The anxiety of influence: Janet Frame’s In the Memorial Room and Katherine Mansfield

This article argues that Frame’s anxiety about the influence of her famous literary predecessor Katherine Mansfield, as represented in her posthumously published novel In the Memorial Room , instigated a crisis about writing and authorship. The novel features an anti-imperial “memorialisation satire” on excessive adulation of authorial fame, focused through Frame’s self-deprecating narrator Harry Gill, who undertakes a residency fellowship in Menton in honour of Rose Hurndell (i.e. Mansfield). The article builds on Harold Bloom’s Freudian theories about the anxiety of influence including the concept of misinterpretation which Frame appears to resist. It is informed by Jan Cronin’s (2014) claim that the novel represents Frame’s interest in exploring states of perception and expression, triggered by Gill’s apparent deficiencies of sight and hearing: labelled as “Mr Metonymy”, Gil acts as medium or container for these concerns. In this literal/fabulist response to literary influence, Frame thus expands the author function, notably through Gill’s appreciation of the Menton light and sun when working in the Memorial Room, which I suggest is mediated by Katherine Mansfield’s diaries and their modernist aesthetic response to the Mediterranean landscape. Narrative experimentation, intertextuality and reflection on perceptions of various entities and phenomena enable Frame to accommodate the threat of her precursor through a provisional reshaping of the author presence.