See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/269514148

Feminist Auto/biography as a Means of Empowering Women: A Case Study of

Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar and Janet Frame's Faces in the Water

Article in Text Matters · November 2011

DOI: 10.2478/v10231-011-0014-7

CITATIONS READS

4 1,895

1 author:

Tomasz Fisiak
University of Lodz
12 PUBLICATIONS 11 CITATIONS

SEE PROFILE

All content following this page was uploaded by Tomasz Fisiak on 24 March 2019.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

Text Matters, Volume 1 Number 1, 2011
DOI: 10.2478/v10231-011-0014-7

Tomasz Fisiak
University of Łódź

Feminist Auto/biography as a Means of

Empowering Women:
A Case Study of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar
and Janet Frame’s Faces in the Water

Abstract
Feminism, as a political, social and cultural movement, pays much atten-
tion to the importance of text. Text is the carrier of important thoughts,
truths, ideas. It becomes a means of empowering women, a support in their
fight for free expression, equality, intellectual emancipation. By “text” one
should understand not only official documents, manifestos or articles.
The term also refers to a wide range of literary products—poetry, novels,
diaries. The language of literature enables female authors to omit obsta-
cles and constraints imposed by the phallogocentric world, a world domi-
nated by masculine propaganda. Through writing, female authors have an
opportunity to liberate their creative potential and regain the territory
for unlimited expression. In order to produce a truly powerful text, they
resort to a variety of writing styles and techniques. Here the notions of
a situated knowledge and context sensitivity prove useful. There are three
methodologies working within situated knowledge, namely, the politics
of location, self-reflexivity and feminist auto/biography. All of them re-
gard text as a fundamental tool to signify one’s authority, yet feminist
auto/biography, a concept widely discussed by the British theorist Liz
Stanley, appears to be the most empowering mode of writing. It challeng-
es the overused genre of auto/biography and reconstructs its role within
feminist epistemologies, thus creating a favourable environment for text
production. The works by Sylvia Plath and Janet Frame can be analyzed
from the point of view of auto/biographical empowerment, even though
their auto/biographical potential is mainly instinctive. Nevertheless, they
help to comprehend the strength of the auto/biographical.
The aim of this article is to “investigate” two novels by these au-
thors, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath and Faces in the Water by Janet Frame,

Unauthenticated
Download Date | 3/24/19 12:27 PM
 Tomasz Fisiak

and their compatibility with Stanley’s concept. The paper attempts to

answer several questions. Are these novels actual feminist auto/biog-
raphies or rather fictional auto/biographies with feminist undertones?
What kind of narrative strategy is used to achieve the effect of authority
over the text? Last but not least, what is the function of auto/biographi-
cal narration in the case of these two novels? The article also explores
the idea of writing as a means of regaining control over one’s life (with
references to the authors’ biographies and parallels between their lives
and lives of their fictive alter egos).

Abstract
184

From “female writing” to “female auto/biography”

Contemporary feminism pays much attention to the text as a carrier of
new ideas, thoughts and practices. Text enables free and unrestrained ex-
pression of the author’s truths and beliefs. Text knows hardly any bound-
aries—it can be almost infinitely deformed, changed, deconstructed. But
text may not only contain the meanings which are solidly fixed within
a particular field of knowledge. Today’s feminism, especially its postmod-
ern branch, develops the idea of a situated knowledge, in which the context
of the author and her research, be it social, cultural or philosophical, is
hugely important (vide texts by Ruth Frankenberg, Ien Ang, Avtar Brah
or Marjorie L. Devault, whose reasearch is always situated in a particular
environment). The three methodologies working within situated knowl-
edge, namely, the politics of location, self-reflexivity, and, most of all, femi-
nist auto/biography, regard text as vital in expressing one’s authority. Even
though traditional discourse still favours the male point of view and tends
to situate female writing outside the phallogocentric vision of the world,
female authors do their best to reclaim authority over the text. The notion
of a feminist auto/biography especially comes in handy in this context as
it challenges the overused genre of auto/biography and redefines it within
feminist epistemologies. And the range of its functions is wide. Valérie
Baisnée indicates that it has become a place in which the female subject
not only records personal growth but also tackles certain crucial political
issues linked to the position of women in society, and adds that “the au-
tobiography, situated at the border between public and private discourse,
and in which the present perspective mixes with that of the past, enables

