A Mad Reading of Janet Frame’s Madness Narratives Faces in the Water and An Autobiography

The critical component of my thesis focuses on two works by Janet Frame: Faces in the Water and An Autobiography.

My critical research is situated in the emerging field of mad studies and examines the literary treatment of the lived experience of madness and psychiatrisation. Mad studies has a simple premise: the study of madness should include the mad perspective—let the mad speak of themselves. Mad is a broad term that includes anyone who is “mentally ill,” a psychiatric survivor, a psychiatric consumer, or who identifies as mad. Madness narratives, including the two texts by Janet Frame mentioned above, invite readers inside the walls of psychiatry as well asinside the experience of madness itself. However, few studies to date have focused on these narratives from the perspective of those who live with a psychiatric illness, or those who identify as mad.

This thesis argues that the Frame scholarship tends to uphold ableist and sanist notions of mad literature. Further, the biographical research on Frame often treats the author’s psychiatric history as good material for a writer who is sane, rather than formative, educative, or the foundation for a life informed by the state of being a psychiatric survivor. My research addresses these gaps by studying Frame’s madness narratives and her life through the lens of mad studies. My project builds on the pioneering mad studies work of scholars such as PhebeAnn Wolframe and Bren LeFrançois, and critically engages with Janet Frame scholars such as Jan Cronin, Sylvie Gambaudo, Susan Schwartz, and Mark Williams. By drawing on my own experience of forced psychiatrisation and living with madness, I locate mad realities that have thus far gone unacknowledged in these texts and I consider the following questions: what insights can we gain by approaching Janet Frame’s mad narratives—and the scholarship on those works—from a perspective that not only acknowledges but indeed privileges the author’s lived experience of psychiatric incarceration? And in so doing, can we counter claims that language cannot capture madness and the mad experience?