Freie
Universität Berlin WS
2001/2002
Nordamerikastudien
Ü 54 074
Academic
Research and Composition
Lecturer:
Elizabeth J. Erling
Torn between the Image of the Southern Belle
and the Flapper of the Modern Era
Anne-Claire
Kaufmann
8. Semester
M.A.,
Nordamerikastudien,
Neuere
Deutsche Literatur
Matrikelnummer:
3362709
Revaler
Str. 10
10245
Berlin
030/293 51
532
List of Contents
1. Introduction.......................................................................................................................... 2
2. Womanhood in the Early Twentieth Century...................................................................... 4
2.1.
The Southern Belle...................................................................................................... 6
2.2.
The Flapper.................................................................................................................. 9
3. Invented Lives.................................................................................................................... 12
3.1.
Zelda as the Golden Girl in This Side of Paradise..................................................... 13
3.2.
The Struggle for Identity in Save me the Waltz......................................................... 15
4. Conclusion......................................................................................................................... 20
Works
Cited.............................................................................................................................. 21
She was the prototype of
the modern woman, the extravagant Flapper and the woman that destroyed the life
of F. Scott Fitzgerald, one of America’s most talented and promising authors of
the twenties. For many years Zelda Fitzgerald’s popularity was based on this
very one-sided view of her personality. Critics described her as spoiled and
selfish, an insane woman that ruined her own life and that of her husband
through her unsupportiveness and jealousy.
Only in the early
seventies did this view start to change. In her biography Zelda Nancy Milford depicted Zelda Fitzgerald as a gifted and
despairing woman who was torn by the clash between her husband’s career and her
own burning passions and talents. Milford showed the extent to which the
Fitzgeralds depended on each other, the extraordinary degree to which their
dreams matched, and how this finally brought up a self-destructive conflict
between the couple.
Still, the opinion that
Zelda was not more than a “complementary intelligence”[1]
to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s work did not cease. Even after the re-publication of
her novel Save me the Waltz in 1967,
only few remembered Zelda Fitzgerald as an aspiring writer of her own. Her
talents in the fields of painting, dancing and writing were ignored by others
as they were by herself when she was young and could have developed at least
one of them properly.
In her 1991 study, Zelda Fitzgerald and the Failure of the
American Dream for Woman, Koula Svokos Hartnett was the first scholar that
concentrated on the fact that society’s concept of womanhood, namely the ideal
of the Southern Belle with which Zelda grew up, prevented her from the need to
make it on her own and made her “a victim of the Failure of the American Dream
for Women” (xi). Great start!
The aim of my research
paper will be to show how society’s conception of womanhood, identified by
Hartnett, influenced Zelda’s individuality, independence, and free will. In order to demonstrate this (?), I will give a short
overview of women’s social position during the early twentieth century until
the nineteen-twenties and will then focus on the two seemingly contrasting
ideals of womanhood – the Southern Belle and the Flapper – that dominated the
public image as well as Zelda’s image of herself.
It is Questionable whether in the case of
Zelda Fitzgerald both ideals of womanhood are
contrasting or only complementary to each other and whether it was possible at
all for her to develop an identity of her own based on her talents in a time
where independent women were still a rarity. Continue
here? Therefore I will also analyze the conception of womanhood in F.
Scott Fitzgerald’s first novel This Side
of Paradise for which Zelda stood as a model
and in her own novel Save me the Waltz. Both
texts will show that even though the Fitzgeralds were heralded as the golden
couple of the modern era that lived its new liberties and took actively/actively took part in the creation of it, both held
on to the old concept of womanhood, which was typical for the American middle class. This ideal regarded the
subordination of the wife to her husband and her financial dependency on him as
given and natural.
My paper will show that
it was impossible for Zelda Fitzgerald to become an independent character while
torn between the liberties of the new era and the old model of womanhood with
which she grew up. Her fate of being driven into depressions and madness
therefore can/can therefore be seen as no
incident/accident? but a typical outcome of the
radical changes during the Jazz Age era that finally failed to overtly overcome
the restrictions of women’s independence.
“[T]he cult of the true
womanhood was the defense of nineteenth-century Americans against the
incursions of industrialism” (Welter in Brown 30). Through virtues of piety,
purity, submissiveness and domesticity women of the Victorian Age were
idealized as the guardians of the home and the private sphere, unaffected by
any social or political changes.
As the twentieth century
approached, (the) rapidly
ongoing/ rapid and ongoing
industrialization made it impossible to continue a clear separation between the
public sphere and the private sphere. Especially/particularly
Middle-class women, especially,
started to challenge the cult of domesticity and began to engage in social and
political activities. Margaret Sanger’s campaign for birth control in 1914
fought for the emancipation and liberation of women through the ability to
control reproduction, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman “advocated women’s economic
independence through equality in the workplace and state-run day-care centers”
(Boyer et al. 490). In addition, more and more colleges opened for the education
of women and thereby supported the development of a new self-confidence that
helped women to break with the Victorian ideal of passiveness and
submissiveness. One outcome of this growing self-confidence of women was the
climbing of the divorce rate. “Women who sued for divorce increasingly cited
their husbands’ failure to act responsibly and to respect their autonomy”
(Boyer et al. 445).