Unauthenticated
Download Date | 3/24/19 12:27 PM
 Tomasz Fisiak

a registration of . . . changes at both individual and social levels” (12). In

a natural way it becomes an influential tool for mastering memories and
imagination. The power of auto/biography lies also in its compatibility
with two concepts—the notion of écriture féminine, the term used for the
first time by the French literary theorist Hélène Cixous in her essay The
Laugh of the Medusa, and the idea of parler femme, invented by Belgian
feminist philosopher, Luce Irigaray.
The concepts of auto/biography and écriture féminine seem to share
many similarities. Both discuss the importance of body. Both advocate free
traversing within generic conventions and transgressing socially imposed
borders. Each of them acknowledges the inevitability of fragmentation of
the self whilst rejecting the idea of its nature as unitary. Verena Andermatt

185
Conley points out that Cixous’s writings continuously affirm “that I is
always more than one, that life is full of springs and that all is enigma, to
be discovered, and that is the very ‘essence’ of life” (xxii). Last but not
least, feminist auto/biography and écriture féminine revalorize the role of
women and their own authority over the written word in general.
Still, it is necessary to pose some essential questions first. Is there
a feminist auto/biography as such? Could a distinct example of this genre
be consciously produced? It is difficult to answer these inquiries as no clear
definition of this concept can be provided, because the whole issue of self
in auto/biography, not to mention the undertones of the word “feminist,”
is quite complex. In her influential The Auto/biographical I: The Theory
and Practice of Feminist Auto/biography, Liz Stanley tries to explain the
term and name some characteristic features of this particular literary genre.
Obviously, one should be aware of the distinction between biography, i.e.,
writing about somebody else’s life, and autobiography, standing for writ-
ing about the life of oneself (hence Stanley merges these two into a unitary
concept of auto/biography, thus underlining its fluidity and indetermina-
cy). Both of these, however, need to meet certain criteria to be analyzed in
the context of feminism. Liz Stanley is perfectly aware of this. Moreover,
she brings caveats to any definition of auto/biography, such as the selective
nature of memory, the conventionality of the form, the usage of fictive de-
vices blurring the perspectives on described events, or the problem of self
as subject matter. She also raises another important question, namely, what
exactly makes a feminist auto/biography. “[I]s the fact that a text is femi-
nist authored or about a feminist subject sufficient to define it as feminist
auto/biography? Is the form or structure of what is written . . . not just
the subject who forms the bones of its content, actually different from
any other auto/biography?” (Stanley 247). And even though Stanley does
not provide her readers with easy answers, she lists several features that
could be found in a feminist auto/biography. These include challenging

Unauthenticated
Download Date | 3/24/19 12:27 PM
 Tomasz Fisiak

conventional forms, playfulness, and rejection of a linear mode of present-

ing events. A good feminist auto/biography ought not only to recreate
the genre in an exciting and unconventional way, but also to transgress the
boundaries within different genres and relate more to the readers. Never-
theless, it would also be impossible to talk about a distinct feminist auto/
biography without four fundamental elements: anti-realism, anti-spotlight
stances, contingency, and location in a particular ideological context (that
is, within feminist ideological practices). The inclusion of these “regula-
tions” may result in the creation of a noteworthy feminist auto/biography
(therefore Liz Stanley refers to Kate Millet’s Sita and Flying as the illus-
trations of unconventionality of auto/biographical writing). Stanley also
does not fail to underline the importance of the text itself, not only in the

186
dimension of the female authorship or presence of a female protagonist.

Auto/biographies, both written and spoken, are intertextual, but within

this there is a primacy of everyday life and its concrete material events,
persons, conversations. ‘Bio,’ the narration of the material events of eve-
ryday life, is the crucial element in theorizing and understanding both
‘auto’ and ‘graph,’ albeit, regarding written (but not spoken) auto/bi-
ography, that the only way readers have of relating to this is through
‘graph,’ as through the writing (Stanley 246).

The potential author of a distinct feminist auto/biography is expected to

refer to “graph” as the carrier of a wide range of meanings. But “graph,” the
physical side of the writing process, may also aid in maintaining control
over the final product of the creation process. It is especially precious in
the case of female authors who treat the actual, physically existing text as
a means to regain power over their lives.

Sylvia Plath on the territory of textual authority

Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar can be considered a suitable example illustrating
Stanley’s theories. At the same time it would be rather risky to call this
novel a strict feminist auto/biography (the way Stanley comprehends it) as
the production of a feminist text was not the author’s aim. Thus it might
be safer to view The Bell Jar as a fictional auto/biography, containing, how-
ever, several feminist traces. The novel becomes an original piece of writ-
ing where elements of the author’s life are transformed into a convincing
story (after Federman 100).
In Plath’s case, autobiographical elements could already be found in
her poetry; “Lady Lazarus” or “Daddy” express her suicidal tendencies,
her complicated emotional life, and allude directly to her strong feeling of
guilt caused by her Austrian origins (after Connie Ann Kirk’s biography

