Fences of Being: The Child in the World in Janet Frame's "A Note on the Russian War," "Prize" and "Royal Icing"

By dint of a close reading of "A Note on the Russian War" (The Lagoon),
"Prizes" and "Royal Icing" (The Reservoir), this essay examines what Janet Frame calls "a
fence of being" in "A Note." In the Framean text, when individuals, especially children,
surround themselves with fences of being, they renounce any true intimacy with other selves
and with the real. Conversely, the absence of boundaries between one identity and the next or
between the self and the world is not simply the condition known by deceased consciousnesses
in Frame"s haunting universe, for it is also the natural state of the human essence.