By the turn of the
century the same magazines that had once proclaimed the cult of true womanhood
started to lament (on)
its demise. The “New Woman” that took its place was described in a newspaper
article from 1910 as follows:
[A] wholesome lovable
creature with surprisingly bad manners. [She] has gone to college, and when she
graduates she is going to earn her own living. She declines to be dependent
upon a father and mother amply able to support her. She will do settlement
work; she won’t go to church, she has views upon marriage and the birth-rate,
and she utters them calmly while her mother blushes with embarrassment...
(Deland in Brown 31).
With the beginning of
World War I many activists hoped that the war would enlarge opportunities for
women especially in the work sphere. In fact, only few women started to work
between 1917 and 1918, and overall “the percentage of working women declined
slightly from 1910 to 1920” (Boyer et al. 517).
Nevertheless, after
World War I the old Victorian morals and manners were challenged drastically.
The post-war-period brought great changes in national social patterns, which
were as much the result of the changes in women’s values and attitudes as they
were catalyst for them. The ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, which gave woman the right
to vote, and the
prosperity of the 1920’s offered women – especially young middle-class women –
the possibility to “indulge themselves in the activities and products offered
by an increasingly commercialized popular culture” (Raub xiii).
Young women did not care
anymore about the Victorian ideal of true womanhood; they rebelled against it,
but in a less political way than their predecessors. They were Flappers and
soon became a symbol and a myth of the “Roaring Twenties.” Instead of engaging
themselves in feminist matters, they shortened their skirts, bobbed their hair,
smoked, drank, danced wild dances, and enjoyed the liberalization of women’s
sexuality. They did not mind to
kiss/kissing one of their many admirers
in public and “were no longer willing to postpone intercourse until after the
exchange of vows” (Yellis 44). Nevertheless, for most of them, marriage
remained a natural consequence in their conception of life and very few earned
their own living.
Unfortunately, the
expansion of social boundaries and the relaxation of restrictions for women
were as short-lived as the period itself. With the onset of Depression the shortcomings (one word) of a unifying women’s movement during the
nineteen-twenties became apparent. The lack of political engagement while
fighting the old morals and manners led to a return to traditional values when
the prosperity of the nineteen-twenties ended. At least until the beginning of
World War II, many women were expected again to return into the private sphere.
In the South, where the
industrial era entered far more slowly and brought many conflicts with it, the
cult of true womanhood was heralded and lasted longer than in the rest of the
United States. The ideal of the southern lady was a specifically regional and
extreme version of the nineteenth-century lady. The majority of southerners
were very conservative and in their moral ideas Victorians at heart. Southern
ladies were expected to present the best of the South. They had to be
“physically pure, fragile, and beautiful, socially dignified, cultured, and
gracious, within the family sacrificial and submissive, yet if the occasion
required, intelligent and brave” (Jones xi). In particular the fragility and
helplessness of the southern women were emphasized and seemed to be both
essential and appealing to southern men (Jones 5).
The
zenith of southern women was reached at the marriageable age of sixteen to
twenty, their Southern Belle time. During this period the Southern Belle would
temporarily leave the save/safe sphere of the
home to enter the “world” on social occasions, such as balls and dances. The
more men that courted her, the more respected
she was, but as soon as she was married she would retreat into the private
sphere and become the supervisor of the home, mother and nurse for her husband
and children (Seidel 6).
Should this be a new
section? Zelda—as a Southern Belle???
Zelda Fitzgerald, born
Sayre, was the youngest of six children of a southern conservative upper
middle-class family in Montgomery, Alabama. Her father, an Alabama Supreme
Court justice, embodied the tradition and conservatism of the South. Minnie
Sayre, Zelda’s mother, was an artistic character. She/Zelda
or her mother? wrote and (had) once dreamt of entering the theatre stage, but her father
would have rather seen her dead than on the stage, and he forbade her to
perform (Milford 5). Although she was not a rebel, Minnie Sayre was a
non-conformist in the manner in which she raised her children, especially her
daughters. They grew up as very independent characters, unusual for the time
and place in which they lived.
Zelda was a whirlwind
and once stated about herself as a little girl that she had a great confidence in
herself, “even to the extent of walking against life as it was then. I did not
have a single feeling of inferiority, or shyness, or doubt, and no moral
principles” (qtd. in Milford 8).
Growing older/As she grew older Zelda soon became the most
spectacular Southern Belle Montgomery would ever know. With her blond hair and
her flawless skin she had become a real beauty and therefore fulfilled the
major task of a Southern Belle, to be able to attract a good catch.
