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Heaven: May Book Group: Owls Do Cry by Janet Frame

MiliMili Shipmate
edited August 2021 in Limbo
Here is the thread for the book group in May. I hope a few can join in despite the pandemic situation. 'Owls do Cry' is available as an inexpensive ebook if you cannot get to a library at this time or borrow an online copy. I bought a copy on Google Play since my library is closed and I want to reread it. Questions will be up around the 20th as usual and there are lots of themes to discuss, despite it being a short book. Here is the link to a review if you would like to know more https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/11/owls-do-cry-janet-frame-review-new-zealand-s-first-big-novel

Comments

  • SarasaSarasa All Saints Host
    Thanks @mili . Downloaded it and ready to go!
  • MiliMili Shipmate
    Looks like it might be a small group this month! Hopefully in the months ahead it is easier to access library books again. If anyone else has read the book or plans to feel free to join in the discussion. As usual you can choose to answer the questions you would like to answer and add more if you like.

    1. Mental health and it's treatment in the 1930s to 1950 is a major theme of the book. Daphne and Toby provide examples of two approaches to mental health care: institutionalisation and invasive shock therapy and surgery for Daphne (without her consent) to try to conform her to society's expectations along with isolation from family and society. Freedom for Toby with care only from family, leaving him to struggle without some important life skills once his mother dies and father cannot care for him, but allowing him to be part of his community. Do you feel that their respective genders played a part in the type of care they received?

    3. Did Toby's and Daphne's experiences change your views of current mental health care and community attitudes to the mentally ill and those with disabilities?

    4. The Wither's feared social workers or doctors intervening in the family. Were Amy and Bob negligent parents or parents doing their best while constrained by poverty?

    5. Chicks/Theresa had a very different lifestyle and worldview than her mother Amy. Was Theresa ultimately happier than her mother?

    6. What did you think of the sections of the book written from Daphne's point of view in a poetic style? Did you feel they added or took away from the novel?

    7. How might the lives of the Withers family members have been different if Francie had not died in such a traumatic way?

    9. Were the Withers on the edge of their community or an integral part of town life?

    10. Was the ending of the book real, or part of Daphne's dreamlike imaginings?

  • SarasaSarasa All Saints Host
    I'm still reading it, as I got side tracked, but I'll add my comments when I've finished it
  • MiliMili Shipmate
    No worries. I hadn't quite finished my reread when I noticed the date was the 20th. All this iso and pandemic news is a distraction from the calendar :)
  • MaramaMarama Shipmate
    I'm still reading it too, though should be finished soon.
  • MaramaMarama Shipmate
    Owls Do Cry is a book I have been meaning to read for a while, ever since a stint living in New Zealand, so thanks for giving me the push to read it. While in NZ I read Patrick Evans' compelling and often funny novel Gifted (2010), which is the story – fundamentally true – of Janet Frame’s spell living in the outhouse of novelist Frank Sargeson in Auckland in 1955. Janet is shy and reserved and Frank, the narrator, sees himself as her mentor, but the tables are turned as she types away and his muse dries up; she completes a novel. Owls Do Cry is that novel.

    So answers to the first few questions; I'll return with further answers later.

    1. Mental health and it's treatment in the 1930s to 1950 is a major theme of the book. Daphne and Toby provide examples of two approaches to mental health care: institutionalisation and invasive shock therapy and surgery for Daphne (without her consent) to try to conform her to society's expectations along with isolation from family and society. Freedom for Toby with care only from family, leaving him to struggle without some important life skills once his mother dies and father cannot care for him, but allowing him to be part of his community. Do you feel that their respective genders played a part in the type of care they received?

    I’ve been thinking a lot about this, having read a bit recently on the history of mental health care provision. Daphne’s experience, and Janet Frame’s own, are the result of the growth of western medicine; Toby’s experience is more what had always happened – families were responsible for the care of their members, for good or ill. The work of Truby King and the invention of electric shock treatment meant that New Zealand doctors were willing to attempt to cure mental illness – that it didn’t work all that well in practice for many patients was an unfortunate reality. New Zealand historian Michael King (who wrote a biography of Frame) commented that asylums like Seacliffe (Truby King’s asylum outside Dunedin, and where Frame was treated) ‘had the kind of name that suggests a rural estate or cheerful holiday resort; this served to mask what some patients experienced as the horror of having to live in such institutions’. On the other hand, he says, ‘he promoted fresh air, exercise, good diet, work and recreation as the appropriate treatments for mental illness’. We see all this at the fictional asylum at Arrowtown (a very beautiful place). It was inadequate, but it attempted cures.

