OWLS DO CRY: AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOVEL OR FICTIONAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY?

Owls Do Cry is Frame's first novel, published in 1958. She evidently borrowed some material for it from her own life, for, as she said: ‘reality, the ore of polished the fiction’ (III 19). Yet she also makes it clear that the book is a novel, despite the resemblances between Daphne and herself, Toby and her brother Robert and Chicks and her younger sister June. The title is inspired by The Tempest, and that sets the tone for the whole book. Like Ariel, the fairy spirit who shifts between two worlds, most of the characters in the novel are somewhat other worldy.

Written in the third person singular, except for Chick's diary (a sort of embedded autobiography), it opens with Daphne's narrative, related to us from the psychiatric hospital – ‘the dead room’ – to which she has been confined. Daphne's family name, Withers, significantly underlines the limits and eventual atrophy imposed by a conformist society: ‘The Withers have atrophied in their stereotypes’. Gina Mercer thinks the family name is borrowed from Greville Texidor's story ‘Anyone Home?’ (SF 33) where the family name is also Withers. It is, however, no wonder that Frame's fiction should be peopled with characters whose difference is punished, even annihilated.

That is precisely what happens to Milly Galbraith in Intensive Care, Frame's frightful dystopia that borrows its binary system of classification between animals and humans from George Orwell's Brave New World. Difference is articulated in language. Daphne's is poetic, even prophetic, though it is considered as ‘the language of the mad’ by ‘normal’ people. The difference is rendered typographically through the use of italics. All the characters who stand against the tyranny of social conformism share a common abnegation from the established codes of communication either because they are below or beyond words.

The very title of the novel The Edge of the Alphabet is significant: those who are different, who do not conform, speak ‘beyond the alphabet’, ‘beyond the range of words’ (EA 16), ‘beyond the boundaries of words’ (EA 18). Frame's originality lies in her questioning language, reproaching it with being one of the main causes of the individual's alienation in society, though she is aware that it is a ‘necessary evil ’ for how is one to say that language is alienating without simultaneously using it to do so?