Farhana Tabassum reviews Janet Frame’s autobiography An Angel at My Table (Virago, 1982-1985), and reflects on Frame’s process of identity creation and representations of schizophrenia in autobiographical writing.
Janet Frame’s autobiography volume, An Angel at My Table, was published in three parts between 1982 and 1985 in volumes titled To the Island, An Angel at My Table, and The Envoy from Mirror City. Frame’s autobiography navigates the themes of identity, memory and trauma as she explores the replacement of her past self with a newly created self on the page, as a way of rewriting the past and reclaiming her own life story. One of New Zealand’s most prominent literary voices, Frame’s journey of self-discovery takes the reader from New Zealand to London, Paris, Barcelona and back in this autobiography which inspired Jane Campion’s 1990 film adaptation.
Frame’s autobiography can be productively read through the medical humanities and mental health studies, as it allows for a deeply personal exploration of the intersection between life writing, mental health, and the socio-cultural constructions about madness. Her autobiography comes as a counter-narrative to her experiences with schizophrenia, and the trauma of dealing with it even after being labelled ‘sane’ by her doctors in London. An Angel at My Table deconstructs medical narratives of schizophrenia along with the commonly-held perceptions surrounding it. Further, I would argue that Frame’s text contributes to a historically neglected area in medical humanities studies: forced institutionalization and the lived experience of misdiagnosis. Utilising an autobiographical form to tell her story, Frames uses the first person pronoun I to give greater credibility to her narrative, and attests a veritable insight into the world of the author—a challenging childhood, grapple with mental illness and exclusion, misdiagnosis, and institutionalization. What Frame also does brilliantly through her account is allow the readers an exclusive insight into the workings of mental health institutions through the experience of the patient.
Tracing “madness”:
As a child growing up in a household that struggled financially, Frame suffered emotionally from a very young age. With no friends, and very little sympathy from her family, she reflected that she was isolated and found herself capable of expressing herself. After the sudden death of her sister Myrtle with whom she had just begun to develop a friendship, Frame shares how she withdrew into the confines of her imagination, unable to process her grief. Frame reflects in her autobiography that she could see this pivotal early experiences of loss as a catalyst for her worsening mental health later in life, which culminated in her admission to the psychiatric ward at Dunedin Hospital in New Zealand. When the doctors at Dunedin diagnose Frame with schizophrenia, Frame’s life turns upside down. From this moment on, she reflects, her identity would be at the mercy of everyone else around her- doctors, nurses, family, neighbours, but her. While Frame reflects that she saw this as an opportunity to hide away, to the reader’s surprise she also saw this as an opportunity to live only in her imagination, hiding away in what she calls throughout her biography her ‘mirror city’. Frame tells of how her diagnosis seemed to replace her authentic, complex identity with that of an assumed, or rather imposed one.
Though the act of diagnosis, she has become a third person, even a non-person. Her presence is unseen, and is only acknowledged when referred to as a patient suffering from schizophrenia. Frame recounts in her autobiography that ‘terrible treatments had been forced on me, decisions made about me, without anyone getting to know me personally’ (Frame, p. 288). Looking back to these moments of impersonal care that seemed so routine that they were almost insignificant at the time, Frame now finds in them a deep sense of poignancy as moments of lost identity. This revelation then makes Frame’s autobiography and process of writing her experience in the institution all the more imperative, so as to make sense of a time that felt unreal to her younger self. Along with Frame, the reader too comes to understand the multi-layered nature of the autobiography.
Questioning Reality:
Frame’s retelling blurs the line between fact and fiction. It destabilizes the opposition of reality and fiction. Her autobiography at times defies the expectations of the genre to assume a position closer to how Laura Marcus would define “autofiction” (Marcus, p. 1). What Frame achieves through this autobiographical and autofictional work, is to reclaim her right to tell her story- a right that has been denied many people with mental health conditions whose lived experience has been historically undervalued and erased. Such narratives of mental health conditions have been historically received as unintelligible, incoherent, thus invalid. The doctors, nurses, relatives become their spokesperson, taking decisions for them, and sometimes, though tragically, forcing them to comply. Throughout An Angel at my Table, Frame is vocal about how herself and other people with mental health conditions are unique individuals with their own thoughts, ideas and experience, and rejects the cultural expectation that they are unable to be the authors of their own stories due to their mental health condition.
‘What the long journey from ostensible madness to social normality entails is not on a redefinition of the self, but a virtual reconstruction of the dicursive subject denied power, agency and individual autonomy’ (Henke, p. 94).
Frame takes aesthetic control over her own narrative through the autobiography, representing the complexity of her experience and identity in part to counter some of the myths surrounding her life and her work.
Schizophrenia Narratives:
Since the autobiography revolves largely around the pathologized self of the author, it can be read in conjunction with other narratives exploring the lived experience of schizophrenia such as Esme Waijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias (2019) and Joanne Greenberg’s I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (1964). I have observed that many published narratives of schizophrenia and indeed those that explore mental illness follow a similarly experimental structure, creating a narrative through fragments which can leave the reader feeling dislocated. These narratives provide insight into the subjective lives of the patients including their diagnosis and prognosis, and the impact of it on their individual identity.
This formal subjectivity can put the lived experience of schizophrenia into comparison with temporally linear autobiographies that do not explore mental health, creating a comparison between a telling of the self that is seen as ‘normative’ and the formal techniques common among narratives of schizophrenia. Very briefly, while reading a schizophrenic narrative one can expect to be confronted with a stream of unconventional techniques of writing. Writers tend to narrate in fragmented dialogues, in an attempt to mirror the actual incoherence of thought in the patient’s mind. The storytelling is non-linear and challenging to follow. An absence of clear, logical connections between events is another important technique that gives it a more distinctive character. But this assumes greater authenticity when the narrator isn’t just the speaking voice narrating the inner world of a fictional character, or an acquaintance, but the self that has undergone every fragment of it, which is the case in An Angel at My Table.
Conclusion:
The title of the volume might give the false impression of something angelic or ethereal, but what the reader unravels is very far from it. While continuing the discourse on mental disorders and medical narratives, the autobiography also testifies the continuing journey of patients before and after hospitalisation. When read through the conventions of the autobiography as a genre, we can see how Frame’s text utilises the form as a tool to express her own lived experience of her mental health. The autobiography also inspires an interdisciplinary dialogue between literature and medicine: the role of imagination and literary articulation in foregrounding patients lived experience.
About the Author
Farhana Tabassum is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at Gauhati University, India. Her areas of interest include the medical humanities, life writing, Victorian literature, Japanese literature. She has published papers on affect theory, ecocriticism, and on gender studies in UGC-Care journals, and is open to exploring new fields of study.
References
Frame, Janet. An Angel at My Table. Virago Press, 2008.
Henke, Suzette. Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women’s Life-Writing. St. Martin’s Press, 1998.
Marcus, Laura. Autobiography: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2018.
Wang, Esme Weijun. The Collected Schizophrenias. Graywolf Press, 2019.
