{"id":144048,"date":"2020-04-02T11:31:30","date_gmt":"2020-04-02T15:31:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=144048"},"modified":"2020-04-02T11:48:31","modified_gmt":"2020-04-02T15:48:31","slug":"quarantine-reads-faces-in-the-water","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/04\/02\/quarantine-reads-faces-in-the-water\/","title":{"rendered":"Quarantine Reads: \u2018Faces in the Water\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

In this series, writers present the books getting them through these strange times.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Recently, I\u2019ve found myself drawn to stories about women locked up. I\u2019ve been reading Anna Kavan\u2019s short fiction, in which protagonists are pursued by invisible enemies\u2014nameless perpetrators of \u201csome vast and shadowy plot\u201d against them\u2014and shut in asylums \u201cwhere days passed like shadows, like dreams.\u201d I\u2019ve finished Shirley Jackson\u2019s We Have Always Lived in the Castle<\/em>, in which two outcast sisters seek refuge from society\u2019s taunts in a crumbling mansion. And I\u2019ve returned to Katherine Mansfield\u2019s restless diaries from the French sanitarium where she died of TB in 1923 (\u201cFelt ill all day … rather like being a beetle shut in a book, so shackled that one can do nothing but lie down\u201d). At a time when neither escapism nor consolation quite appeals, I think I\u2019m enjoying these strange, claustrophobic books for their emotional intensity, their piercing portraits of dissolution, and their dark, absurdist humor in the face of despair.<\/p>\n

In my quarantine household, we have a notepad by the bread bin on which we keep a list of the movies we plan to watch in our own indefinite confinement. Last week, we put on An Angel at My Table<\/em>, Jane Campion\u2019s 1990 adaptation of Janet Frame\u2019s autobiography, which Hilary Mantel has described as \u201cperhaps the most moving film ever made about a writer.\u201d We meet Janet as a squat, determined child, with a frizzy mop of ginger hair. Over two and a half searing hours, we watch her flounder to find her place in a hostile world, from the unremitting tragedy of her childhood in the New Zealand coastal town Oamaru (a father who beat his children, a brother with severe epilepsy, two older sisters who drowned in separate incidents) to the grim unfolding of her twenties in psychiatric hospitals across the country. In 1945, age twenty-one, Frame was diagnosed as schizophrenic and incarcerated at Seacliff Lunatic Asylum, where misunderstood patients were routinely condemned to electroconvulsive therapy. Over the subsequent eight years, as she wrote in An Angel at My Table<\/em>, she \u201creceived over two hundred applications of unmodified ECT, each the equivalent in degree of fear, to an execution.\u201d In 1952, while she was awaiting a scheduled lobotomy, it came to the attention of the hospital superintendent that Frame\u2019s book The Lagoon and Other Stories<\/em> had recently won the Hubert Church Memorial Award. He canceled the operation and Frame was released. She left New Zealand and spent her life living and writing in exile: some of the film\u2019s last scenes show a suntanned, laughing Frame in Ibiza, enjoying a carefree love affair and creative productivity. She died in 2004 as a celebrity, her funeral broadcast live to the nation, her body of work regularly mentioned alongside that of Mansfield, for whose family Frame\u2019s mother had once served as a maid.<\/p>\n