    Invasive shock treatment is still used, successfully in many cases. A friend of mine found it very helpful in treating severe depression – with consent, of course. Daphne’s father’s consent was needed for her surgery (lobotomy, I assume), though it’s not clear if it was needed for shock treatment.

    The gender question is interesting – certainly more women than men were incarcerated in the asylums, whether they were seen as more amenable to treatment I’m not sure. ‘Hysteria’ was always seen as a female disease, though Truby King was attempting to be more analytical in diagnosis. It’s easy to be critical of Truby King and his specific methods (the same could be said of his Plunket Society), but I’m not sure that it’s entirely fair to belittle the general concern for public health and welfare he encouraged.

    4. The Wither's feared social workers or doctors intervening in the family. Were Amy and Bob negligent parents or parents doing their best while constrained by poverty?

    It's hard to see them as negligent – the behaviour described, like allowing the children to scout around the rubbish heap and leave school early, would have been fairly standard, if not universal, in the 1930s. Fear of the authorities seems to have been fairly common. But in their case it may have been unfortunate, as more medical help might have been helpful to Toby. New Zealand actually had remarkably advanced social welfare programs in the late 19th and early 20th century, compared to elsewhere; women’s suffrage 1893, old age pensions 1898, centralised public health system 1900. The Withers might well have fared worse elsewhere.

  • MaramaMarama Shipmate
    Another good review of this book can be found
    here
  • SarasaSarasa All Saints Host
    Just finished the book. I must admit I did skim it in places, so I may have missed vital bits.
    1. Mental health and it's treatment in the 1930s to 1950 is a major theme of the book.
    3. Did Toby's and Daphne's experiences change your views of current mental health care and community attitudes to the mentally ill and those with disabilities?
    Daphne's treatment did make me wonder about how things have changed and if they have improved for people with mental illness, since the sort of places she lived in have now mostly closed and people should be cared for in the community. It certainly didn't seem a very patient led approach. Nothing about therapy, just drugs, electric shock treatment and lobotomies. The Daphne sections reminded me of Antonia Frost's Beyond the Glass which is another first hand narrative of being in a mental hospital. I found it very lyrical, but also very hard to read. I'm not sure if it is just that Daphne is female and Toby make, though that plays a part, but I think even if people weren't very knowledgeable about epilepsy it wasn't quite feared as much as mental illness, and maybe Toby would have more sympathy from his community than Daphne. Toby comes across as having learning difficulties as well as epilepsy. Nowadays I am hoping drugs and education would have helped him live a more fulfilled life.


    4. The Wither's feared social workers or doctors intervening in the family. Were Amy and Bob negligent parents or parents doing their best while constrained by poverty?
    The Wither's seem to be trying their best against overwhelming odds. Like a lot of people at that time they don't want to have others interfering in their lives, and I think they are doing their best. Bob comes across as loving, but feckless, and also somewhat controlling in an off-hand way, sending Francie out to work for instance. But he did get her the bicycle.

    5. Chicks/Theresa had a very different lifestyle and worldview than her mother Amy. Was Theresa ultimately happier than her mother?
    Theresa seems happier in that she has all her material needs met. The section where Toby reads her diary and then acts on it by putting Sharon on the rocking horse was I thought the most successful bit of the novel. She is a rather stereotypical 1950s housewife though.

    6. What did you think of the sections of the book written from Daphne's point of view in a poetic style? Did you feel they added or took away from the novel?
    I felt they were integral to the structure of the novel, but as I said above, I found them rather hard to read.

    7. How might the lives of the Withers family members have been different if Francie had not died in such a traumatic way?
    Francie seemed to be the organiser and protector of her younger siblings. She also seemed to know what she wants and if she'd married Tim rather than Theresa I assume they would have made sure the rest of the family were cared for.

    9. Were the Withers on the edge of their community or an integral part of town life?
    They are both. Certainly on the edge but the sort of people that others are either glad they are not like, or feel that they need to try and help.