Nevertheless, her outstanding character and her free-spiritedness ran contrary
to this ideal. She was the first/girl in town to wear
who wore mascara. She
smoked and drank gin. She was busy going out with young males, but she enjoyed
being worshipped by them more than she was determinedly looking for a future
husband. Unfortunately, she also quit her ballet lessons to have more time for
dating, despite the fact that many people predicted that
she would have her
a great career as a ballet dancer. The only things she cared for at that time
were boys and swimming (Milford 16).
Zelda ignored what other
people thought about her and clearly reacted against the ideal of southern
womanhood, which expected females to be submissive and passive. She did not fit
into the ideal of a woman that needed to be protected and helped by a male
counterpart, and many of her dating partners were confused by her seemingly
fearless character (Milford 17).
Still, Zelda was not
completely unaffected by the old roles. In contrast to her struggle for
independence, she also had a great need for emotional security. This duality
can be seen in her self-definition: “it’s very difficult to be two simple
people at once, one who wants to have a law to itself and the other who wants
to keep all the nice old things and be loved and safe and protected” (qtd. in
Milford 21).
For Zelda the “nice old
things” were clearly connected with the institution of marriage that she never
seemed to question. Although she wanted to be free and independent, it seemed
only natural to her that she would end up in marriage at some point. The only
thing she feared was to become/becoming one of
the women who “crawl[ed] on their bellies through colorless marriages” (Zelda
Fitzgerald in Hartnett 21). Her idea of life was a more glamorous one:
“Marriage was created not as a backdrop but to need one. Mine is going to be
outstanding... the live, lovely glamorous performance, and the world shall be
the setting“ (Zelda Fitzgerald in Hartnett 96).
During her courting
period with F. Scott Fitzgerald, whom she met at the Montgomery Country Club in
1918, she sent him several letters that clearly depict the role she had
imagined for herself in their marriage:
I’d had no purpose in
life – just a pretty – decoration. Don’t you think I was made for you? I feel
like you had me ordered – and I was delivered to you – to be worn – I want you
to wear me, like a watch – charm or a button hole boquet [sic] – to the world.
And then, when we’re alone, I want to help – to know that you can’t do anything
without me (qtd. in Milford 41).
For Zelda, marriage
seemed the only way that she could imagine to alter/altering
the scope of her life. Scott had told her that he wanted to become a rich and
famous writer in New York. Through him she hoped to be able to combine the
ideal of marrying “a good catch” and enter/entering
a world different from her conservative background in the South, a world in
which she would be able to live her free-spiritedness and an extravagant life,
which was all that she wanted at that point.
And you see Scott, I’ll
never be able to do anything because I’m much too lazy to care whether it is
done or not – And I don’t want to be famous and fêted – all I want is to be
very young and very irresponsible and to feel that my life is my own – to live
and be happy and die in my own way to please myself- (qtd. in Milford 59).
She knew that it was her
whirlwind character and her free-spiritedness that Scott loved most about her,
and therefore, it did not matter to her to play/if she had to play
the passive role. She thought of it as an acting part. “It’s funny, but I like
being ‘pink and helpless’ – When I know I seem that way I feel terribly
competent – and superior” (Zelda Fitzgerald in Milford 49).
What Zelda did not
realize back then was that the role of the passive wife who served others,
foremost her husband and family – the role that her mother finally lived and
that women’s magazines cherished – would not satisfy her all her life. LINK? Although she was very talented, Zelda had given
up dancing when she was sixteen because she cared more for spending her leisure
time with boys. It might not have been only a lack of ambition that made her
stop the lessons. She was also afraid to fail, as she admits in a letter to
Scott: “I hope I’ll never get ambitious enough to try anything. It’s so much nicer to be damned sure I could do it better than other people –
and I might not could if I tried – that, of cource [sic], would break my heart”
(qtd. in Milford 57). Again her two contrasting characters become apparent. The
courageous and fearless one was “damned sure” she could do things better, but
due to her upbringing within the traditional role of femininity, she was
lacking the self-confidence to believe in her own talents.
In his article,
“Prosperity’s Child: Some Thoughts on the Flapper,” Kenneth A. Yellis wrote
that “[i]n any epoch, what women is perceived to be by men, by other women and
by herself, and the way in which she wants to be perceived, all tell us a great
deal about perception in that period” (44). The Flapper was the first ideal of
womanhood that was perceived as distinctly modern. Whereas the Victorian women
and the Gibson Girl, the predecessor of the Flapper, still belonged to the
nineteenth century, the Flapper was the first twentieth century ideal. With her
outer appearance – the bobbed hair, a flattened chest, hidden waist and short
skirts – as well as her scandalous behavior that rebelled against nineteenth
century morals and manners, she represented the new social tendencies that were
deeply connected with the modernity of the Jazz Age. The term “Flapper” was
brought to the United States from England, where it was used to describe young
girls in their mid-teens, who had not yet reached mature womanhood. It was only
in the United States that it became an aesthetic ideal (Yellis 49).
