An Angel at My Table: Disability, Creativity, and the Tortured Artist

The trope of the tortured artist, or eccentric, solitary genius, permeates our cultural understanding of creativity: Vincent van Gogh, Sylvia Plath, and Kurt Cobain are among many who have been given such a label. However, it is a stereotype that has come under criticism for romanticising mental illness, including by artists themselves.

New Zealand writer Janet Frame is famous for narrowly escaping a lobotomy: the operation was cancelled just days before, when she won a national literary prize with her debut publication. It is Frame who is the subject of Jane Campion’s 1990 biopic An Angel at My Table. While the author herself – raised on ‘tortured artist’ tales – continually linked disability to ability, the film paints a slightly different picture: Campion frequently contrasts her heroine with other ‘mad’ people, but at the same time acknowledges her experience of difference, and offers some sensitive interpretation of the relationship between disability and creativity – if one exists at all.

The audience of An Angel at My Table is introduced to the theme of ‘madness’ in the very first scenes. Janet, the protagonist, is on a train with her mother when, out of the window, she sees a disabled man on the platform, making noise that we cannot hear. Not only does her mother covers the heroine’s eyes but – crucially – the window acts as a conceptual barrier between Janet Frame and disability. Although perhaps their mutual gazes “combine mutual forces, mutual energies,” the scene reads as an early response to a public perception of Frame as a ‘mad’ genius. Alongside the framing, the fact that the episode is an innovation of the screenplay, rather than a feature of its source material, makes it even more clear as a defence. Indeed, throughout the film, Campion continually distinguishes her heroine from other ‘mad’ people, perhaps to dispel such rumours, often straying from the narrative of Frame’s autobiographical writing to do so.  

Disability and creativity are juxtaposed most strongly in the scenes at Seacliff Asylum and other institutions. Janet is depicted as a solitary, silent, and terrified witness to a kind of chaos around her. Certainly, the ‘treatment’ of perceived disability and illness is condemned by the film: in one particularly emotive scene, Janet is too shy to use the toilet with the gaggle of people ‘watching’ her, and a nurse responds by forcefully pulling both her and her clothes down to make her go. Nevertheless, this condemnation of abuse mostly focuses on Janet’s, thereby distilling a critique of more general malpractice onto an individual symbol of misdiagnosis and its injustice. Graham Fuller has observed how ‘visual patterning’ in the film suggests that Frame was ‘not ill in any clinical sense but had internalized the belief that she was.” Similarly, Alexis Brown notes that she is frequently contrasted with her fellow patients – who ‘exist only to demarcate themselves from Frame, whose sentience and fear, as well as autonomous personality, separate her entirely from their world’. This composition is at odds with the presentation of the protagonist in Faces in the Water, Frame’s semi-autobiographical novel about a psychiatric facility, where the heroine is more closely aligned with other characters – all of whom have individual personalities of their own. 

So, though for Micki Nyman ‘Campion seeks to make disability a companion to her subject's artistry’, the companionship the ‘answer’ of disability offers Frame is minimised by the frequent contrasts drawn between Frame and other disabled characters. In Frame’s autobiographies, on the other hand, the author draws more connection than contrast: ‘in our home there was a continued association between disability and proven ability’.

As a result, there is some more sensitive portrayal of disability in the film as well. Janet’s brother, Bruddie has epilepsy, and significant screen time is given to the reactions to his condition from his family. Early on in the film’s narrative, the Frame sisters are awoken by noise: Bruddie is having a seizure, and his mother and father argue about both the cause and the treatment – “Curly, put him in the bath!”, she shouts, while he argues “The boy’s [just] had a bad dream!”. At school, Janet is shown witnessing her brother being bullied, and distancing herself in response to it. Campion paints a convincing picture of ableism and how it influences how people view themselves, as well as others. Reactions to, and treatments of, disability, illness, and difference are continually very important.

The mistreatment of her brother Bruddie foreshadows the treatment that Janet will receive after her suicide attempt and later diagnosis of schizophrenia. She went on to receive over two hundred applications of electric shock treatment over eight years – “each one equivalent in fear to an execution.”. So, a key turning-point in her life comes when a doctor in England encourages her to write about her experiences, and offers a nonviolent, less diagnostic, and more practical solution to her shyness: “If anyone tells you to get out and mix, and you don’t want to, don’t!” The simplicity with which Campion portrays this new prescription is emotive and striking, and Kerry Fox’s touched reaction in performance is just as convincing here as throughout the film. It is one of the few times Janet is given explicit permission to exist just as she is, and her social anxiety is not perceived as a problem. 

However, true to life, An Angel at My Table presents Janet’s history of mental illness and institutionalisation as another ghost that haunts her – regardless of her own relationship with it. This is made clear towards the end of the film, when Janet applies for a position as a nurse, and casually mentions her eight years of hospitalisation. Such honesty is met with shock and anger, and as narrator she describes how ‘I felt that all the griefs I’d ever known were beginning to surface within me.’. At this point in the narrative, Janet’s experience of difference is of less significance to her life than the negative reactions to diagnosis of disability – a presentation that aligns with definitions of disability as, in some ways, a social construct. Campion’s sensitive portrayal of this fact makes for a moving argument towards a more accepting society. 

When Janet receives news that her father has passed away, she returns to her family in New Zealand. The author is consistently shown at her happiest with her sisters. So, while the loss of her father is devastating, the scene in which she quite literally steps into his shoes not only signifies the comfort that being back home brings, but also the freedom of self she can enjoy there. The film ends with Janet living in a caravan at her sister’s home, exercising a degree of ‘solitary genius’, but in close proximity to loved ones. This finale, blending Janet’s creative accomplishment after years’ experience of difference and perceived disability, grounds her health and happiness in a setting close to family. The film concludes by refusing to diagnose – or even un-diagnose – its heroine. While the tortured artist trope is not entirely eliminated by the biopic, in these final scenes, it is put to rest – while “the grass, and the wind and the fir and the sea are saying: hush-hush-hush”.

An Angel at My Table reframes Janet Frame’s experience of difference. In Campion’s narrative, disability is first given, then taken, and, finally, distanced from Frame as an answer to her identity, and as companion to her creativity. At many points, the film seems to serve as a response to rumours about Frame, a defence of her as not just a tortured artist, and – if a semi-solitary genius – not a ‘mad’ one. However, as the narrative progresses, and her character blossoms (back) into herself, ambiguity surrounding Frame’s potential disability, neurodiversity, illness, or difference remains – and deliberately and effectively so. The film itself seems to come to a new understanding about the relationship between disability and creativity as it progresses, by asking: would it matter if there was one, in a society where difference is not so demonised? An Angel at My Table grapples with, and sometimes struggles against, historic and contemporary portrayals of illness and disability, in order to craft a beautiful, moving tale about an extraordinary woman. 

If you enjoyed this article, please consider becoming a patron of Hyperreal Film Journal for as low as $3 a month!