Janet Frame has always written from the position of the other. Her perspective is that of the outsider, the marginalised, the oppressed and the repressed.' (2) The title of this essay comes from the first volume of Janet Frame's autobiographical trilogy, a story of exclusion in all its forms. Frame, the daughter of a poor railway worker, is ostracised at school where the prestigious Group dominates, imposing the literary tastes which are but the reflection of the fashions which enslave it: 'This group was the core of the class with their activities at home and at school the source of most of the class interest and news; the rest of us moved on the outside in more or less distant concentric circles' (I: 117). This image echoes one also found in Frame's autobiographical novel Faces in the Water (1961)--which she herself calls 'documentary fiction' (3)--where each mental ward is likened to one of Dante's infernal circles. At school, Janet had already suffered under the exclusionary label of thief for having stolen money from her father to buy chewing gum for her classmates (which could be read as a re-writing of a scene in Jane Eyre) and we know that--as Wilde put it--'from a label there is no escape'. (4)