Unauthenticated
Download Date | 3/24/19 12:27 PM
 Tomasz Fisiak

of Plath). However, it is crucial to analyze Plath’s poetry in the context of

challenging textual forms and exertion of authority over the production
of a written form. Eileen M. Aird emphasizes how her poems, especially
those from the Ariel period, envisage a “Paradise of autonomy and recog-
nized identity, an image of completeness”(201), thus corresponding with
the concept of unity of text and body. For Plath, a poem is not a mere
textual structure consisting of subjects, verbs, objects, and predicates, but
rather a live being, whose existence goes far beyond obvious references and
metaphors. The text is a value in itself, a treasure to cherish, a product re-
sisting separation from its author (such an approach is adequately reflected
in “In Plaster”). Christina Britzolakis notes that ”the language of Plath’s
later poems undoubtedly draws upon the ‘flashy’ naturalistic idiom of con-

187
temporary American speech,” adding that “this change of stylistic register
cannot be seen merely in terms of liberation from a tradition-bound aca-
demicism,” but rather from a viewpoint of “making it new, of renewing and
paring down the language of poetry”(136). Yet even the power of the text
and the language cannot escape control, for this unlimited freedom may
result in an eventual conflict between the form and the content.
The poems help us to comprehend a complicated Plath-text relation-
ship. However, the author’s traumas and feelings are even more prominent
in The Bell Jar.1 Plath describes here the life and various experiences of
Esther Greenwood, yet most of the events taking place in the novel may be
traced back to episodes from Plath’s own life. Esther, the author’s fictional
incarnation, fights with heavy depression, tries to kill herself several times,
and finally enters a mental hospital where she undergoes shock treatment.
The reader not only observes the slow process of Esther’s emotional and
mental collapse, punctuated by her suicide attempts, but also accompa-
nies her during her painful and initially fruitless therapy. All of this can be
found in Plath’s actual biography.2
What is then so challenging about this novel? Which elements of
a feminist auto/biography does it contain? Does Sylvia Plath (or her fic-
tional alter ego) succeed in reclaiming control over the body of her text
(and through this, her physical body, as well)? The whole text is the reflec-
tion of the many traumatic experiences of the female protagonist—the

1
Even though this particular novel achieved a cult status, thanks to its successful
construction of a protagonist, not to mention the excellent use of technique and style,
Plath “did not feel it was an adequate book [and] was agitated by the reviews” (Ames 172).
2
In 1953 Plath was hospitalized for depression and treated with electroshock
therapy. Lois Ames, in the bibliographical note to The Bell Jar, quotes a fragment of her
diary describing this period as “[a] time of darkness, despair, disillusion—so black only as
the inferno of the human mind can be—symbolic death, and numb shock—then the painful
agony of slow rebirth and psychic regeneration” (208).

Unauthenticated
Download Date | 3/24/19 12:27 PM
 Tomasz Fisiak

difficult fight with depression, the suicide attempts, and finally, the loss of
a friend who successfully took her life. Esther loses control over her self
on different levels—her body and mind cease to cooperate, therefore the
text gains authority as the most reliable witness of her pain. It also helps
her to re-establish herself and rebuild her self-esteem until she can eventu-
ally say: “I [am] my own woman” (Plath 182). Esther becomes estranged
from her physical body, but regains control over the body of the text. Ob-
viously, Esther’s capabilities never go beyond fictive experiences, as she
succeeds in describing her existence, simultaneously encountering many
obstacles in the attempt to portray similar experiences of her fictional alter
ego, the heroine of her unfinished novel. Her strength appears to lie more
in the auto/biographical than in the fictional.

188
The Bell Jar meets many of the criteria established by Stanley. Plath’s
work challenges the conventions of a typical auto/biography. The author
discards a linear way of presenting the events—memories of the past in-
tertwine with recent occurences without causing unintelligible chaos. She
also includes elements of meta-writing. The female protagonist, a young
writer, creates the personage of Elaine (mentioned in the previous para-
graph), very reminiscent of herself:

Elaine sat on the breezeway in an old yellow nightgown of her mother’s

waiting for something to happen. It was a sweltering morning in July,
and drops of sweat crawled down her back one by one, like slow insects.
Inertia oozed like molasses through [her] limbs (Plath 99).

