Most of Janet Frame's fictional and autobiographical work charts a journey to find a place in both geographical and metaphysical senses of the term: that is, a place to live and a place to be. Hers is truly a migrant poetics. The island, spelt is-land in the first volume of her autobiography, epitomizes the ideal place in which one might 'dwell poetically', as Holderlin's poem famously has it. Both closed in on itself and open to the sea, set apart in time and space, the island is that longed-for place of freedom to imagine and create which Frame discovered in 1956 on setting foot on Ibiza. Several chapters of The Envoy from Mirror City (1985), the third volume of her autobiography, are devoted to recounting this experience. But an island is more than a place: it is a rhetorical topos that is both a space and a discourse. In this essay I aim to uncover the mythic and poetic dimensions of Frame's island discourse, and will also argue that Frame's ideal (imagined) place is threatened by its own uncanny. Ideological Structure
