The Wounded Spectrum: Colour-Coding and the Value of Harm in Janet Frame's Owls Do Cry‪.‬

When, after reading his sister Teresa's diary, Toby Withers proceeds to throw it on the fire, repudiating her views, he enacts a recurrent scene in Janet Frame's Owls Do Cry (1957). Toby's rejection of Teresa's harsh, self-serving, and often obtuse criticisms of him expands the themes of loss, destruction and alienation brought out by the death of Francie, the eldest sister, in a fire at the local rubbish dump. Her death occurs just before she would have attained adulthood, and symbolically denotes the loss of childhood innocence and imagination. Both incidents show that certain behaviours are socially unacceptable and that failure to conform to normative social standards (1) results in extensive rejection of individuals who do not 'fit in'. Cherry Hankin notes the use of parallel narrative levels which relate psychic and bodily harm with social pressures, including repressive, unimaginative language uses: 'Janet Frame chooses that [Francie] shall be destroyed physically rather than spiritually by the forces of conformity'. (2) Toby does not burn to death like Francie; instead, in an apparent inversion of that event, he burns Teresa's words. Yet Toby is unwittingly guilty of the same misguided judgement as Teresa: both reject 'good' with 'bad' since they fail to see that the other is capable of insight as well as blindness.