Melancholia in Janet Frame’s <i>Faces in the Water</i>

New Zealand author Janet Frame was initially diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1945, during her stay in Seacliff Mental Hospital, Dunedin, following a mental breakdown. She spent eight years in and out of psychiatric institutions in New Zealand. The diagnosis of schizophrenia was reversed in her late 30s. In 1956, she left New Zealand on a literary grant to travel Europe. While in London, she voluntarily attended psychiatric assessment at the Maudsley Hospital to re-appraise her mental difficulties. In 1957 she was declared “sane” and told that she had never suffered from schizophrenia. Her mental difficulties were believed to be the result of years of “treatment” undergone in New Zealand. Frame’s psychiatrist, Dr. Robert Hugh Cawley, suggested she write about her experience to gain some form of cathartic closure. The result was Faces in the Water, first published in 1961, in which she narrated her experience of the psychiatric establishment. She also wrote about that experience in the second volume of her autobiography An Angel at My Table, first published in 1984. Both novel and autobiography share a common story line. Not surprisingly, clarifying the relationship between fiction and fact in Frame’s work has preoccupied most of her readers and critics