Janet Frame’s Autobiographical Frock Consciousness

ABSTRACT

This article investigates New Zealand author Janet Frame’s relationship to clothes in the three volumes of her autobiography, To the Is-land, An Angel at My Table and Envoy from Mirror City. It uses the concept of ‘frock consciousness’ – conceived by Virginia Woolf in 1925 as an idea through which to explore one of the many states of consciousness a person may inhabit – as a tool through which to unpack how Frame fashioned her life through writing. Like Woolf, Frame was profoundly aware of the power of clothes to shape one’s sense of self and inform the representation of this self and others through writing. She was also fraught by an ambiguous relationship to fashion and dress, simultaneously enchanted and embittered. For Frame, clothes were key to her negotiation of the external ‘real’ world and her inner ‘other’ world; fundamental to her subjectivity. Reading Frame’s autobiography through her frock consciousness, I argue, provides important insight into her experiences of loss and the codes of (in)sanity with which she was inscribed, as well as furthering our understandings of the complex, intimate roles fashion plays in the creative and everyday lives of women.

KEYWORDS:

• Fashion
• ‘frock consciousness’
• Janet Frame
• literature
• New Zealand
• Virginia Woolf

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank an early first reviewer, whose potent comments made me rethink the particular significance of frock consciousness in Frame’s autobiographical writing. Also, Professor Natalya Lusty for her generous support in working through those comments.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Hawes (1995) has written about Frame’s fascinating practices of ‘cultural cross-dressing’ yet this is in reference to the way she, at the behest of Frank Sargeson, accentuated her ‘otherness’ by posing as a new migrant to New Zealand, a Pacific Islander and non-native English speaker – not in reference to any actual dressing she might have done.

2 It is interesting to note how fellow New Zealand author Katherine Mansfield also used masks, both literal and metaphorical, in her writing, reflecting a ‘deliberate detachment from the outside world, and a curious intimacy in that detachment’ (Ferrall et al. 2014, 5) very similar to that which Frame depicts in her autobiography.

3 The Houses of Waitaki Girls’ High School are named after Margaret Burn (red), Catherine Ferguson (yellow), Mary Gibson (green) and Jessie Wilson (blue).

4 For more on the history of uniforms and clothing poverty in the history of New Zealand see: Labrum 2007.

5 Also see: New Zealand Fashion Museum. 2012. Home Sewn. Auckland: Penguin Books.

6 Frame’s relationship with dressmaking is also made clear in a later passage, in which Frame wears a cardigan she had proudly knitted whilst visiting Aunt Polly and Uncle Vere in Petone (north of Wellington) before departure to London. Aunt Polly is vociferously disparaging about her clothes: ‘What on earth are you wearing that horrible cardigan for? It’s far too big and its [sic] an awful colour, it’s just no colour at all. You look like a piece of earth or something, wearing it’ (Angel, 187). Despite Frame’s protestations in defence of the cardigan, Aunt Polly simply declares: ‘It’s drab’ (Angel, 188).

7 Sylvie Gambaudo (2013, 307) notes that Frame initially embraced the diagnosis; the schizophrenia was ‘something she has and something that justifies what she is, extra-ordinary’ (original emphasis). Following the reversal of the diagnosis, then, Frame was faced with a difficulty: ‘to integrate her two selves: the self with and the self without schizophrenia.’

8 This is in interesting contrast to Woolf, whose plain, even drab appearance – her wearing of that which was ‘rather quiet and nondescript … individual rather than fashionable – out of synch with the times’ – according to her husband Leonard, accentuated her ‘disquieting aura of “genius”’ (cited in Koppen 2009, 10).

9 Frame’s wearing of a mac ties her to a long lineage of mackintosh-wearing women, including Doris Kilman in Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. In her article on the modernist character of the mackintosh, Celia Marshik (2012) remarks on the range of qualities the simple green coat carries, not least of all the class differential between Kilman and Clarissa Dalloway. While Frame, like Kilman, wears her mac to render herself invisible, the opposite occurs as the coat draws attention to the ‘abject body’ beneath (Marshik 2012, 64). In its very ordinariness, the garment marks out these women as ‘other.’

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Notes on contributors

Harriette Richards

Dr Harriette Richards is a Research Associate in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne working on the ARC Future Fellowship project ‘Modernism, Cosmopolitanism and Consumer Culture’ (2018-2022) with Professor Natalya Lusty. She is co-founder of the Critical Fashion Studies research group and her work has been published in a range of journals, including Cultural Studies, Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty and Gender, Work & Organisation, and in the edited collection Rethinking Fashion Globalisation (Bloomsbury 2021). She recently co-edited with Natalya Lusty and Rimi Khan, a special issue on ‘Fashion Futures’ for Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies (2021).