writer. Towards the end of the book, she seems to have recovered from schizophrenia because she became confident when Frank Sargeson gave all his help in order for Janet Frank to become a writer as himself. In my opinion, the book portrays the versatility and the path to opportunities of life, and how certain decisions could change an instant of a situation.
