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.