‘People connected to the sky in their mind’: Chaos and mental illness in Janet Frame and Patricia Grace

Two women writers in New Zealand literature have offered an impressive representation of mental disease : Janet Frame and Patricia Grace. Both view the chaos in their characters’ mind as a gift which enables them to have a deeper insight into time and space or be ‘Sky People’, in Grace’s terms. The mentally ill also come to symbolize the outcasts, those who do not fit in a reality dominated by monological inflections of identity and ruled by the principle of rationality, which treats imagination as chaos or an infection. This paper will focus on a comparative analysis of some of their fictions in order to show how the different cultural and ethnic background of the two writers (European for Frame and Maori for Grace) affects the characters’ perception of insanity and chaos considerably. Frame’s account of mental illness is pervaded by deep sorrow, isolation and sense of guilt – a peculiar version of Christian martyrdom often ending up in lobotomy, that is, the sacrifice of imagination (chaos) to the god of reason (order) . On the contrary, in Grace the chaos of insanity can turn into a vital and creative force, which reflects Maori cosmogony. According to Maori myth, chaos (first shaped as void, then as darkness) was the primeval state of the universe and contained the potentials to become the ‘World of Light’ inhabited by gods and humans. Chaos is not to be rejected, but must be treated as one of the many facets of reality: a different viewpoint or a necessary stage of an evolutionary process .