ZELDA: THE MADWOMAN IN THE FLAPPER DRESS My November Column at Bookslut“Is a pen a metaphorical penis?” Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar asked in their seminal study of women writers and the literary imagination The Madwoman in the Attic (1979, reissued 2011). Their answer was a resounding, if complex, yes, resulting in our most robust and far-reaching feminist literary theory to date.“In patriarchal Western culture,” they wrote, “the text’s author is a father, a progenitor, a procreator, an aesthetic patriarch whose pen is an instrument of generative power like his penis. More, his pen’s power, like his penis’s power, is not just the ability to generate life but the power to create a posterity to which he lays claim.” This power further implies “ownership” over all his “brain children” — characters, scenes, and events. “As a creation ‘penned’ by man, moreover, woman has been ‘penned up’ or ‘penned in,’” radically reduced to stereotypes (angel or monster) that seriously conflict with her own sense of self, liberty, and creativity.They show how the pen — indeed mightier than the sword — has for millennia excluded and silenced half the human race. Paradoxically, the author “silences [his characters] by depriving them of autonomy (that is, of the power of independent speech) even as he gives them life.” The authors quote the literary scholar Albert Gelpi: “The artist kills experience into art, for temporal experience can only escape death by dying into the ‘immortality’ of artistic form. The fixity of ‘life’ in art and the fluidity of ‘life’ in nature are incompatible.”Gilbert’s and Gubar’s book explored how women, increasingly becoming authors themselves in the nineteenth century, coped with ubiquitous literary paternity. A distinctively female literary tradition emerged: “images of enclosure and escape, fantasies in which maddened doubles functioned as asocial surrogates for docile selves, metaphors of physical discomfort manifested in frozen landscapes and fiery interiors — such patterns recurred throughout this tradition, along with obsessive depictions of diseases like anorexia, agoraphobia, and claustrophobia.” In response to being both locked up in, and out of, language, “female art has a hidden but crucial tradition of uncontrollable madness.”Nancy Milford’s fascinating and disturbing biography Zelda (1970, reissued 2011) tells the tragic story of a young woman from Montgomery, Alabama who had great self-confidence, ambition, intelligence, artistic talent, and sex appeal, and who was, in effect, “killed into art” by her husband F. Scott Fitzgerald, the patriarchal culture she lived in, and herself. Her failed attempts to find artistic self-expression lead her to suffer from debilitating asthma, eczema, and mental illness.Born in 1900, Zelda was the cleverest, prettiest, wildest, and most talented girl in town. Scott Fitzgerald, with whom she fell in love at seventeen and married at twenty, began his immortalization of her as the quintessential “Jazz-age” flapper in his first novel This Side of Paradise (1920) as Rosalind: “She danced exceptionally well, drew cleverly but hastily, and had a startling facility with words, which she used only in love letters… She was perhaps the delicious inexpressible, once-in-a-century blend.”Much later Scott told Malcolm Cowley, “Sometimes I don’t know whether Zelda isn’t a character I created myself.” To create that character, however, Scott made a regular practice of using his wife’s persona, experience, diaries, and letters, often verbatim, for his work.Early in the Fitzgerald’s marriage, George Jean Nathan, editor of the magazine The Smart Set, read Zelda’s diaries. “They interested me so greatly,” he said, “that… I later made her an offer for them. When I informed her husband, he said that he could not permit me to publish them since he had gained a lot of inspiration from them and wanted to use parts of them in his own novels and short stories.” Zelda didn’t object. Scott was the Great Male Writer, the chronicler and prophet of the age. She was his helpmate.Asked to review Scott’s The Beautiful and Damned for the New York Tribune, however, Zelda expressed her ambivalence toward Scott’s thievery: “It also seems to me that on one page I recognized a portion of an old diary of mine which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage, and also scraps of letters, which, though considerably edited, sound to me vaguely familiar… In fact, Mr. Fitzgerald… seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.” When Zelda wrote stories and essays herself, they were often published either under Scott’s name alone or jointly.Continue reading my column at www.bookslut.com
3.5 stars, rounding up. Zelda Fitzgerald was one of the most notorious women in literary history: wife to F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby); named the First American Flapper; enemy of Hemingway; ballet-enthusiast; painter; novelist; and, at 30, diagnosed with schizophrenia. The rest of her short life was lived in and out of hospitals, sending letters to her estranged husband, writing, and painting, until his death in 1940. Originally published in 1970, Zelda pools letters, interviews, books, diaries and all matter of other things to tell the story of a woman who was lost in the huge shadow of her husband's celebrity, following her life from her childhood as a rambunctious belle in Montgomery, Alabama to her return as "that crazy woman" mothers warned their children about.One thing, however, that Zelda somewhat neglects is the