Janet Frame in Focus by Josephine A. McQuail

Author:Josephine A. McQuail
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland
Published: 2018-01-26T05:00:00+00:00

Locus of Identity Formation and Plural Identities

The necessity for the feminine voice to emancipate itself through writing is expressed in a multiplicity of ways in both essays and fiction especially since the outbreak and rise of the 1960s movements for women’s liberation. In her 1975 manifesto, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Hélène Cixous, one of the leading French feminist writers, criticizes traditional patriarchal system and its hijacking of language by imposing a male-oriented perspective. Cixous’s attempt to redirect discourse as the sole instrument of male domination opens the way for a renegotiation of modes of expression as well as represents women’s voices in fiction. At the time of her writing her collection of short stories, The Lagoon and Other Stories, Janet Frame not only is an incarcerated body in an isolated mental hospital, but also embodies a repressed voice set against patriarchal and sociocultural power structures that regulate modes of production and reception of literary texts. The initial recognition of Janet Frame’s genuine talent in acclaimed public literary spheres has saved her from a lobotomy.3 Frame’s physical integrity is therefore restored and, in the meantime, the author has achieved public visibility by renegotiating and circumventing her exclusion. Cixous’s plea for women merges together a claiming back of the female body and the imperative of linguistic appropriation against male discourse. By means of sustaining “l’écriture féminine,”4 a female prerogative therefore implies an engagement to invent the female self through writing from and through the body. In other words, the path towards the “I-woman” is drawn.

To suggest that Frame’s writing ventures into modes of self-expression, it is my intention to carry the question of lagoonization through the use of the lagoon as an instrument for exploring identity formation. I read selected passages from Frame’s short stories in the light of the lagoon as a corollary to the coming into existence of a self-image. In fact her first short story, “The Lagoon,” describes the narrator’s encounter with the materiality of the body of water. The particularity of the lagoon resides in its changing nature; the narrative illuminates the dynamic and shifting trajectory of the lagoon. The lagoon only comes into existence through tidal movements, and its physical presence is a precondition to allow the deployment of a narrative voice, and initiate the process of construction of a personal identity. The intradiegetic account of the surrounding landscape pays close attention to the spectacle of a changing environment. For this effect the narrator’s Picton grandmother of Maori descent recounts that even though the lagoon vanishes momentarily at low tide, it achieves full presence in the form of small puddles wherein it is possible to glimpse one’s face “tangled up with sea water and water and rushes and bits of cloud” (1). In spite of its ephemeral nature, the lagoon reveals the locus of formation of a specular image. The lagoon therefore contains a potential revealing function, and unleashes a mechanism of reciprocity in imagining one’s self-image.

In my reading, I wish specifically to signal the interaction of the displaced narrator (addressed in the second person singular) with the lagoon.

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