The Facts of Life: Janet Frame's 'the Bath'‪.‬

The Bath' belongs to a group of short fiction by Janet Frame which might usefully be categorised as horror stories. (1) Some horrible fact about the nature of life is revealed to an ignorant, naive or complacent character, usually as an epiphanic climax. Usually, too, it comes after a prolonged attempt by the character to avoid recognising this fact of life--or at least 'fact' to the extent that Frame leaves the reader in no doubt. Frame's didactic purpose is that the reader should identify with the character and feel something of the character's shock of discovery. In the case of 'The Bath', an elderly woman has difficulties getting out of her bath and is finally forced to understand that her death will not result in an after-life. This is something she slowly intuits, but which the reader is also supposed to learn from observing the woman's mentality: watching the failure of her mistaken belief that 'With care, with thought' she will be able to defeat the trap of the bath and therefore, by implication, defeat death's finality. Again typically of a Frame story, the woman in 'The Bath' thinks in terms of images and motifs that the reader should interpret as metaphors, such as the bath, the graveyard, sleep and thinking itself. These supply Frame with the means to fulfil a double purpose. They can show the flow of the woman's mind, as she realises that there is no heaven, and they can be interpreted by the reader as evidence that her unhappy conclusion is true. Frame manages this latter task convincingly because she restricts the images in the fictional world she describes to a closed set, which she then manipulates towards her desired revelation. This why the metaphors in her writing often seem so elaborate, almost conceits. Through metaphor, Frame aims to show in 'The Bath'--and thus prove--the non existence of an after-life. The first paragraph in the story sets up the woman's situation with skill and economy. It consists of three sentences. The first presents a conventional scene: a dutiful widow makes preparations to visit her dead husband's grave. The woman is referred to as 'she' and remains unnamed throughout the story. The only information which marks her out as an individual is the name of her dead husband, John Edward Harraway, and the date he died, 5 August 1965, as if he has more individuality than his wife does. Elsewhere the story is placed clearly in Dunedin. Time and place are thus established, but like the woman's identity, these circumstances are defined only in relation to the death of the woman's husband. The second sentence in the first paragraph introduces the motif of the woman's thinking and, indirectly, suggests that her thoughts are not all they should be: 'Her visit this year occupied her thoughts more than usual.' The third sentence deepens the progression from the conventional into the anxious. The woman's 'journey' to the grave is becoming more 'hazardous' each year. Why it is hazardous is not explained at first; instead the reader is given a list of the journey's stages. (It is one of several short lists Frame uses to particularise her story.) However, the paragraph concludes with the woman's complaint that she feels too tired at the graveyard to go home and, even more worryingly, that instead of going home she longs to lie down among the graves 'in the soft grass, and fall asleep.' Tired not just in body but also in spirit, her very existence, like her identity, is failing.