Sylvia Plath writes about Esther writing about Elaine, and all three follow
a similar emotional pattern. Writing in the auto/biographical mode is the
first step in achieving authorship over the text and enables the author to
use fictive devices, but in such a way as not to obliterate the whole image
of one’s experience. By means of creating the character of Esther Green-
wood Sylvia Plath transgresses the role of a mere author or biographer. She
translates real-life experience into fiction and still remains credible to the
readers, thus forming a very strong bond with them (which is compatible
with Stanley’s ideal of a reader-friendly auto/biographical writing). What is
more, Plath uses the auto/biographical form to tame the demons of over-
whelming reality. The paper takes on a therapeutic role, becoming a sponge
absorbing problems. It is also a continuation of the body, an integral part of
her existence. Plath pays much attention to the human body (ugly bodies,
sick bodies, bodies of newly born babies) and the body takes the role of
a reflection of the text, which undergoes a striking transformation—from
a chaotic structure into a more coherent creation. Juxtaposing the imag-
ery of babies with the production of the text seems very reminiscent of

Unauthenticated
Download Date | 3/24/19 12:27 PM
 Tomasz Fisiak

Cixous’s comparison between writing and birth giving. Cixous underlines

how much text production relates to female physicality. Plath recreates this
image to describe the struggle in daily routines. On the whole, in The Bell
Jar life and fiction mingle together and remain in a state of constant flux.
Giving Esther a chance to restore harmony in life, Sylvia Plath attempts
to transplant the character’s decision into real life. Yet this process cannot
be continued infinitely—Esther reflects Plath’s life, but Elaine is unable to
take that role any further.
The auto/biography appears within the constraints of another auto/
biography. Moreover, the recurrent motif of a bell jar, descending and en-
gulfing the main heroine, refers to Plath’s life itself and is a clever, com-
pelling metaphor. The novel ends with the optimistic vision of Esther

189
escaping the title trap, which stands in stark contrast to the events that
followed afterwards—Plath’s gassing herself soon after the publication of
the novel.3 Susan R. Van Deyne makes a valid point about this particular
clash between life and prose: “[b]ecause the poems and novel that have
made Plath’s name come to almost all her readers as posthumous events,
her work has inevitably been read through the irrevocable, ineradicable and
finally enigmatic fact of Plath’s suicide. The challenge for her biographers
has been to puzzle out the relationship not merely of her life to her art,
but of her art to her death” (3). Nevertheless, taking the conflicting real/
fictional events aside, it seems the text has the capacity to prevent the bell
jar’s descent, especially for someone to whom “the world itself is the bad
dream” (Plath 193).
The Bell Jar also goes beyond normal generic literary divisions. The
novel derives from both biography (observing life from a distance) and
autobiography (the usage of first person narration), but it also comprises
newspaper headlines, imagined dialogues, and flashbacks. It is riveting
and engaging for those readers who build an emotional bond with Esther
and support her in her uphill battle with depression. Last but not least,
it abolishes the assumption that the form of a diary utilizes its author’s
creativity best.
What about the feminist context then? Why is The Bell Jar not really
a feminist auto/biography? Is the female authorship or female protagonist
sufficient to classify it as such? The novel certainly contains several ele-
ments that could be viewed as feminist. Esther spurns the roles that soci-
ety wants to impose on her. She rejects the “feminine mystique,” refusing

3
Her suicide was the result of many factors—disenchantment with the man she
loved (Ted Hughes), financial insecurity, health problems, and harsh weather conditions at
that time in London. Philip J. Baker describes Plath as a person with “mood disturbance”
and suicidal tendencies (195).

Unauthenticated
Download Date | 3/24/19 12:27 PM
 Tomasz Fisiak

to become simply a good mother or a wife. Instead, she demands the right
to express herself freely as a writer (as a result, she does not take a course
in shorthand because it would demean her and limit her potential). In this
respect Esther challenges social and cultural conventions, choosing a chal-
lenging form to describe her existence (the narration she uses reflecting
the fragmentation of her mind). Moreover, The Bell Jar definitely meets
the basic tenets of a feminist auto/biography espoused by Stanley—it is
anti-realist in its disruption of a linear method of presenting events. It is
contingent, as it textually recognizes the fragility of facts and arguments.
It is also anti-spotlight, as it refracts attention from a single unique subject
(Esther’s life is in the centre, but it is often interpreted through the lives
of others). At the same time, it is not possible to claim that the novel is

