The working-class writing of Janet Frame: Oral storytelling, community, and embodied knowledge

This article positions the twentieth-century New Zealand author Janet Frame as a working-class writer, and as such addresses an absence within Frame criticism. Her works have invited feminist, postcolonial, and postmodernist readings, and in recent years her compositional approach has drawn much interest, issuing in the popular characterisation of her writing as prescriptive. This article intervenes in these debates by insisting on the importance of social class in shaping Frame’s relationship to storytelling and her conceptualisation of authorship. It establishes the centrality of oral storytelling, song, and the recitation of poetry to the first of Frame’s autobiographies To the Is-Land (1982), and identifies a connection between her working-class origins and the oral fabric of the Frame family home. It explores the operations of a domestic mythopoeic practice, which it defines as sociable, transcultural, and open-ended, and shows how this oral culture influenced Frame as she began to engage with processes of literary production and participate in the national literary culture. Close examination of her first publication The Lagoon and Other Stories (1951) reveals a writer uneasy with the associations of print authorship, namely, ownership and autonomy. Close reading of these early stories shows Frame to be intent on preserving their oral provenance and on conveying to the page their original bases in multiple authorship and transculturalism. This article uncovers an early resistance to the politics of individualism represented by the proprietary author, a resistance that proceeds from her classed experiences and which is implicated with her negotiation of the legacies of empire in Aotearoa/New Zealand.