Through a comparison with Janet Frame’s Autobiography, from which it is adapted, this chapter analyses Jane Campion’s An Angel at My Table as the first New Zealand film to present all three of the main maturational phases characteristic of the coming-of-age genre, but as experienced by a Pākehā girl. Identifying the effects of a repressive environment as the source of the emotional stresses that lead the main character, Janet, to be institutionalized for schizophrenia, the discussion shows how she finds respite in fictive creativity and a world of the imagination. It also shows Campion’s personal investment in the story as a displaced representation of her own mother’s fight with mental illness.
Alteridad y experiencia femenina: el cine de Jane Campion
