"To the Is-Land”
The Hyphenated
Space
When Janet Frame is asked to write a review of “A Fable “ and other William Faulkner’s novels from the library. She thinks
“ spinning, spinning, awhirl in pools of words and feeling… How could I write a review of a novelist who clouded my vision with feeling? I returned to the book, reading it again and again, slowly emerging into the clear-fountain light where the characters, the scenes, the meaning appeared starkly outlined, solid, real, good. This was William Faulkner’s world, and I had found it to keep it” (page 309 / Volume 2: An Angel at my Table)
Janet Frame’s words about William Faulkner could as well express the feelings one has when approaching Frame’s biographies: “clouding one’s vision with feeling.” This is all about feeling, poetry, reading about vulnerability, pain and beauty. Jane Campion admits “she has disarmed me” / “struck a blow right to my heart.” I run attuned with these thoughts. She has given a voice to us, the teenage girls and children we were (Jane Campion).
To the Is-land
New Zealand, an island, Janet’s island, a country full of rivers. The book opens with a parade of the many family arterial connections through different lands: Flemish Weavers, descendants of William of Orange, a tinge of Scottish blood, and even African and Maori ascendency...people like places running like rivers through firm land. The narrative spins up through place, physical and metaphorical.
Frame is an island inhabiting the hyphenated vacuum of the is-land, her choice of word ushers us into the first volume of her autobiography. What does Is-land mean? How does the word unthread in this hyphenated separation of a verb and a noun?
Island / Is-land: Janet hoisted in isolation, a piece of land adrift in the immensity of the ocean, a land that resists conquering, and a land to be claimed as the territory of the self. Her body, her land is subjected to plunder: everybody wants to change her, straighten her hair; she must use a girdle so her behind will not be seen; she should not use red lipstick as it does not match her hair. The coarse tunic girdling her body, tightening her, restraining her …
As James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, she forges her way into conquering her ground, her land, the territory of the self, of her imagination. This is a journey of self-discovery as a writer and conquering the land of words, a journey that takes place outside and inside. She describes herself as a commonplace, practical woman.
That year I discovered the word Island, which in spite of all teaching I insisted on calling Is-Land. In our silent reading class at school, when we chose one of the Whitcombes school readers, those thin, fawn-covered books with crude drawings on the cover and speckled pages, I found a story, To the Island, an adventure story that impressed me so much that I talked about it at home. ‘I read a story, To the Is-Land, about some children going to an Is-Land. //’ ‘It’s I-Land,’ Myrtle corrected. //‘It’s not,’ I said. ‘It’s Is-Land. It says,’ I spelled the letters, ‘I-s-l-an-d. Is-land.’ // ‘It’s a silent letter,’ Myrtle said. ‘Like knee.’ // In the end, reluctantly, I had to accept the ruling, although within myself I still thought of it as the Is-Land. (Page 35)
Her parents’ artistry—and their world overflowing with books, music, and painting—shapes her early imagination and forges the passion that would lead her to become a writer. Words captivate her: their meanings, their deceptions, their force. She ploughs her way into poetry.
The process of growing takes place through physical pains, poverty, dereliction, death and through many convulsive historical moments: The Great Depression, the Second World War, the lack of Social Security ( the first Labour Government in New Zealand that guaranteed access to Social Security was elected in 1935). At home, there is the struggle with disease (Brudie’s epileptic fits), death (Myrtle), economic penury and hardship. At Willowglen, the kitchen floor is made of earth.
In the real world, as she calls it, she shifts through the different pronouns, the family “we”, the students “we,” the institutional “she" of the asylum. She fumbles in search of her "I,” which she finally finds in writing. Upon discovery of the Grimm Brothers’ Tales, she discovers a world where fiction and reality cohabit and blend as she interiorizes and fleshes the stories under the veil of magical impersonations.
Later, she is marked by the impossible- to - utter - grieving caused by the death of her sister Myrtle. It is only the poets, she broods, following her mother, who can voice the lashing pain of this bereavement. "Annabel Lee, in a Kingdom by the Sea" by Edgar Allan Poem serves Janet to articulate the pain of Myrtle's absence:
Eden Street, in Oamaru, New Zealand, the world, in the outbreak of the Second World War… (See: "A Portrait of the Artist" by James Joyce with a similar categorization) She becomes her heroines and her heroes, and as Madame Bovary (Bovarism), she outpours and feeds from the imaginative worlds she reads:
Gradually I was acquiring an image of myself as a person apartfrom myself as a poet, and in my reading I identified most easilywith the stoical solitary heroine suffering in silence, the ‘plain Jane’content to love the strong, inarticulate hero, who was easily beguiled by the flashily beautiful woman but who turned always in the end (regretfully too late) to the shadowy shy woman he had failed to notice. I saw myself as a ‘background’ person watching, listening. I was not Becky Sharp; I was Emma. Yet I was also Tess and Marty South, as I had once been Anne of Green Gables and Charlotte Brontë (Isabel being Emily, and June Ann). I was Maggie Tulliver and Jane Eyre and Cathy. And when I could find no heroine to become, I was myself simply adoring the heroes – Jude the Obscure, Raskolnikov, Brutus, rather than Mark Antony, whom everyone liked.
And Shakespeare.
