The theme of the journey has undergone several developments in the literatures of Australia and New Zealand. In both countries (particularly Australia) the concept has been grounded in the mythologies of landscape and history, and in both, the peripatetic movement between 'Home' and colony has registered a deeply embedded sense of cultural schizophrenia. The novels of Janet Frame constitute the most explicit statement in either country of the journey through the contours of the consciousness as a specific psychological imperative.

All Frame's novels are firmly anchored to a central desire to explore the possibilities open to a consciousness willing to break through the accepted limitations of modern society. (p. 12)

Owls Do Cry, Frame's first novel, is important to an understanding of her work, because it introduces the major types which are to populate her novels, and if the characterization seems at times vaguely defined, it is because she sees these characters less as members of a social inter-action than as varying possibilities of human experience. The most common and superficial type in the society is represented by those people who have become so much a part of the social crust of human experience that they cannot even conceive of a journey beyond the known, and make what they can of their existence until a momentary sight of their nothingness destroys them. They are the members of the all too recognizable world of the Waimaru Council with its typically frantic sense that it is being left behind by 'progress'; it is a world of crippling insecurity…. It is a world perhaps best described by Francie, who explains the array of uneaten Easter eggs in Mawhinney's front room by suggesting: 'When you'r grown up you'r frightened to taste the nice things, like Easter eggs, in case you never get them again.' In a novel which seems intensely symbolic, even self-sufficiently allegorical, the most effective feature is perhaps that it becomes social comment by undermining some of the human premises of modern Western culture.

By far the most important types in Frame's work are those represented by Toby and Daphne, the one hovering upon, the other realizing, a capacity to journey past existential boundaries such as those regarded as the edges of sanity. In the terms of Frame's novels these edges are indicative of the always avoided boundaries of true being…. The edges are the beginning of true being because everything within them is the common property of humanity. The novels demand that we see the real discovery of Being as lying beyond the edge, not just of sanity but of all those human limitations that are accepted without question.

The theme of the visionary capacity of madness is an old one, held usually with philosophical or mystical overtones in both Western and Eastern cultures. (pp. 12-13)

In Janet Frame, however, we may detect a peculiarly modern, peculiarly existential development of this tendency that reaches some better known triumphs in Doris Lessing's work. It belongs to that school of thought of which R. D. Laing was the chief spokesman, and suggests that the journey through madness was for some (possibly for all) the only way to an integration of the self. It is a new development of the madness myth, because it makes a more direct connection between what human beings are in their innermost selves and how they behave collectively.

Though in no way influential on Frame (his first work was published eight years after Owls Do Cry), Laing is important because he best synthesizes this particular aspect of liberationist thought in what has come to be known as the intellectual revolution of the sixties. In Laing's view, madness functions in two ways to reveal society to itself. First, the 'mad' person embodies in various forms the society's self-division; second, and more importantly, in the heights and depths of his nature the schizoid individual participates in those realms of existence which conventional society has either denied or never known. Frame is not necessarily concerned with schizophrenia or madness per se, but self-division as it reflects the dilemma of modern society. (p. 14)

The journey Daphne undergoes, and the consistent presence of her italicized commentary, make her the most important voice of the consciousness in the text, and the poem contained in Chapter One is one of the novel's most evocative pictures of her attempt to travel toward the centre. Most interesting is the way in which her attempts to break out of the skin of her existence are thwarted, not merely by the constraint of human society but by the restriction of human existence itself—time and death…. The quest for inner knowledge underlies Daphne's journey beyond the borders of sanity…. She might, and does, find the lush growth of a summer within her, but what use is the find if the parameters of her existence cannot accommodate the truth towards which she is journeying…. [At] the very beginning the novel states a question to be explored—how can man realize a transcendent centrality of being if there are limitations still pinned to him. (pp. 15-16)

Daphne is the mad one. She is the only one who fully accepts the responsibility for the journey into self. Yet at the beginning the desire for treasure and the choice to search for it is offered to all the children, and the obsession with treasure in the dump is a metaphor for the human need for discovery. The children are certain they will find their treasure 'the same way that grown-up people (they thought) go to shops and offices and factories, what they call their work, to find their grown-up treasure'…. At first, all are involved in the world of fairy-tale and freedom, of imagination and 'Intelligence' represented by the chorus-like repetition of Ariel's song from which the novel takes its name. But all engage in a death brought about by, and accentuating among other things, the passage of time. Francie dies at the very edge of possibility, the edge of love, sexuality, and life, burnt by a fire in the dump, consumed by the world of her dream. Daphne dies to society and normality and henceforth speaks from the 'dead-room' of her chosen silence. In contrast, Chicks chooses the death of normality and materialism, while Toby becomes locked into the living death of his own particular half-world. (pp. 16-17)