Zelda as a flapper?
Scott
and Zelda Fitzgerald married a month after the publication of his first novel This Side of Paradise in nineteen-twenty
and were immediately idealized as models in the cult of youth, the dream couple
of the Jazz Age and “the arch type of what New York wanted” (Scott Fitzgerald
in Cowly 17). Scott was made the spokesman of his time, and Zelda became the
prototype of the modern Flapper, a role she could immediately identify with.
Youth had always been an important aspect of her life. In a letter she wrote to
Scott during their courtship she states: “[A]ll I want is to be very young and
very irresponsible and to feel that my life is my own” (qtd. in Milford 59).
Their life seemed to be the natural extension of her Montgomery existence, now
played on a larger stage. In its extravagance and glamour it perfectly fitted
what Ernest Hemingway would later call Zelda’s “festival conception of life”
(qtd. in Milford 115) She was freed from any parental or social restrictions
and felt marvelously irresponsible.
When
asked by a newspaper to write a short piece on the Flapper, Zelda described the
ideal as follows:
[T]he Flapper awoke from
her lethargy of sub-deb-ism, bobbed her hair, put on her choiciest pair of
earrings and a great deal of audacity and rouge, and went into the battle. She
flirted because it was fun to flirt and wore a one-piece bathing suit because
she had a good figure; she covered her face with powder and paint because she
didn’t need it and she refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn’t boring.
She was conscious that the things she did were the things she had always wanted
to do (Zelda Fitzgerald 391).
What Zelda wanted to do was to
celebrate life, experiment with it and use her Flapperdom as “a code for living
well” (Milford 91). In her view, a Flapper had to be self-aware and do things
consciously for their effect. By “merely applying business methods to being
young” they would be able to “capitalize their natural resources and get their
money’s worth” (Zelda Fitzgerald 393). A young Flapper had to create herself as
a product that advertised itself.
Zelda believed that if a
woman had lived on her own terms during her youth she would be happier during
her marriage, which she still considered to be the ultimate fate of all women,
even the Flapper. In her essay . . . she wrote that .
. . (introduce quote)
She has come to none of
the predicted “bad ends,” but has gone at last, where all good flappers go –
into the young married set, into boredom and gathering conventions and the
pleasure of having children, having lent a while a splendor and courageousness
and brightness to life, as all good flappers have (Zelda Fitzgerald 399).
The splendor and brightness of the
Flappers’ life before marriage would prevent them to become/from becoming
unhappy once they were married.
Although (,) Zelda had enlarged her
perspective on life and womanhood after she had married and went to New York, where she enjoyed
the liberties of the new woman and had freed herself from many restrictions of
her Southern Belle identity, she did not doubt the fact that a woman had to
depend on a husband. At least the idea of a
career of her own did not yet appear in her philosophy of life. As late as 1926
she would tell a journalist that she believes “a woman gets more happiness out
of being gay and light-hearted, unconventional, mistress of her own fate, than
out of a career that calls for hard work, intellectual pessimism and
loneliness” (qtd. in Tavernier-Courbin 26).
Still, as much as Zelda
was only playing the role of the pink and helpless Southern Belle, her
Flapperdom was again a performance that she wholeheartedly identified with for
a while. As the next chapter will show, a large part of Zelda’s life was an
invented one in which she tried to live up to certain roles that society and
her husband had thought up for her. This finally led to her destructive
struggle to find an identity of her own and ended up in the complete loss of
herself.
It is a commonly held
opinion that Scott Fitzgerald’s texts are to be read
on a more or less autobiographical level. Not only do many of his characters
resemble himself or other real life persons/people,
but Fitzgerald himself has
also once stated to his friend Alexander McKaig
that he “cannot depict how anyone thinks except himself & possibly Zelda.
[He finds] that after he has written about a character a while it becomes just
himself again” (McKaig in Milford 79).
With the publication of
his first novel This Side of Paradise,
F. Scott Fitzgerald gained immediate success, and he and Zelda became
synonymous with the Roaring Twenties. Scott had later described his popularization as follows:
I who knew less of New
York than any reporter of six months’ standing and less of society than any
hallroom boy in a Ritz stag line, was pushed into the position not only of
spokesman for the time but of the typical product of the same moment (qtd. in
Milford 67).
Like “small children in
a great bright unexplored barn” (Scott Fitzgerald in Cowley 17) Scott and Zelda
played the roles that media and society had thought up for them – the lives of
untamed whirlwinds that rebelled against old morals and standards. Scott was
reported to have undressed in public, Zelda dived into the fountain at Union
square and they spent most of their time partying and drinking excessively
(Milford 66). They created a legend with their actions, but they also
constantly felt obligated to live up to this legend. Zelda, whom Scott had used
as an inspiration for the portrayal of the Flapper in his novels, especially
felt the constant need to fulfill the expectations set on her by society and to
give her husband new material for his books.
