In Camera/On Camera: The Re-Presentation of Janet Frame as a Kiwi Icon

Abstract

Frequently referred to as New Zealand’s most famous and least public author, Janet Frame occupies a curious place in the nation’s literary and cultural history. With her feted literary production largely overshadowed by her dramatic personal history, Frame is, to paraphrase one critic, an author obscured by her image. The present study takes the form of an analysis of this characterisation of Frame in all its attendant implications: biomythical, socio-cultural, multimedia, and extraliterary. Inverting the traditional mode of analysis, we will frame our subject, as it were, by focusing not on the author’s own literary production, but on the promotion and reception of her work in an increasingly heterogeneous range of media/contexts, examining Frame’s transformation from obscure author to New Zealand icon in relation to an ever expanding range of appropriations. Far from superfluous artefacts subordinate to traditional modes of literary analyses, the ephemeral and ancillary evocations of authorial identity that form the basis of our study have an animating and vitalising influence on Frame’s career and celebrity status, testifying to the integral role of mass media in the perpetuation of her biographical legend and construction of her iconic status. By concealing their inherently discontinuous nature through their re-presentation of the subject as an historically determined presence, these manifold appropriations simultaneously purport to present us with an authentic and incontrovertible image of the author, a guarantee that gains added significance in the case of famously hermetic celebrities such as Frame. The increasingly visual nature of Frame’s authorial construction creates the illusion of the foreclosure of the gap between the visible and the invisible, the knowable and unknowable. Through this process, Frame’s likeness becomes increasingly ubiquitous while retaining the mysterious qualities essential to her appeal as both an experimental author and enigmatic celebrity. But rather than re-present her rise to prominence as ameliorative in its manifestation, our analysis reveals Frame’s authorial imago to be a contended site of cultural production, mediating the impact and influence of artists commercial and political commodities in late twentieth and early twenty-first century New Zealand. Refashioned as a secularised, multimedia re-presentation of irrepressible artistic individuality in the face of social and global impediment, Frame’s remarkable life/story is indelibly etched into New Zealand’s cultural imaginary; the famously reclusive author granted the status of Kiwi Icon.