Frame wrote Faces in the Water <\/em>(1961) at the encouragement of a psychiatrist who had reversed the diagnosis of schizophrenia and declared her sane. Convinced that what others saw as madness was rather the symptom of extraordinary creative genius, he suggested she process her experiences by transforming them into fiction. The novel\u2019s Cassandra-figure narrator, Istina Mavet, is confined to an asylum, for unspecified reasons. Removed from daily life, she sits trapped in a small single bedroom, gazing at the cherry blossoms through windows that slide open no more than six inches, while sinister staff in pink uniforms stalk the corridors, keys jangling on their belts. Each morning, the nurses announce the names of those scheduled for ECT: \u201cthe new and fashionable means of quieting people and of making them realize that orders are to be obeyed.\u201d As they approach, Istina attempts to suppress any behavior that might mark her out as volatile: \u201cto leave no trace when I burgled the crammed house of feeling and took for my own use exuberance depression suspicion terror.\u201d She knows that \u201cthe doors to the outside world are locked,\u201d so when her name is called, there is no escape: dragged from bed and locked in the observation dormitory, she can hear the faint sounds of the absolved clattering spoons at breakfast. As soaked cotton wool is rubbed on temples, floral screens are drawn down between beds, and pillows placed at an angle, the screams are snuffed into submission, and the patients begin to lose consciousness: \u201cI dream and cannot wake, and I am cast over the cliff and hang there by two fingers that are danced and trampled on by the Giant Unreality.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Istina denounces the cruelty with which the most vulnerable patients are treated, one nurse scoffs: \u201cCan\u2019t you understand that these people to all intents and purposes are dead?\u201d When a bright doctor suggests that \u201cmental patients were people and therefore might like occasionally to engage in the activities of people,\u201d the result is horrifying \u201csocials\u201d in which inmates are forced to waltz before an audience in a parodic performance that belies the very humanity it\u2019s purported to affirm. Yet Istina refuses to have her \u201cmind cut and tailored to the ways of the world.\u201d Against stern instruction, she strives to preserve her imagination, and her empathy for those around her, in case \u201ca tiny poetic essence could be distilled from their overflowing squalid truth.\u201d Frame\u2019s major theme, across her work, is the disassociation and anguish inherent in living on the threshold between the outside world and the \u201cMirror City,\u201d as she called it, of an inner life. Her visionary protagonists suffer in a society that feels threatened by those who refuse to conform. Daphne Withers, the heroine of Frame\u2019s debut novel Owls Do Cry<\/em>, is a child whose imaginative world provides her with a refuge from the illness and poverty in her family; as she grows up, her spirit is sacrificed to an adult world in which poetic vision is an aberration, not a gift, and where doctors are prepared to modify her brain to make Daphne \u201cbe just like other people.\u201d Reviewers likened the novel to Goya\u2019s Disasters of War <\/em>etchings or the work of Dostoyevsky for its exalted depiction of suffering.<\/p>\n

Recalling her time at Seacliff, Frame wrote, \u201cI inhabited a territory of loneliness which I think resembles that place where the dying spend their time before death, and from where those who do return living to the world bring inevitably a unique point of view that is a nightmare, a treasure, and a lifelong possession.\u201d Frame always denied that her books were purely autobiographical. Yet as I read Faces in the Water<\/em>, spending hours immersed in her shifting, poetic, dreamlike language, it\u2019s clear to me that she\u2019s seeking a literary form to express real truth. Instability and incoherence are embedded within Frame\u2019s rich, associative sentences. Her writing is experimental in the most urgent way possible: in finding her voice, Frame\u2014like Istina \u2014 is grappling for a way to survive. In 1947, after the death of her sister, Frame wrote from the asylum to a friend, \u201cWe are such sad small people, standing, each alone in a circle, trying to forget that death and terror are near.\u201d But if we \u201cjoin hands,\u201d she suggested, \u201cwe have the strength then to face terror and death, even to laugh and make fun of being alive, and after that even to make more music and writing and dancing.\u201d It\u2019s a remarkably hopeful, generous vision from a writer who has visited the abyss of hopelessness and returned convinced of the power of art.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Read more in our Quarantine Reads series here.\u00a0<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Francesca<\/span>\u00a0Wade<\/span>\u00a0is the editor of\u00a0<\/em>The White Review. Her book\u00a0<\/em>Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars\u00a0is published by Faber in the UK and in the U.S. by Tim Duggan Books in April.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Recently, I\u2019ve found myself drawn to stories about women locked up. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1908,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[62714],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-144048","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-quarantine-reads"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nQuarantine Reads: \u2018Faces in the Water\u2019 by Francesca Wade<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"April 2, 2020 \u2013 Recently, I\u2019ve found myself drawn to stories about women locked up.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/04\/02\/quarantine-reads-faces-in-the-water\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" 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