James R. Mellow
described Zelda and Scott in his biography, Invented
Lives, as “figures in a hall of mirrors: everything reflected back
brilliant or attractive or distorted images of themselves, but it was difficult
to know where the real substance was” (5). Much later in his life Scott would
state to a visitor that “[s]ometimes I don’t know whether Zelda and I are real
or whether we are characters in one of my novels” (Scott Fitzgerald in Cowley
19).
When F. Scott Fitzgerald
met Zelda in 1918, he was halfway through the composition of his first novel This Side of Paradise and had just begun
to create the woman character that would become the famous heroine of all his
novels and that he would describe as follows:
Girls for instance, have
found the accent shifted from chemical purity to breadth of viewpoint,
intellectual charm and piquant cleverness... we find the young woman of 1920
flirting, kissing, viewing life lightly in an immature way – a sort of mental
baby vamp... Personally, I prefer this sort of girl. Indeed, I married the
heroine of my stories. I would not be interested in any other sort of woman”
(qtd. in Milford 77).
Zelda was all this when
he first met her and therefore it was easy for Scott to draw on her for
material that he could use in his novel. He used her diaries and letters as an
inspiration for his book. Sometimes he even
quoted whole passages out of them and would continue to do so in his following
novels.
The
character of Rosalind in This Side of
Paradise closely resembles Zelda. Rosalind is a young girl of nineteen, and
we first meet her on the night of her debut. It seems only fitting that
Fitzgerald uses the stylistic form of a play to introduce Rosalind: she is just
about to enter the stage and play the role of the most adorable and charming
debutante in order to marry the best catch she can get. She is described as
“one of those girls who need never make the slightest effort to have men fall
in love with them” – a description that also perfectly fits on Zelda – and only two types
of men seldom do: “dull men are usually afraid of her cleverness and
intellectual men are usually afraid of her beauty” (Scott Fitzgerald 195).
Rosalind is the same
mixture out of Southern Belle and Flapper as Zelda was. She enjoys wearing a
“hoop skirt with pantaloons” or a “one-piece bathing-suit” because she knows
that she looks charming in both of them (Scott Fitzgerald 196). She calls
herself selfish and emotional and is fond of the admiration she earns by/from men. Rosalind knows that she belongs to an
“American social class that still fosters women’s economic dependency on men”
(Fryer 24). Consequently, she uses her cleverness and beauty in order to be
successful in the only “business” she will ever indulge in – the marrying
business. As Zelda would later demand in her “Eulogy on the Flapper,” she
applies business methods to being young. Rosalind has to marry wealthy to
assure her social and financial standards. The fact that she talks about
“business hours” and calls herself “Rosalind, Unlimited,” who will sell her
name and identity for “$ 25,000 a year,” shows that she is perfectly aware of
her fate but does not seem to question it (Scott Fitzgerald 198 f.).
Still, times have
changed: Rosalind tells her mother that “[she] can’t run everything now the way
[she] did in the early nineties” (Fitzgerald 203). She has her own way of
dealing with the dating business. She kisses and flirts with whomever she
wants, and she tries to get as much out of her debutante time as she can. When
Gillespie, one of her many admirers, tells her that he thought she was won with
the first kiss, Rosalind answers him that “[t]hose days are over. I have to be
won all over again every time you see me” (Scott Fitzgerald 206).
Nevertheless,
although Rosalind is perfectly aware of what is expected from her, she falls in
love with Armory Blaine, who certainly does not fulfill the criteria of a “good
catch.” Rosalind wants “real sentiment” (Scott Fitzgerald 210) and hopes to
find it in her love of Armory. Therefore she is willing to subordinate herself
to Armory. The phrases Rosalind uses during her courtship with Armory show a
strong similarity with Zelda’s letters to Scott before their marriage. Rosalind
promises, “I’ll do what you want. We’re you – not me. Oh, you are so much a
part of me, so much all of me” (Scott Fitzgerald 214). Rosalind hopes to be
able to combine the pleasure of real love with her fate of marrying and subordinating
herself to a husband. She tells her mother that her love may be “insane,” ...
“but it’s not inane” (Scott Fitzgerald 211). But at the end Rosalind becomes
increasingly aware that a marriage to Armory would ask of her an enormous
personal sacrifice, and she decides to break up with him in favor of Dawson
Ryder, a wealthy admirer of hers. A marriage with him will offer her the
financial security she still depends on. Despite the sexual liberation that the
era of the New Women has brought her, Rosalind is far from being able to become
economically independent.
During
Zelda’s and Scott’s courtship, Zelda had once broken/once
broke off their engagement for almost the same reason. When Scott asked
her to marry him in summer 1919, after a series of failures to become a
successful writer in New York, Zelda refused. She knew that money was necessary
to live the kind of lifestyle Scott had imagined for them. It was not she who
insisted on being rich but Scott, and she knew that if he would continue to
fail, he would blame her for it. Most biographers would criticize Zelda for being the materialist, but
in reality it was Scott who dreamt of being wealthy since childhood (Hartnett
45).
