Forbidding Bodies: Avatars of the Physical in the Work of Janet Frame

The human body is hardly presented as a site of desire in the work of Janet Frame, who sees it first of all as an index of decrepitude and destruction and as a reminder of mortality. In the context of the social realist criticism often brought to bear on the novels, Frame's disintegrating body has also been metaphorized as indicative of her obsession with the decay of a culture lacking the resources to regenerate itself. However, it can be argued that a more positive (utopian) drive operates within the work, so that the fading body derives an unexpected significance by virtue of its being in touch with eclipsed dimensions clamouring for ontological and epistemological reclamation.