With No Frame, Who Are We?

What makes us who we are? What makes us decide how we feel about things or how we see things? What molds us into the person we become? Experiences of life, what we learn when we are children or who we are in terms of race, nationality, religion, gender or class are all the things that contribute to our frames. But what is a frame? As explained in Artists of the Floating World, by Burton p.61 and quoted from Lakoff, frames are "Mental structures that shape the way we see the world". We need our frames in order to make sense of the world.

Over time I have seen my own frame expand. I grew up Christian, in a middle class family, and to the blind eye I seem to be a typical “white” girl (blonde hair blue eyes). I grew up as a daddy’s girl. I loved following him around, going on fishing trips and camping trips, I idolized him. In my mind, he’d always be there. When I was 15 years old, something happen to me that changed my perception of the world. I lost my dad. From that time one I learned not to take people or experiences for granted. I look at the world and ask, “what can I do to better my life, my future and all those around me? How can I make the most of my life while I have it?”

Meeting my husband, who came from a totally different frame of life then I did, changed me even more. He is Christen as well but Asian, Hmong, and didn’t have the privileges in life as I did. Learning things from him really opened my eyes to acceptance and knowledge. You cannot determine a person’s religion or cultural believes as weird. You must look into and further understand them.   

What happens to us if we have no frames, or our frames were severly damaged? We would not be able to identify with the world, with ourselves. A Question of Power is a novel written by Bessie Head. Bessie bases her main character, Elizabeth, as a woman who has no such frames. Elizabeth was born in a metal ward where she was taken away from her mother. Her mother was a white woman, and her father was a black stable boy. In those times interracial relationships were not allowed. As an infant, Elizabeth was not accepted into families. “A day later you were returned because you did not look white” (17).  

Eventually, she was taken in by the wife of a man who worked for the child welfare committee. All of Elizabeth’s relatives, excluding her grandmother, wanted nothing to do with her. Elizabeth’s uncle says “we want to wash our hands of this business” (17). He acts as if this child is nothing but a mere burden. Elizabeth’s grandmother would visit her until she was six, when Elizabeth’s mother committed suicide.

All the while, Elizabeth grew up thinking her mother was the lady who raised her. She had shaped her frame until she was 13 years old and the news of her true birth crashed it down. She learned of the news from the principle of a mission school. The principle blatantly told Elizabeth of the new upon her arrival at the school. “She had always thought of herself as the child of the woman who had been paid to care for her” (16). This is the moment in which Elizabeth’s frame began to crumble. What she had thought of her past was a lie. She no longer knew who she was.

In order to deal with life, Elizabeth created a world within herself. For an author to come up with such a tale as this they either have a very creative mind, or they have similar experiences. Bessie Head’s life story greatly corresponds with the life of her character Elizabeth. Bessie was born in a metal hospital to a white woman, and had a black father. Because she never knew her parents, she had no roots to look back onto, no real grasp of the world. Bessie had a hard life, and many nervous breakdowns. She spent some of it in a mental institution.  "In some ways Bessie Head remained an outsider in her adopted country, and some discern she had something of a love-hate relationship with it" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bessie_Head).

If we don’t have frames to help us become who we are, our minds may run free. We can create our own reality within our minds, but we need a true frame to sustain our sanity. While writing this book, and basing most of the story on her own life, Bessie Head is trying to give the reader an insight of what life would be like, what her live was like, without a frame to hold the pieces together. Bessie shows the reader, through Elizabeth, why our frames are so important to our lives. I am truly blessed to have the experiences I have and I am also blessed to have such a strong frame.