The Reservoir Study Guide

Janet Frame was a highly celebrated New Zealand author and a recipient of numerous awards, including the Order of New Zealand, the nation’s highest civil award. Her early life was marked by trauma––growing up with poverty, family illness, and the death of two of her siblings, Frame found imagination and literature a form of escape. She graduated from Waitaki Girls’ High School in 1942, and studied part-time at Otago University while she was a student at Dunedin Teachers’ Training College from 1943-1944. Her teaching career was cut short by mental illness, and after being misdiagnosed with schizophrenia, she was a patient in mental hospitals from 1947-1954. Frame published her first book of short stories, Lagoon and Other Stories (1951), while in the hospital, and she continued to write after being discharged in 1954. After her release, she befriended fellow writer Frank Sargeson and lived on his property for two years while writing her first novel, Owls Do Cry. In the following years, she traveled abroad, publishing several more works that explored isolation, eccentricity, and conformity. She also continued to explore genre, publishing a book of poetry in 1967, a children’s book in 1969, and a series of autobiographies that began in 1982. Frame passed away in 2004, but new works by her have been published posthumously as recently as 2013.

“The Reservoir” does not establish the year concretely, but given its publication date and the narrative’s epidemic of Infantile Paralysis (also known as polio, which is no longer a pressing medical concern), readers can assume it takes place during the mid-20th century. Several epidemics of Infantile Paralysis like the kind in the story occurred during the 1950s, and thousands of children died of the disease worldwide. After World War II, many societies prioritized conformity as the world tried to return to normal, and the expectation of conformity and respect can be seen in the parents’ attitude toward their children. The technological advances of this period are also evident, as the village’s water pump is replaced by the Reservoir.

Janet Frame is among New Zealand’s most famous writers, and the New Zealand landscape plays a crucial role in “The Reservoir.” Fellow New Zealand author Frank Sargeson was a friend and contemporary of Janet Frame’s, and his works are known for introducing New Zealand colloquialisms to wider literature. Frame was also inspired by the Romantic poets of the late 17th and early 18th centuries—such poets as William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge—particularly regarding her interests in nature and the conflict between eccentricity and conformity.