In
This Side of Paradise Fitzgerald
observes sharp-eyed/sharply observes the ambitions
and frustrations of the New Woman[2]
of his generation to whom the equality of sexes, despite her victories in the
sexual liberation, still proves to be illusionary. Although, his depictions of
their struggles show that Fitzgerald was aware of this conflict, his
description of the New Woman and his own marriage reveal that Fitzgerald did
not fight for the equality of the sexes. Like his heroes in his novels, he
expected “unquestioning, self-effacing support” from his wife, whom he loved to
imagine as the immature mental baby vamp (Fryer 5). Zelda lived under the
constant pressure to live up to this ideal and as the interpretation of her
novel will show, her effort to free herself from the expectations of society
and her husband became the struggle of her life, which she would inevitably
lose.
None of Zelda
Fitzgerald’s other writings depicts so explicitly her search for an identity of
her own as her only novel Save me the
Waltz.
It is simultaneously a
response and a search: A response to a personal situation (an
unhappy marriage), to
the social role its author was expected to play as a famous writer’s wife and
as the model for his heroines, and to the universal condition that comes from
simply being a woman (Tavernier-Courbin 24).
Like most of her
husband’s writings, Save me the Waltz
is highly autobiographic and Alabama Beggs and her painting husband, David
Knight, seem to be the fictionalized alter egos of Zelda and F. Scott
Fitzgerald. The novel came so close to their own lives that Scott became
infuriated on first reading it. Zelda had written/wrote
the first draft within few months after her second hospitalization in 1931[3]
and had sent it to
Maxwell Perkins at Scribner’s without Scott’s knowing or further proofreading.
Scott called the manuscript back from Scribner’s and insisted on extensive
revisions, and the cut out of several chapters before its publication. He
accused Zelda of using his “material”: “Everything we have done is my [material]...I
am the professional novelist, and I am supporting you. That is all my material.
None of it is your material “(qtd. in Milford 273). Obviously he believed that
through their marriage he owned the exclusive rights on Zelda and her
“material”.
Furthermore Scott felt
offended by the way Zelda depicted him as the heroine’s alcoholic husband,
fearing that it could damage his public image. “My God,” he complained in a
letter to one of Zelda’s psychiatrists, “my books made her a legend and her
single intention in this somewhat thin portrait is to make me a non-entity”
(qtd. in Aldrich 139). The fact that he would do the same thing a few years
later – by exposing Zelda and her illness in the character of Nicole Diver in Tender Is the Night (1934) – seemed to
be something different to him (Milford 284).
As
mentioned before, the story of Save me
the Waltz is very close to Zelda’s own life. Alabama Beggs is the youngest
daughter of a family of a southern judge. She grows up with the typical model
of femininity presented to her trough her mother and her two older sisters. Introduce quote:
She saw her mother as
she was, part of a masculine tradition. Millie did not seem to notice about her
own life that there would be nothing left when her husband died. He was the father
of her children who were girls, and who had left her for the families of other
men (Zelda Fitzgerald 186).
Whereas Millie has completely given
up her own personality when she married her husband, Alabama learns from her
sisters “to conceal, not to cancel what she is ‘really like’” (Cary 67).
Like Zelda, who felt superior when
she played the role of the helpless woman in front of men, Alabama is aware
that “the only thing of any significance was to take what she wanted when she
could” (Zelda Fitzgerald 32).
When
the young soldier and painter David Knights steps into Alabama’s life, it seems
that he is all that she wants. He appears as the saving knight who offers her
the bright and shining world of New York. Nevertheless, David’s view upon
marriage is a very conventional one. He does not propose directly to Alabama
but asks her father for allowance/permission.
He views himself as “David, David, Knight, Knight, Knight” and his future wife
as “Mrs. Alabama Nobody” (Zelda Fitzgerald 39) that he will make his princess
and “keep […] shut forever in an ivory tower for [his] private delectation”
(Zelda Fitzgerald 42).
Alabama
gladly submits herself to David, concealing the real Alabama that is sure of
her own abilities. “I am so outrageously clever that I believe I could be a
whole world to myself if I didn’t like living in Daddy’s better,” she tells her
daughter (Zelda Fitzgerald 80). As hard as she tries to live the conventional
role of femininity, she fails. She does not know how to handle her pregnancy,
is a bad housekeeper, and blames David for her boredom while he works. All this
equals Zelda’s life and character traits. Zelda and Scott spent the first month
of their marriage partying around New York. But when Scott returned to work,
Zelda grew more and more restless. Alexander McKaig, a friend of the
Fitzgeralds, took record of the growing discontent between Zelda and Scott:
October 12[, 1921]: Went
to Fitzgeralds. Usual problem there. What shall Zelda do? I think she might do
a little housework – apartment looks like a pig sty. If she’s there Fitz can’t
work – she bothers him – if she’s not there he can’t work – worried what she
might do (qtd. in Milford 79).
