“A subaqueous condition of the mind”

Madness and Water Metaphors in Janet Frame’s Asylum Stories

Abstract

Both Janet Frame’s debut collection of short stories, published in New Zealand while she was an inmate at Seacliff Lunatic Asylum (The Lagoon and Other Stories, 1951), and her later novelistic account of this experience (Faces in the Water, 1961) are steeped in water imagery, offering a literary epitome of “the age-old alliance of water and madness” (Foucault 1972) through the prime vehicle for association that is metaphor. This paper argues that in Frame’s asylum stories, the “radical metaphoricity” of madness (Felman 1978) hinges on the border-crossing drive of water metaphors, focusing first on the effects of her immersive writing, before reflecting further on the applications and implications of fluidity in these liminal tales – where madness and metaphor emerge as agents of re-conceptualisation.