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VOL. 12, ISSUE 2 (2026)
Writing against the asylum: Psychiatric discourse and narrative subversion in Janet Frame’s Faces in the Water
Authors
Farhana Tabassum, Bibhash Choudhury
Abstract
Narratives like Faces
in the Water (1961) offer a biting revelation of the dangerous chasm
between psychiatric discourse and experiential data. The novel is a powerful
literary account of life within psychiatric institutions, depicting both the
emotional and visceral consequences of diagnostic labeling, surveillance, and
incautious invasive treatments (ECTs and the like). Drawing on Michel
Foucault’s theory of discourse, the paper examines how medical discourse often
exercises epistemological hegemony to produce, as well as, regulate identities
labelled “mad”. Much like the Foucauldian “panopticon”, inmates are subjected
to constant, virulent surveillance that pierces through every aspect of their
daily lives, so as to empty them of any residual sense of identity. “I did not
know my own identity. I was burgled of body and hung in the sky like a woman of
straw” (Frame 49). The paper revisits the novel through the conceptual
framework of the “wounded storyteller” —a theory forwarded by Arthur W. Frank
in his work, The Wounded Storyteller (1995). Building on contemporary
scholarship on narrative psychiatry, it also problematizes the idea of
“narrative repair”—a process through which experiences of illness are reshaped
into meaningful storytelling. The paper, thus positions Faces in the Water,
as a counter-narrative that foregrounds the personal, experiential voice of the
institutionalized subject.
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Pages:54-58
How to cite this article:
Farhana Tabassum, Bibhash Choudhury "Writing against the asylum: Psychiatric discourse and narrative subversion in Janet Frame’s <i>Faces in the Water</i>". International Journal of English Research, Vol 12, Issue 2, 2026, Pages 54-58
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