Zelda did a little
painting and writing all the time, but most of her stories were published under
Scott’s name to earn more money, and it did not give her what she needed most:
self-affirmation. It was not before the age of twenty-seven that Zelda, like
Alabama in the novel, started dancing lessons with the earnest wish to become a
prima ballerina. Some critics regard Scott’s affair with the seventeen-year-old
actress Lois Moran in 1927 as the cause for Zelda’s sudden ambitions because
Scott had told/told her that the young actress
at least did something that required talent as well as effort (Milford 129).
Still, Zelda’s very own longing to express herself emotionally was probably the
most powerful motivation for her dancing. Intro. It’s
a good idea to integrate all quotes into your text.
It seemed to Alabama
that, reaching her goal, she would drive the devils that had driven her – that
in proving herself, she would achieve that peace which she had imagined went
only in surety of one’s self – that she would be able, through the medium of
dance, to command her emotion, to summon love or pity or happiness at will,
having provided a channel through which they might flow (Zelda Fitzgerald 118).
Both
Scott and David Knight first see their wives’ dancing ambitions as a relief for
their marriage, but change their minds as soon as they feel that their own
needs are being neglected. “Yet you can’t stay with me! What’s the use of
having a wife? If a women’s only to sleep with there are plenty available for
that,“ complains David to Alabama about her constant being away at the studio
(Zelda Fitzgerald 120). The biggest problem is Scott’s as well as David’s
disbelief in their wives’ ability to succeed. “You are so thin,” said David
patronizingly. “There’s no use killing yourself. I hope you realize that the
biggest difference in the world is between the amateur and the professional in
the arts” (qtd. in Zelda Fitzgerald 138). While he sees himself as the
professional and the boss in their household, he sees Alabama as only an
amateur who has to submit her ambitions to his will and needs. Therefore he
does not take it seriously when Alabama receives a professional offer to join
the San Carlos Opera Ballet in Naples. “He simply will not consider the fact that Alabama wants to – and can – have a
career as he does” (Tavernier-Courbin 35).
When
Zelda was offered this/these chance/chances to fulfill all her dreams, she inexplicably
did not take it/them. Scott obviously tried to
prevent her from doing it.[4]
She would probably not have made it anyway; trying to make up the lost time,
she had overstrained her physical and mental abilities and suffered a breakdown
in April 1930 from which she should never recover (Hartnett 127).
Alabama, in contrast,
risks damaging her marriage and goes to Naples. She does not mind to live/living the life of a poor dancer in Naples because
it makes her psychologically and financially independent from David’s material
world and enables her to create a world of her own. Unfortunately, she does not
succeed either. Her body fails, and when after a blood poisoning the doctors
have to cut the tendons in her foot, she is not able to dance anymore. Deprived
of her life and her newly won identity she has to return into the dependency of
a world dominated by men (Tavernier-Courbin 38).
Charles Scribner’s Sons
published the book/Save me the waltz in 1932.
Critiques on the publication of the book were few, and many critics
concentrated more on the fact that Zelda was the wife of the famous F. Scott
Fitzgerald than on the book itself. Still, critics who took a closer look on
the book realized that Zelda had a talent on/of
her own. A reviewer of the Philadelphia Public Ledger wrote in October 1932:
“[…] when an author has written a book constructive in thought, clever in
execution, individual, fascinating and brisk, she deserves to shine in her own
light rather than to bask in the reflection of another, even though that other
is a gifted husband” (White 165). Unfortunately, Zelda Fitzgerald never had the
possibility “to shine in her own light”. A world still dominated by a masculine
view had prevented her from it and the conflict between the safe world of her
childhood and the liberties that were offered through a new conception of
womanhood were too strong for her to overcome.
Women were probably the
greatest victims of the 1920s, which brought them a superficial form of
emancipation – bobbing their hair, smoking, “Saying damn without a blush,”
flirting – but it locked them into the role of a “mental baby vamp,” completely
dependent on husbands who felt that they no longer needed to protect their wives
since they were “emancipated.” (Tavernier-Courbin 33f.)
The clash between the
two different ideals – “one who wants to have a law to itself and the other who
wants to keep all the nice old things and be loved and safe” – was impossible
for Zelda Fitzgerald to overcome. While the ideal of the Southern Belle would
have deprived her of her free-spiritedness, the ideal of the Flapper which she
tried to live during her marriage lacked the emotional security she longed for
and offered her liberties that were too superficial to satisfy.