190
composed by textually located feminist practices. When Plath wrote the
novel the second wave of feminism was at the early stage of development,
hence it is hard to estimate its influence on the author. Even though Sylvia
Plath’s writing obviously predates the discussion about the impact of the
distinct feminist auto/biography, her writing (not to mention the life nar-
rative of her fictional impersonation) goes in the direction of the feminist
auto/biography model. This is a tangible proof that the auto/biographical
effect of empowering the female author may appear in the least expected
circumstances.
In the case of Esther Greenwood, the text’s value should not be ex-
posed to any limitations. This may explain why Plath’s heroine feels
trapped in the suffocating atmosphere of Ladies’ Day—“the big women’s
magazine that features lush double-page spreads of Technicolor meals,
with a different theme and locale each month” (Plath 21). Imposing the-
matic restraints on the text itself degrades the creative potential of the
author; therefore, it is essential to free oneself from all possible constraints
in order to voice one’s message.
The choice of techniques used to introduce the notion of exerting au-
thority over the body of the text is also significant. The usage of the auto/
biographical mode is just one of the main components to gain autonomy
through writing. This notion is compatible with Cixous’s statement that
a “[w]oman must put herself into the text—as into the world and into
history—by her own movement” (347). To liberate one’s voice, the au-
thor creates a distinct written self (fictive or not) that gains control over
the matter of the text. The author of the text naturally wields power over
her production and amplifies this potential through introducing powerful
characters who also possess such control. Plath does this skilfully, holds
the reins of the narrative through her literary alter ego, Esther Green-
wood, a being functioning on manifold levels—a separate fictional being
and a character “constructed through the perception and recollection of

Unauthenticated
Download Date | 3/24/19 12:27 PM
 Tomasz Fisiak

others” (Evans 84). Even though Esther seems to crumble under the pres-
sure of strong personalities around her (her mother, her boyfriend, other
men she meets), she manages to preserve some space for her special needs.
The strong relation to the text is one of the decisive factors. Esther tells
the story of her apprenticeship in the beauty magazine, difficulties in com-
plying with the standards manufactured for women, and, eventually, her
mental collapse caused by the discrepancy between her vision of happi-
ness and the harshness of post-war life. The reader is provided with a mi­
nute account of these occurences and her emotional life.4 Despite being at
times somewhat detached from her experiences, Esther keeps a firm grasp
over her story, which helps her survive confrontation with an unfriendly
world. Mary Evans points out that Esther “assume[s] a capacity for ac-

191
tion which is apparently free of the control of others” (86). The narrator
proves that she can free herself not only from the constraints imposed
by “significant others . . . peer groups, institutions, [and] . . . a normative
culture” (Evans 83), but also from the pressure of the text. She fails to
write her own novel, but her life narrative resists outside influences and
flows steadily unobstructed. Esther wants to become a real self, not just
a product of others’ expectations. In order to achieve this, she has to clas-
sify herself within the matter of her narrative. At this point, she makes an
important transition—keeping command over the text enables her to reaf-
firm control over her body and mind. She liberates herself through writing
as it aids her in finally declaring “I am, I am, I am” (Plath 199).

Facing the auto/biographical in Janet Frame’s novel

A discussion of auto/biography as both an empowering technique of writ-
ing and a tool to regain one’s own territory within the male-dominated
world of literary practices can be extended to other authors. A similar ap-
proach to written forms of expression can be found in novels by New
Zealand author Janet Frame. Frame, who wrote a series of strictly auto/
biographical books (To the Is-land, An Angel at my Table, and The En-
voy from Mirror City), also wrote a few novels in semi-auto/biographical
tone, deeply rooted in real-life events and personal traumatic experience.5
In the 1940s Frame was diagnosed with schizophrenia; however, years
later, psychiatrists in London confirmed that this diagnosis was incorrect
(Ross 425). Philip J. Baker refers to her mental illness in terms of psy-

4
Her partnership with her boyfriend, Buddy Willard, collapses. Moreover, Esther
is unable to build a relation with other men (with a young sailor or with Irwin, the first
man she sleeps with) or friendship with other girls (she cannot communicate with fellow
trainees at Ladies’ Day).
5
Janet Frame’s two sisters drowned and her brother suffered from epilepsy (Ross 425).

Unauthenticated
Download Date | 3/24/19 12:27 PM
 Tomasz Fisiak

chosis and a deep sense of isolation (244). Nonetheless, since adolescence

she spent many years in various New Zealand psychiatric institutions. As
a result of these events, she grew up with a strong feeling of separation
and marginalization. “[H]er need for [isolation] seems initially to have
grown out of negative personal experience, it is encouraged by her read-
ing and by her ambition to become a writer. It is, moreover, reinforced by
the local cultural and literary climate. Isolation, both on geographical and
on a social level, is frequently thematized in the New Zealand literature”6
(Oettli-van Delden 74). Faces in the Water explores this dissociation, and
offers a graphic depiction of a long chain of mental collapes, nervous break-
downs, and long stays in mental institutes. But the novel goes far beyond
a record of the traumas of everyday existence in hospital and transfer from

