SOURCE: "Owls Do Cry: Portrait of New Zealand," in Landfall, Vol. 44, No. 3, September, 1990, pp. 350-58.

In the following essay, Brown comments on the way in which Frame analyzes New Zealand society in her novel Owls Do Cry.

Janet Frame emerged in 1954 after eight years in hospital to join a literary academy which had strong views about society's shortcomings. New Zealand was held to be narrow, bourgeois, puritanical, philistine, boring and materialist. Two influential articles in Landfall: Pearson's 'Fretful Sleepers' (1952) and Chapman's 'Fiction and the Social Pattern' (1953) elaborated a perception of New Zealand which by that time had transcended the status of opinion and become accepted as fact. The fringes of the perception were open to modification—Pearson predicted that puritanism was about to be replaced by shallow and sneering hedonism, while Chapman concentrated on explaining why New Zealand society was so puritanical—but no-one suggested that the central...