Late in his life Scott
Fitzgerald would write about Zelda in a letter to their daughter: “She realized
too late that work was dignity and the only true dignity, and tried to atone
for it by working herself, but it was too late...” (qtd. in Hartnett 113). It
seems ridiculous that he,
who had more than once tried to discourage Zelda in her efforts to work
professionally, would
write this sentence, but he was right. If Zelda had earlier felt an ambition to develop her skills earlier, she might have found emotional security and
independence through her work. It was probably her bad luck that she too perfectly fit into the
female ideals of her time too perfectly, the
stunning beauty of the Southern Belle and the rebellious and fun-loving
character of the Flapper – and therefore was unable to free herself from the
expectation immediately set on her by society.
Hopefully, the trend in
literary scholarship in the future will be to view her as an individual talent
and not only as a “complementary intelligence” to her famous husband. This view would thereby extinguish extinguishing the false
picture of her as a destructive and selfish wife, bringing her the attention
she deserves.
Comments:
Nicely done.
Your paper is well constructed and argues. There are very few language
error—mostly errors of tense (always use simple past tense when reporting past
time events) or errors of gerund/infinitive, i.e. she did not mind living
the life of a pauper.
Your Works
Cited page looks wonderful. In general, great job of editing, etc. I think it
looks good!
Aldrich, Elizabeth Kaspar. “’The
most poetical topic in the world’: Women in the Novels of
F. Scott Fitzgerald.” Scott
Fitzgerald: The Promises of Life. Ed. A. Robert Lee. London: Vision Press,
1989. 131 - 156.
Boyer, Paul S., et al. The
Enduring Vision. A History of the American People. 3rd ed.
Boston/New York:
Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998.
Brown, Dorothy M.. Setting a
Course. American Women in the 1920s. Boston:
Twayne Publishers, 1987.
Cary, Meredith. “Save Me the Waltz
as a Novel.” Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual 1976.
Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli.
Columbia: Indian Head Inc., 1978. 65 - 78.
Cowley, Malcolm. “The Scott
Fitzgerald Story.” The New Republic 12 Feb. 1951: 17 - 20.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. This Side
of Paradise. New York: The Modern Library, 2001.
Fitzgerald, Zelda. The Collected
Writings. Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1991.
Fryer, Sarah Beebe. Fitzgerald’s
New Women. Harbingers of Change. Ann Arbor:
UMI Research Press,
1988.
Hartnett, Koula Svokos. Zelda
Fitzgerald and the Failure of the American Dream for Women.
New York: Peter Lang
Publishing, Inc., 1991.
Jones, Anne Goodwyn. Tomorrow Is
Another Day. The Woman Writer in the South,
1859 -1936 . Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1981.
Mellow, James R. Invented Lives:
F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Company. 1984.
Milford, Nancy. Zelda. A
Biography. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1970.
Raub, Patricia. Yeaterday’s
Stories. Popular Women’s Novels of the Twenties and Thirties.
Westport: Greenwood
Press, 1994.
Seidel, Kathryn Lee. The Southern
Belle in the American Novel. Tampa: University of South
Florida Press, 1985.
Tavernier-Courbin, Jacqueline. ”Art
as Woman’s Response and Search: Zelda Fitzgerald’s
Save Me the Waltz.” The
Southern Literary Journal 11.2 (1979): 22 - 42.
White, Ray Lewis. “Zelda
Fitzgerald’s Save Me the Waltz: A Collection of Reviews from
1932-1933.” Fitzgerald/Hemingway
Annual 1979. Columbia: Indian Head, Inc.,
1980. 163 - 168.
Yellis, Kenneth A.. “Prosperity’s
Child: Some Thoughts on the Flapper.” American Quarterly
21.4 (1969): 44 - 64.
She was two people at once – the
Southern Belle and the Flapper. These two different concepts of womanhood drove
Zelda Fitzgerald, the wife of the famous writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, into
madness because she was not able to emancipate herself from the different
expectations that were set on her and to find an identity of her own. My study
concentrates on the influence of the two contrasting ideals of womanhood on her
conception of self. Therefore I will give a short overview on the situation of
women during the early twentieth century up to nineteen-twenties and then focus
on the impact of the ideals on her life. Furthermore I will analyze the
literary production of her husband, namely his first novel This Side of Paradise, to show his influence on her glorification
as the modern woman of the Jazz Age and Zelda’s own novel Save me the Waltz as a depiction of her inner struggles. My
research paper shows that it was impossible for Zelda Fitzgerald to become an
independent character because the impact of the social and historical
conception of womanhood worked too strongly on/against
her.
[1] It was F. Scott Fitzgerald himself who wanted his wife to be a
complementary intelligence to his own (Milford 274).
[2] All together there are four women characters in his book who all share
the same fate. Due to the limited space in my paper and the fact
that the conception of Rosalind comes closest
to the character of Zelda, I concentrated solely on her.
[3] Zelda had
suffered a mental breakdown in spring 1930. Her desperate struggle to become a
ballerina had exhausted and worn her
out.
She would go in and out of hospitals the rest of her life and would never fully
recover.
[4] Scott had tried to get Madame Egerova, Zelda’s ballet teacher, to
discourage her, but in contrast she predicted her a future in dance
(Hartnett 127).