The children presented in the opening chapters are far more than the members of a family. Each is a formalization of human consciousness exploring the potentialities of its existence in different modes. By extending their lives into an historical and temporal scheme, the novel is able to examine the varieties of possibilities open to an individual within a specific culture, thus developing issues which are purely ontological in kind. This fact, like many others in the novel, is elucidated by the omniscient mode of being and knowledge represented by Daphne…. (p. 17)

[A] reference to the sun travelling from 'dark to dark' is central to the development of the novel and becomes clearer when we see the relationship between Francie and Daphne as modes of being (Daseins) of the same consciousness. On the last day of school Francie is dressed as Joan of Arc in the school play, 'in a silver helmet and breastplate waiting to be burned', and enacts the sacrifice that she is to make in reality later at the dump, the sacrifice necessitated by the search for treasure. Francie is the burnt one because 'in all her knowing she had not learnt of the time of being, the unseen always'. This unseen, this timeless sense of Being (Sein), is what the treasure always represents because it is a wholeness so far beyond the multiplicity of society. At one level, Francie's conflagration reveals the destructive power of the dream, and at another signals an embarkation out of the world of class hatred and wealth discrimination in which she lives. But most important to the symbolic structure of the novel, as a mode of being in the world, Francie is transmogrified into Daphne. Her actual death precipitates Daphne's plunge through the borders of sanity, which demonstrates the path that the consciousness must take when it goes beyond the safety of the 'flags' in search of the 'unseen always' within the self. (pp. 19-20)

Frame couches Daphne's intermittent commentary in a peculiarly intense poetic language, which sometimes seems to be the language of insanity, because the experience she is trying to suggest is beyond language, the product of a journey into a world of silence. The barriers of language, as one example of the barriers of 'reality', are a persistent concern in Frame's novels…. [It is] interesting to consider the logical positivist view of language found in Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico Philosophicus. He says simply that attempts to say anything about the limits of language end in senseless propositions, and attempts to say anything about what lies on the other side of language (e.g. metaphysics) end in nonsense. He is not saying that nothing exists on the other side of language, only that it cannot be spoken about, but 'shown'. Daphne's silence is all she can communicate to those about her because she has progressed beyond the limits of what language can state. But the novel can 'show' her journey in the 'nonsense' propositions of poetry.

The conflict between the compulsion to search for Being and the inability to know how to start gets to the centre of Frame's view of society in the novel, and is a conflict focussed in the person of Toby. His is the type of existence which achieves increasing prominence in Frame's novels, because like most individuals who can see into a realm of possibilities, he is trapped by inadequacy and inaction in a half-world on the fringe of being. Toby's epilepsy is enough to open up a private and lonely world, but not enough to help him journey into it. The indecision of his half-world is focussed in his imaginative relationship with the sea. When he discovers that his hope of marriage to Fay Chalklin has been dashed in favour of Albert Crudge, he dreams of sitting beside the sea watching with Fay and floating her hair on it. The passivity of his relationship with the sea captures the impotence of his state. On his return home from Fay's, his mother 'greeted him with her old love-invitation of food, as if he had starved on his voyaging'. And indeed he has starved, and will starve, because his voyaging cannot penetrate the periphery of possibility.

The metaphor of the sea becomes more insistent later when Toby drives down to the new dump near the river mouth:

Sometimes Toby would drive out to the tip and sit at the wheel and watch the sea and river meet, the trout-brown water spread out like a lap across the smooth ivory stones; and the hesitant sea, reinforced with tide, saying hush, hush to its own talking….

The dump, which is the place of treasure, even now to the grown Toby, has been moved so that he can look beyond it to the symbol of his unaccepted challenge, the sea. The treasure lies out on the inner sea which will not stop its insistent beckoning, yet the kind of journey Daphne has made, the journey beyond accepted restrictions, remains impossible for Toby. (pp. 21-2)

Toby's attempts to make the journey will take him, in The Edge Of The Alphabet, back to England, as if he might accomplish geographically or culturally what he has been unable to achieve existentially. For Frame, whose personal history has taken her some distance along this path, the path from 'this' world into 'that' world, true discovery, lies out beyond the fringes of mundane possibility and it is in these terms that her work must be understood. (p. 22)