192
one ward to another. It is also a successful attempt to “investigate” the
body of a text, to invoke its potential to tame the demons that were born
by overbearing therapy, electric shock treatment and threat of lobotomy.
At some point the text becomes a means of reconciliation with suffering.
Confinement in the asylum leaves a deep scar in the protagonist’s mind,
who neither pretends it never happened, nor distances herself from these
events.
In Faces in the Water Janet Frame, just like Plath in The Bell Jar, con-
structs her fictive alter ego. Istina Mavet recalls events from the Cliffshav-
en and Treecroft institutes. She does not avoid shocking details and her
narrative is tense; fear of lobotomy, the peculiar behaviour of the sick,
antipathy between stern nurses and distrustful patients—these elements
strengthen the narration and endow it with drama. Istina exists on the
borderline between sanity and madness. She takes the concurrent roles of
a suffering subject and a careful observer who writes to keep firm grasp of
reality. Yet at the same time she confesses in her final words:

I looked away from [other patients] and tried not to think of them and
repeated to myself what one of the nurses had told me, ‘when you leave
hospital you must forget all you have ever seen, put it out of your mind
completely as if it never happened, and go and live a normal life in the
outside world.’ And by what have I written in this document you will
see, won’t you, that I have obeyed her? (Frame 253–54).

6
The sense of isolation is also present in The Bell Jar. Esther’s suffering stems
from the strong feeling of not belonging and being unable to maintain any closer personal
relations. It is amplified by her inexperience—she is unable to write her own novel due to
lack of basic knowledge about life: “How could I write about life when I’d never had a love
affair or a baby or even seen anybody die?” (Plath 99).

Unauthenticated
Download Date | 3/24/19 12:27 PM
 Tomasz Fisiak

Istina implies that her narrative, tangible proof of her physical and men-
tal experiences, is also a burden. She has an ambiguous attitude towards
her own narrative—it paradoxically releases and relieves her innermost
thoughts and feelings whilst simultaneously amassing a heavy load for her
shoulders. This ambiguity makes Frame’s novel even more intriguing. The
author uses certain technical devices to hold the attention of the reader,
and in this respect her novel follows the grain of Liz Stanley’s auto/bi-
ography (even though it departs from it in particular ways, too). Despite
the relative linearity of narration, Janet Frame resorts to several other
techniques to challenge her reader, like her uncompromising approach to
punctuation (she often refrains from using any punctuation signs at all) or
very long sentences. The words that end Faces in the Water are crucial if one

193
wants to comprehend the complexity of this narrative. The text surpasses
“the restoration of reason and . . . [underlines] the loss of the compound
personality that is alive in the madhouse and is characterized by prodigious
empathy with the world” (Delrez 23).
The narrative transgresses the reminiscent or therapeutic function.
“This could be seen as simply furthering the historical readings of women’s
writing as emotional and somehow uncontrolled rather than the intellec-
tual response of the artist” (Unsworth 26). Through writing, Frame (and
at the same time Istina) defends her subjectivity. “Frame presents a world
in which interpretation of events and therefore the reality of individuals is
entirely dependent on point of view and consequently cannot be seen as
objective” (Unsworth 28). Istina Mavet, just like Esther Greenwood, longs
for a development of her own voice and handles the text as a tool to shape
and liberate it. “[She] . . . tries to find her subject position by comparing
herself to others, by anxiously seeking signs of acceptance or rejection in
the behaviour of the people around her. She cannot take her stand because
she is completely dependent on the reactions of others”(Reif-Hülser 191).
In Frame’s novel Monika Reif-Hülser observes “a passionate desire to be
seen, to be heard, to be recognized . . . . [T]he possibility [not only] to re-
capture or to negate, but also to love and to understand and thus transcend
isolation” (181). Istina admits:

I will write about the season of peril. I was put in hospital because a great
gap opened in the ice floe between myself and the other people whom
I watched, with their world, drifting away through a violet-coloured sea
where hammer-head sharks in tropical ease swam side by side with the
seals and the polar bears. I was alone on the ice (Frame 10).

Istina appears to write to reconstruct her identity (she worked as

a teacher, but mental instability shattered her classroom persona) and to

Unauthenticated
Download Date | 3/24/19 12:27 PM
 Tomasz Fisiak

bridge the gap that had grown between herself and others. Text becomes
a means to overcome isolation, discordance, friendlessness.
But through writing Istina also resists the incessant implications of
her madness. Text offers her a possibility to underline that her stay at the
hospital for “loonies” (as she calls it herself) was a serious mistake and an
abuse of power. Still, there exists a strong bond between her narrative and
lack of sanity.

