Letter Writing and Space for Women’s Self-expression in Janet Frame’s Owls Do Cry and Jane Campion’s An Angel at My Table

ABSTRACT

This essay engages with life writing in Janet Frame’s 1957 novel, Owls Do Cry and Jane Campion’s 1990 film biopic of Frame’s autobiographies, An Angel At My Table. It aims to consider the physical and socio-political constraints on women’s writing, and how these may be deconstructed through non-conventional forms of intellectual exploration. Communication between women is explored in the formats used in both Frame’s novel and Campion’s film. With a primary focus on letter writing, this essay also considers diary entries, published literary work, the film text, and silence as areas of interest. This essay employs the form of letter writing in attempt to explore the medium used by Frame and the characters in Owls Do Cry as an alternative form of intellectual scholarly practice. In doing so, it aims to consider Frame’s literary legacy as a paradigm for academic study, in which women’s varied creative practices can be considered for academic exploration. The letter form also signifies an attempt to recontextualise the letter form, in order to compare the constraints on women’s writing in 1940s and 1950s New Zealand with twenty-first-century concerns about gender equality in academia and creative writing.

KEYWORDS:

• Janet Frame
• women’s letter writing
• Owls Do Cry
• An Angel At My Table

Disclosure statement

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

Notes on contributor

Hannah Matthews is an Early Career academic at Cardiff University. She has a particular interest in the varying forms of women’s creative work and how these forms illuminate contemporary social roles. She explores the nature of letter writing as an entry point to academic exploration, with a consideration of how this form may contend within the canonisation of writing by women through the passage of time. Her work is feminist in its approach, but critically analytic of the evolving nature of feminism. She is currently working on a project that considers women’s relationships to hegemonic practices and how these relationships may influence the visibility of intersectional creative works within mainstream media.

Notes

1 ‘Help help help’ is a reference from Daphne’s letter to Chicks, written in the asylum. All further references are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically within the main body of the essay.

2 In light of this, my letter-writing to Frame and others assumes a pseudo-historic approach to communication. Given the displacement of letter-writing with email, letter-writing here serves to bolster my connection to an acknowledged past, hence creating a direct line of intellectual inquiry.

3 Peter Fraser was elected as Prime Minister of New Zealand in 1940 and notably commented on the ‘new-fangled gramophone’ which could bring culture to the masses.

4 Ripa comments on incarceration in Nineteenth Century France. Though indirectly related to Chicks’ lobotomy, her inability to speak French but attempt to make appropriate ‘French’ gestures likens her further to Ripa’s observation of the locked up women who could not access the world of their keepers.

5 This refers to Ash’s understanding of what it means to abide by the ‘latent masculine principle’, and her description of the heroine as a woman who waits passively for a male rescuer to change her circumstances.

6 Women of the Future is a 1949 pamphlet from New Zealand’s National Party.

7 Ash (1988, 182). ‘Nowhereness’ is in reference to Frame’s assertion that society’s expectations made her feel as though ‘there were no place on earth’ for her.

8 The final spoken words of Campion’s An Angel at My Table, and the end of the female text.