    10. Was the ending of the book real, or part of Daphne's dreamlike imaginings?
    I rather liked it, although it could well be Daphne's imaginings as she is the only one to make a success of her life. The way she was going I could well see Theresa shooting her husband to emulate the couple that they had had round for coffee.

    I'm glad I read this book, as it was very unlike what I usually read. I'm not sure if I liked it, but I admired the writing.
  • MaramaMarama Shipmate
    And my answers to the other questions:

    5. Chicks/Theresa had a very different lifestyle and worldview than her mother Amy. Was Theresa ultimately happier than her mother?

    Teresa’s diary depicts a young woman beset with social anxieties – will she and her husband, grown up in a small town, fit into the norms of the urban middle class they aspire to. Yet she seems happy in her marriage – at least she keeps praising her husband in her diary. Whether she was happier than her mother perhaps depends one’s answer to qn 10 – if it’s real, then the answer must be ‘no’, as she ends up murdered. She has a more comfortable life than her mother – but Amy has a gift for reconciling people, a deep faith, and an apparently successful marriage.

    6. What did you think of the sections of the book written from Daphne's point of view in a poetic style? Did you feel they added or took away from the novel?

    They definitely added to the novel. The dream-like quality, the sense that Daphne is half understanding, or at least mixing present and past, seeing with ‘different’ eyes are enhanced by the poetic style. Frame has done some of this earlier in her depiction of children’s understanding of the world around them, but there she was not playing with words to the same extent to achieve it. I found Daphne’s viewpoint highly creative, giving a real sense of the dislocation she was experiencing.

    7. How might the lives of the Withers family members have been different if Francie had not died in such a traumatic way?

    Some things would not have changed, like Toby’s epilepsy and the family’s poverty (Francie wasn’t earning much, and seems to have kept at least part of it for herself). But her death, especially in such a traumatic way, clearly affects Daphne, and may be the trigger for her hospitalisation. I suspect the mental instability was always there, but it might have been less serious without the trauma. And Chick’s total rejection of her Waimaru roots seems to have been at least made more likely by the tragedy. Francie also projects a capability and determination which Daphne and Toby can’t, so she could have been a motivating and stabilising element in the family.

    10. Was the ending of the book real, or part of Daphne's dreamlike imaginings?

    I’m not sure; it can be read either way. If it’s real then it gives a tragic conclusion to all the stories except Daphne’s – but then that very fact suggests it could be a wished-for ending.

  • MiliMili Shipmate
    edited May 2020
    Thanks for your contributions. I have really enjoyed reading your though provoking answers to my questions and am glad you didn't find the book too depressing, given some of its themes. Here are my answers over two posts:

    1. Mental health and it's treatment in the 1930s to 1950 is a major theme of the book. Daphne and Toby provide examples of two approaches to mental health care: institutionalisation and invasive shock therapy and surgery for Daphne (without her consent) to try to conform her to society's expectations along with isolation from family and society. Freedom for Toby with care only from family, leaving him to struggle without some important life skills once his mother dies and father cannot care for him, but allowing him to be part of his community. Do you feel that their respective genders played a part in the type of care they received?

    Upon finishing my reread, I was reminded that Toby asks his father whether he thought his mother would have approved of Daphne's operation. Perhaps Daphne was an adult and out of home when committed to the hospital and therefore choices for her care were out of Amy Wither's control.

    Earlier in the book neighbours suggest Toby should be institutionalised, but Amy protects him from this fate. In a different family, gender may not have made a difference. Amy takes on a very traditional role and therefore Toby is not expected to learn the skills to care for himself, even though Amy (unhealthily) does not want him to get married either. Daphne would have been expected to run a household, care for a husband and children and (before marriage at least) to work and support herself financially or at least contribute to her own needs if living at home. I'm not sure if this reflects on the rest of society at the time. Certainly in the past women were often expected to be more responsible than men, especially in regards to alcohol, managing the household and being a moral compass for children and society at large. In many circles if a man was providing financially for his family that was considered mostly adequate even if he was alcoholic, abusive or emotionally distant from his wife and children. Putting the main bread earner in an institution would devastate a family at a time where women had much lower wages than men and childcare was uncommon. It would be interesting to know if this had an impact on the numbers of each gender receiving mental health care.

    3. Did Toby's and Daphne's experiences change your views of current mental health care and community attitudes to the mentally ill and those with disabilities?

