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In Janet Frame's autobiography, taboos refer mainly to the writer's youth. As a child, Frame discovers all the words and things which are forbidden, particularly when they are related to sex, illness and death. Her father's remedies are formidable. Her mother resorts to euphemisms, clichés or silence. For years, Frame remains the 'no-trouble-at-all girl' until she manages to reinscribe taboos in her emancipated form of writing. She then refuses clichés and asserts the prominence of parole over langue, thus liberating a self which had been for too long reduced to silence.
The word taboo derives from the Maori tapu and the Tongan tabu. Its first recorded usage in the English language dates back to 1777 when Captain Cook used it in the narrative of his third trip to the Pacific. The word means that 'something is prohibited, forbidden'.1 1 will deal with the taboos, their functions and power in the autobiographical trilogy of the New Zealand writer Janet Frame. I do not intend to highlight their primitive form but rather their more recent modern meaning in the sense of the prohibition of an action or of an object, considered either as sacred or as impure, the Latin word sacer containing a semantic ambiguity or bipolarity. In Frame's trilogy, taboos are linked to a puritan Victorian education inherited from Great Britain; the 'you must not' endows the speaker with the power of making decisions concerning the lives of others. Individual desire is opposed to social law as the guardian of order and cohesion, imposing some interdictions on the individual which are reminiscent of the Ten Commandments. A taboo is a kind of safeguard against possible individual outbursts. In the third volume of the autobiography,2 the psychiatrist Janet meets in London tells her: 'the 'you should' days are over' (??, p. 128). In Totem and Taboo, Freud writes that the system of taboos works against individual pleasure and movement, as a buttress to the law. Taboos are erected as a reassuring defence mechanism, or as a means to organize reality. Particularly in the first volume of her autobiography, which focuses on childhood, Janet Frame discovers the various interdictions linked to words and actions, at the cost of painful surprises. The world of adults, embodied by conformist...