There is an aspect of madness which is seldom mentioned in fiction be-

cause it would damage the romantic popular idea of the insane as a per-
son whose speech appeals as immediately poetic; but it is seldom the
easy Opheliana recited like the pages of a seed catalog or the outpour-
ings of Crazy Janes who provide, in fiction, an outlet for poetic abandon
194 (Frame 12).

Istina, despite her combat with depression, possesses a capability to produce

text, going beyond down-to-earth presentations of illness, and enriching her
narrative with intertextual references to literary classics, eg. the works of
William Shakespeare. The textual power of other texts translates directly
onto Istina’s textual being. Close contact with literature helps her write
her own narrative, and it also fills in the void between herself and “normal
people.” Hence the feeling of desperation when one day she is denied an op-
portunity to look at fresh volumes brought to the hospital library.

There I had been standing . . . when suddenly a library had appeared

just outside the window and a tweedy fairy godmother had not denied
my request to look inside. But the villain arrived and turned me away
because I had not the status necessary for people who view shelves of
books. I was a patient and could not be trusted; I was a child and would
not grasp the content, the essential meaning, of the books (Frame 241).

Here Istina touches upon another crucial element of daily reality in

a hospital, namely, treating patients not as independent entities but as in-
fantile beings with no intellectual capacity. The written words, both in the
form of a book and one’s own narrative support Istina’s struggle to over-
come the stigmatization, develop her own territory, and escape a simplified
classification of her as a mad woman.7
Frame’s/Istina’s narrative relates to Helen Cixous’s observations and
advice. In her influential treatise The Laugh of the Medusa, Cixous says

7
There is a Gothic quality to Istina’s situation. She resembles a Gothic damsel in
distress who has to withstand the pressures of the unfriendly collective villain, embodied
by the hospital employers and society (who try to prove she is insane without looking
further into her real mental condition).

Unauthenticated
Download Date | 3/24/19 12:27 PM
 Tomasz Fisiak

that “[a] feminine text cannot fail to be more subversive. It is volcanic;

as it is written, it brings about an upheaval of the old property crust, car-
rier of masculine investments—there’s no other way. There’s no room for
her if she’s not a he? If she’s a her/she, it’s in order to smash everything,
to shatter the framework of institutions, to blow the law, to break up the
‘truth’ with laughter” (357). To Istina Mavet writing is also more than
subversive—it goes beyond an ideological masculinity and abolishes the
“institution” of male writing. It is more than a woman’s attempt to free
her forces through the process of narrative creation. It is writing to remain
sane, to endure the reification she undergoes due to her mental instabil-
ity. “The carefully constructed image of Janet as a writer is in fact used by
Frame to conceal the Implicit Author. In the guise of Janet she attempts to

195
present an acceptable public image of herself as someone who was unjustly
certified as insane, but who managed to overcome this social victimization
through writing” (Oettli-van Dalden 89–90).
Faces in the Water may be intriguing from a textual standpoint, but it
also encountered criticism of certain aspects of its construction, for ex-
ample the accumulation of facts describing the daily existence of patients
(vide reviews by Joan Stevens). Simone Oettli-van Dalden refers also to
the conflict between the external and internal worlds presented by Frame,
resulting in a “blurring of the boundary between fact and fiction” (90).Yet,
it would be unfair and patronizing to analyze this novel simply as a dis-
jointed collection of haphazardly placed trivia and overlook its intertextu-
ality and technical mastery. In this fictional auto/biography Frame presents
a fascinating cultural construct and locates her protagonist in a challenging
textual context. Once again the auto/biographical is used instinctively, but
the result is inspiring and productive.

Auto/biography as a tool to reclaim one’s authority

over the text

To conclude, it is possible to write a distinct fictional auto/biography that

resists classification as a feminist auto/biography, yet still possesses some
of its qualities; one which empowers and endows its author with means to
control the text production process and freely express strength. Stanley
states that “whether these possibilities come to fruition as actualities de-
pends upon how willing—not how able—feminist auto/biographers and
writers about auto/biography are to put into practice feminist principles
and precepts, and how concerned readers are to demand that they do”
(Stanley 255). Writing may become a tool to bridge the gap or break the
silence in which women, both as gendered beings and authors, are situ-
ated. Writing may actually contribute to making the female voice heard

Unauthenticated
Download Date | 3/24/19 12:27 PM
 Tomasz Fisiak

(Jones 83). The production of a text may involve a feeling of pleasure,

jouissance. It may also serve as a way to escape the overpowerment of the
phallocentric world (or maybe even phallogocentric as the world keeps
revolving around the male aspect of writing), the world dominated and
determined by men’s laws. Last but not least, success lies where the author
is able to overcome “[the] ‘anxiety of authorship’—a radical fear that she
cannot create, that because she can never become a precursor [in the male-
oriented world of literature], the act of writing will isolate or destroy her”
(Gilbert and Gubar 23). The Bell Jar and Faces in the Water as texts push
the boundaries of female writing, and their protagonists resist fixed iden-
tity categories. Maybe this is not enough to acquire the label of feminist
texts, but definitely sufficient to merit acclaim.