impact of Zelda's life and art on anything other than F. Scott Fitzgerald ("Scott"). Her childhood is all a set-up to how her life with Scott will play out. Their early courtship is, again, Scott-centric in many (understandable!) ways. Their marriage, the same. Her breakdowns, the same. Her hospitalizations, the same. The narration seems to end in 1940 when Scott dies. Zelda, however, lives on for another 8 years--but there's only a chapter or two dedicated to Zelda's life post-Scott. Maybe it's a lack of sources--Zelda's letters to Scott serve as a unparalleled record of her self-discovery, after all--or maybe it was a too-recent event to be captured completely. In any case, the biography suffers for it.Then there is Zelda's art, and more specifically her writing. I had known from other sources that Scott lifted lines from Zelda regularly in his novels; her letters and diaries feature in many of his early works. But when Zelda picked up a pen for herself, things went dark, quickly.Zelda wrote a largely auto-biographical novel called Save the Last Waltz while hospitalized in Maryland. She submitted it to the Fitzgerald's publisher, allegedly to keep from distracting Scott from his own novel (the book that would eventually become Tender is the Night). The fallout was immense. Scott was furious; he seemed to think that because he was the "professional" writer, his life with Zelda was his property. Her writing about it was as good as stealing. The hypocrisy and jealousy and rage exhibited by Scott does nothing to endear him as a husband or an author; it makes him a terrifying monster, crouched in the margins of his works, waiting for you to disagree with his assessment of himself as one of the last great novelists.Here is the crux of the entire story of Zelda's insanity: did Scott Fitzgerald drive her to it? Or had she always been, as Hemingway allegedly knew from the get-go, "crazy"?I think the answer is impossible to know. But what can be known is that they were a couple who destroyed one another and suffered terribly for it. They were the face of the Jazz Age and the victims of the world's short memory. They were, to be blunt, undeniably memorable.
What do You think about Zelda (2001)?
Though there are more recent Zelda Fitzgerald biographies available, Milford's is still the best of the lot. Zelda's life makes for an emotionally exhausting read, but this is an invaluable book for anyone interested in either of the Fitzgeralds. This book is to be recommended even to readers with just a casual interest in the 1920s, given the Fitzgeralds' connections to most of the prominent writers and artists of the period. Those who come to know the details of Zelda's life and literary output may find their estimation of F. Scott Fitzgerald somewhat diminished upon finishing this book.One criticism: I wish Milford had spent more time researching Zelda's life in the eight years between Scott's death and her own. Unfortunately, this is a subject glossed over by most of Zelda's biographers.
—Graham
Engrossing, captivating, and revealing! This portrait of Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald's life together is riveting. It's a love story to two co-dependents who can't stop loving each other even when they are at odds with each other.It's a story of the all-consumed literary genius who extracts so much of his novels from the life of his wife as recorded in her journals. Yes, he steals from her life to create his own characters while weaving in his own, often dysfunctional perceptions, of intimate relationships.It's a story of excesses, a portrait of celebrity success in the 1920's and '30's in glamorous NYC and its surroundings. There's excess drinking everywhere. They move often along the east coast and the South, with major jaunts to Europe. They are restless people looking for a calm that they can't embrace.Zelda is unstable, actually mentally ill, perhaps schizophrenic, who, for years is under the care of psychiatrists with a wide range of approaches to her care and relationships with her and Scott. Zelda is an artist in her own right without the talent of her husband or the literary background. She write, paints, dances ballet in an attempt often to compete with Scott for some recognition of her own, for her value and her place in it all. At every turn this biography capture struggle--emotional, intellectual, physical, relational, mental. It's a book filled with fleeting ups and grueling downs. In all it is a love story of a most heart-wrenching type.
—Dawn Lennon
I think I read this when I was recuperating from an automobile accident and had beaucoup time on my hands. It was very enjoyable and I think got me caught up in getting books on Fitzgerald, the Murphys, Dorothy Parker, etc., that whole crowd in other words.She did have mental problems and if you look at her entire life, you can see them showing up here and there all along the way. I believe she wrote one book and I have heard it questioned, either in print or interviews laterly, whether she was actually talented in this regard. And whether that is the reason she went to the Sanatarium. Because Scott couldn't stand to compete with her. But I don't buy that argument. She may have been talented but was she as talented as he? Or were people only interested in what she had written because of who she was married to?She was a madcap woman from the twenties who jumped into fountains and acted zany. Others acted zany, too, but they were never deemed wacky enough to be locked up. They had madcap moments, she just went mad.
—Jan C
