From Control to Creativity: Teaching and Janet Frame

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This article will discuss Janet Frame’s relationship to teaching and its effect on her struggle to express herself creatively through writing. The relationship between Frame’s parents— an authoritarian father who ruthlessly enforced social conventions and a submissive mother who loved poetry—produced a conflict in Frame as she grew to adulthood. This conflict between repression and imaginative writing was one which continued in Frame’s differing experience of teachers. I will analyse Frame’s experience of teaching from early school years to her time as a university student and student teacher. It was her desperation at being judged as a teacher, when she secretly longed to be a poet, which partly forced her into the breakdown which led to her years in mental institutions. Writing became a medium for her incorrect labelling as a schizophrenic when she deliberately wrote poems with evidence of her ‘disorder’ to impress and keep the attention of her psychology teacher, John Money. However, she eventually found her own words which enabled her to write a narrative for herself rather than to conform to others’ expectations; this self-expression through writing in turn opens a space in which others can form their own thoughts.