196
Works cited

Aird, Eileen M. “‘Poem for a Birthday’ to Three Women: Development

in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath.” Sylvia Plath. The Critical Heritage. Ed. Linda
Wagner-Martin. London: Routledge, 1998. 191–203.
Ames, Lois. “Notes Toward a Biography.” The Art of Sylvia Plath:
A Symposium. Ed. Charles Newman. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1971. 155–73.
Baisnée, Valérie. Gendered Resistance: The Autobiographies of Simone
de Beauvoir, Maya Angelou, Janet Frame and Marguerite Duras. Amster-
dam: Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden
Literaturwissenschaft—Rodopi, 1997.
Barker, Philip J. Assessment in Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing:
In Search of the Whole Person. Cheltenham: Nelson Thornes, 2004.
Britzolakis, Christina. Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning. Ox-
ford: Oxford English Monographs, 2002.
Conley, Verena Andermatt. Hélène Cixous: Writing the Feminine. Lin-
coln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991.
Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Feminisms: An Anthol-
ogy of Literary Theory and Criticism. Ed. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price
Herndl. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997. 347–62.
Delrez, Mark. Manifold Utopia: The Novels of Janet Frame. Amster-
dam: Rodopi, 2002.
Evans, Mary. “Extending Autobiography: A Discussion of Sylvia
Plath’s The Bell Jar.” Feminism and Autobiography: Texts, Theories, Meth-
ods. Ed. Tess Cosslett, Celia Lury, and Penny Summerfield. London: Rout-
ledge, 2000. 76–88.

Unauthenticated
Download Date | 3/24/19 12:27 PM
 Tomasz Fisiak

Federman, Raymond. Critifiction: Postmodern Essays. State University

of New York Press, 1993.
Frame, Janet. Faces in the Water. London: Women’s, 2000.
Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. “Infection in the Sentence: The
Woman Writer and the Anxiety of Authorship.” Feminisms: An Anthology
of Literary Theory and Criticism. Ed. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price
Herndl. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997. 21–32.
Holland, Peter. King Lear and Its Afterlife. Edinburgh: Cambridge
University Press, 2002.
Jones, Ann Rosalind. “Inscribing Femininity: French Theories of the
Feminine.” Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism. Ed. Gayle
Green and Coppelia Khan. London: Routledge, 1985. 80–118.

197
Kirk, Connie Ann. Sylvia Plath: A Biography. Westport: Greenwood, 2004.
Marcus, Laura. “Feminist Aesthetics and the New Realism.” New
Feminist Discourses: Critical Essays on Theories and Texts. Ed. Isobel Arm-
strong. London: Routledge, 1992. 11–25.
Oettli-van Delden, Simone. Surfaces of Strangeness: Janet Frame and
the Rhetoric of Madness. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2003.
Peel, Robin. Writing Back: Sylvia Plath and Cold War Politics. Rose-
mont Publishing, 2002.
Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. Toronto: Bantam, 1973.
Reif-Hülser, Monika. “‘Glass Beads of Fantasy’: Janet Frame’s Faces in
the Water or: The Enigma of Identity.” REAL Yearbook of Research in Eng-
lish and American Literature vol. 12. Ed. Jürgen Schlaeger. Berlin: Gunter
Narr Verlag Tübingen, 1996. 179–202.
Ross, Robert L. Colonial and Postcolonial Fiction: An Anthology. New
York: Garland, 1999.
Stanley, Liz. The Auto/biographical I: The Theory and Practice of Femi-
nist Auto/biography. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992.
Unsworth, Jane. “A Reflection on Theories of Autobiography with
Reference to the Work of Janet Frame.” The Uses of Autobiography. Ed.
Julia Swindells. London: Taylor and Francis, 1995. 13–24.
Van Dyne, Susan R. “The Problem of Biography.” The Cambridge
Companion to Sylvia Plath. Ed. Jo Gill. Edinburgh: Cambridge University
Press, 2005. 3–20.
Whitford, Margaret. Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine. Lon-
don: Routledge, 1991.
Yalom, Marilyn. “Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, and Related Poems.” Com-
ing to Light: American Women Poets in the Twentieth Century. Ed. Diane
Wood Middlebrook and Marilyn Yalom. Stanford: University of Michigan
Press, 1995. 167–82.

Unauthenticated
Download Date | 3/24/19 12:27 PM

View publication stats