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1991 - 19973

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    Living death : the hand of death in five of Janet Frame's novels : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements of Master of Arts in English at Massey University
    (Massey University, 1993) Sherrard, Ruth
    Who is alive and who is dead within a literary text is the result of the discretion or point of view of the narrator. The narrator has the power to act as the hand of death to create and destroy as they write characters in or out of the novel. This process is demonstrated through the actions of individual characters. By judgments which come solely from their point of view, they are able to declare other characters dead, while they themselves remain alive. This thesis examines this theme in five of Janet Frame's novels: Owls Do Cry, The Rainbirds, Intensive Care, Daughter Buffalo and The Carpathians.
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    Allegory in the fiction of Janet Frame : a thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English at Massey University
    (Massey University, 1991) Panny, Judith Dell
    This investigation considers some aspects of Janet Frame's fiction that have hitherto remained obscure. The study includes the eleven novels and the extended story "Snowman, Snowman". Answers to questions raised by the texts have been found within the works themselves by examining the significance of reiterated and contrasting motifs, and by exploring the most literal as well as the figurative meanings of the language. The study will disclose the deliberate patterning of Frame's work. It will be found that nine of the innovative and cryptic fictions are allegories. They belong within a genre that has emerged with fresh vigour in the second half of this century. All twelve works include allegorical features. Allegory provides access to much of Frame's irony, to hidden pathos and humour, and to some of the most significant questions raised by her work. By exposing the inhumanity of our age, Frame prompts questioning and reassessment of the goals and values of a materialist culture. Like all writers of allegory, she focuses upon the magic of language as the bearer of truth as well as the vehicle of deception. She shows that language, in transferring culture and custom from generation to generation, is an instrument of immense power; it may create and preserve, or it may instigate destruction.
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    Trauma and recovery in Janet Frame's fiction : a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Graduate Studies (Department of English), the University of British Columbia
    (Massey University, 1997) Lawn, Jennifer
    Focusing on four novels by Janet Frame in dialogue with texts by Freud, Zizek, Lacan, and Silverman, my project theorizes trauma as the basis for both an ethical and an interpretive practice. Frame's fiction develops a cultural psychology, showing how the factors of narcissistic fantasy and the incapacity to mourn contribute to physical and epistemic aggression committed along divides of ethnicity, gender, and linguistic mode of expression. Employing trauma as a figure for an absolute limit to what can be remembered or known, I suggest that reconciliation with whatever is inaccessible, lacking, or dead within an individual or collective self fosters a non-violent relation with others. I begin by querying the place of "catharsis" within hermeneutic literary interpretation, focusing on the construction of Frame within the New Zealand literary industry. With Erlene's adamantine silence at its centre, Scented Gardens for the Blind (1964) rejects the hermeneutic endeavour, exemplified by Patrick Evans' critical work on Frame, to make a text "speak" its secrets. My readings of Intensive Care (1970) and The Adaptable Man (1965) address inter-generational repetitions of violence as the consequences of the failure to recognise and work through the devastations of war. The masculine fantasy of totality driving the Human Delineation project in Intensive Care has a linguistic corollary in Colin Monk's pursuit of the Platonic ideality of algebra, set against Milly's "degraded" punning writing. In The Adaptable Man, the arrival of electricity ushers in a new perceptual rgime that would obliterate any "shadow" of dialectical negativity or internal difference. The thesis ends with a swing toward conciliation and emotional growth. The homosexual relationship depicted in Daughter Buffalo (1972) offers a model of transference, defined as a transitional, productive form of repetition that opens Talbot to his ethnic and familial inheritance. Working from within a radical form of narcissism, the novel reformulates masculinity by embracing loss as "phallic divestiture" (Kaja Silverman)