The Pull of a Secret Tide

An architecture of isolation, as a location for madness and reverie, becomes one of imprisonment and release, of containment and escape both physically and psychologically. Jane Frame (1924-2004), highly acclaimed New Zealand author and poet of magic realism, spent many years in and out of psychiatric institutions. In her book Faces in the Water (1961) Frame reveals, as an autobiographical journey, her time spent in psychiatric hospitals where the architecture of her incarceration became the site of her authorial memories. The psychiatric hospital became Janet Frame’s island of isolation. Her literary style is poetic, surreal, and at times bizarre, yet reveals intimate and personal experiences about her institutionalisation and her perception of remoteness. Hospitalisation, for many, is the end result of a dissociation with reality. Although viewed from the safe perspective of distance, the psychiatric institution was regarded with remote dis-ease. The psychiatric hospital offered a public face of respectable confinement for large groups of disaffected people, yet functioned as institutions of isolation and separation; they were not expressly meant for the safety of society, as were prisons, but allowed polite society not to face the revelation of its subconscious dark nature. However, the social silence of this interior projection exerts its hush over Man and beast. Janet Frame survived years of mental torment and institutionalisation, yet was regarded as one of New Zealand’s most misunderstood artists, which ultimately earned her notoriety as a cultural icon for her fortitude and outstanding literary vision. Frame suffered psychologically and socially due to her tenuous contact with the world, her mind’s conflict of madness and reverie, and her perception of reality. It is because of her expansive imagination and creativity that she was able to write many outstanding literary works and find her place by the fire in an acceptable world view.