    My views were not changed. I believe it was correct to get rid of large institutions where people with mental illnesses or disabilities were segregated from their families and communities. Those who ran them may have had good intentions, but institutionalisation, decreased mental health and even abuse were likely outcomes for patients. Daphne seemed to be in a better institution in that she did not suffer abuse by the day's standards. However involuntary treatment and chemical restraint through sedation at the slightest outburst would now be considered against human rights. It was horrifying that they would not even have a picnic where other people might see them in case the patients were laughed at, but of course this was a symptom of a time when laughing at those who were different was considered normal and acceptable.

    Community, person-centred care is a much better model, but there should be much greater funding for mental health care and smaller residential settings for those who require them and are happy to live there. I also think that no matter what model is used it is always very difficult to find a good solution when a mental illness leads somebody to become violent or destructive, including while in hospital. How do we protect everybody's human rights and health and safety in these situations? How do we stop the public generalising and blaming mental illness for violence and stigmatising those with mental illness due to violent acts by a minority of people with mental health issues?

    4. The Wither's feared social workers or doctors intervening in the family. Were Amy and Bob negligent parents or parents doing their best while constrained by poverty?


    I felt that Bob and Amy were doing their best with the resources they had. I was taken aback that they only had one clean set of sheets in the house, but they also didn't have a washing machine and may have only had one set of sheets each, plus a spare set for when the doctor visited. Although globalisation has almost killed manufacturing and led to higher unemployment in wealthier countries, we do benefit from cheaper goods including clothes and linens. Most children these days worry about not having the right brand name clothes rather than not having good clothes suited for every occasion.

    I didn't see Bob and Amy as negligent for their children playing at the rubbish dump. Kids would be drawn to a place like that (me included!) and if the community was worried about preventing children playing there they would have made the rubbish dump more secure.

    5. Chicks/Theresa had a very different lifestyle and worldview than her mother Amy. Was Theresa ultimately happier than her mother?


    Theresa was happier when it came to material possessions and having more time for leisure and relaxation. However I felt that Amy had a deeper sense of self and faith that helped her deal with life's challenges such as poverty and an overbearing, distant husband. Theresa should have had a much easier life with a seemingly well suited husband, mostly healthy children and modern conveniences. But she had scars from feeling lower than others due to childhood poverty and suffered from a lot of stress trying to keep up with the Jones and 'move up' in society.



  • MiliMili Shipmate
    6. What did you think of the sections of the book written from Daphne's point of view in a poetic style? Did you feel they added or took away from the novel?

    I found these sections harder to read, but feel they were an important part of the book to understand Daphne better. I would not have missed them if they were not included, however.

    7. How might the lives of the Withers family members have been different if Francie had not died in such a traumatic way?

    Daphne may have been suffering from a form of post traumatic stress disorder or at least this may have triggered or worsened underlying mental health issues. Francie, as the eldest, may have been more supportive of Toby if she had lived and may have helped him when his parents could not, but it is hard to know when she died so young. She may also have stayed in town and been able to help her parents out more as they aged. If she had married Tim, Theresa's life could have been very different. The neighbours whispered that Theresa and Tim had got married young due to an unplanned pregnancy. Would Theresa have married someone less compatible if Tim was no longer available, or not married young and had a whole different life trajectory?

    9. Were the Withers on the edge of their community or an integral part of town life?

    I felt like they were both. On the one hand Amy did not seem to have much contact outside the family and the children felt somewhat ostracised at school due to poverty and Toby's epilepsy. However Bob seemed to have friends from work that he spent time with, Francie had an active social life after school and easily found employment with the wealthier neighbours and Amy was active in writing letters to the newspaper about her opinions on conservation and town issues in general. Toby also seemed quite involved in the community as an adult, even though he was a bit of an outsider. Although he did not marry Faye, she and her family did consider him a friend and invited him to family events. Theresa also married into a respectable family and was accepted by her in-laws despite how the marriage came about.

    10. Was the ending of the book real, or part of Daphne's dreamlike imaginings?

    I agree that it could be read either way. Some of the characters endings were far fetched, but Bob's was very realistic and Toby's ending could also have happened that way. Daphne's ending was ironic in that she ended up working and being very successful in the woolen mill she had vowed to avoid as a child. This seemed to make a point about how the treatment of the patients at the hospital aimed to subdue them and make them conform to society after Daphne tried to used education to escape from her expected role in life.
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