Contexts of Exploration: Janet Frame’s The Rainbirds

Although short-listed twice within her lifetime for the Nobel Prize for Literature, and universally lauded upon her death as New Zealand’s greatest writer, Janet Frame inspires a surprising degree of reticence in literary scholars. Despite the inroads made by recent monographs,1 much of Frame’s work retains the status of a critical conundrum. The problem, it seems, revolves around contexts, both without and within Frame’s novels. Her later texts, those that are most recognizably postcolonial or postmodern in orientation, receive the most critical attention; yet criticism of them has a tendency to be more concerned with contested critical classifications than with textual elucidation.2 Equally problematic is the preponderance of marginalized individuals and flawed societies within Frame’s early novels. This recurring theme earned Frame the status of New Zealand’s national “Cassandra”,3 a role that continues to foster reductive conceptions of her work. Context, where Janet Frame’s novels are concerned, is a more complex affair than either the postcolonial and postmodern theorizations or the social realist accounts of place allow.4 The tendency for Frame’s texts to be other than they appear is wellknown. However, this “otherness” goes beyond Frame’s notorious shifts in reality and revelations of ventriloquism, to involve multiple manifestations of context within any given text. Before the critic can consider contextualizing Frame’s work in terms of established categories, the status of context within the text – as the norm from which the substance of the novel deviates, as the theoretical terrain of the text, and oftentimes as the philosophical or ontological subject of the work – must be negotiated. The two-fold challenge lies then in determining and elucidating the manifold internal context of each novel, and in turn describing and thereby contextualizing the external significance of that particular work. Contexts of Exploration