19th century French asylum inmate Hersilie Rouy, the musician held at Charenton who would scribble desperate cries to authorities, her letters intercepted, destroyed. She wrote in soot and blood, on any surface, in an attempt to prove her sanity. Fellow inmates gave her scraps of paper attached to a thread which they strung under the door. (Sibylla, whose scraps would scatter to the wind if unread.)
Agnes Richter, a former seamstress in an asylum in Austria around the same time, would spend her waking hours embroidering onto her hospital uniform texts so dense as to be unreadable.
The writing of the inmate is not to be believed.
An archaelogy of silence, as Foucault writes.
Sibyls trapped within silent caves, the movie screens, speaking only the fragments of subtitles (and in their real-life cases, trapped in home asylums and forgotten, Marie Prevost whittling away, Crisis-a-day Clara institutionalized at The Institute of Living in Hartford, Connecticut; Louise Brooks in her upstate New York hermitage, an author at last). Perhaps the flappers were the new hysterics. They too were silenced, dubbed. The flapper is certainly portrayed as “actressy” like a hysteric. (“She ought to be in cinema, like your Norma Talmadge,” says a character of Nicole Diver in Tender is the Night.) Zelda and Lucia with their Madame Egorova, Vivien(ne) dancing to the phonograph, Louise Brooks and Joan Crawford dancing the Black Bottom and the Charleston frenetically on tables, Clara Bow flap-flapping around the screen, their “eloquent thighs” as Peggy Phelan writes of the dance of Freud’s hysterics, their domestic seizures mimicking the contortions of Charcot’s models. Our dancing daughters — the name of one of Crawford’s early silent flapper films, when she was a long-limbed beauty, before the mask — it certainly has a Freudian ring to it.
Schizophrenia, which both Zelda and Lucia were diagnosed with, was originally a catch-all category like hysteria. Later aspects of the diagnosis were channeled into other classifications with future permutations of the DSM. (A woman who would have been diagnosed as schizophrenia in the 20s-50s would in the 80s be much more likely to be diagnosed as bipolar or borderline personality disorder, because of new subclassifications in the DSM-III.)
Elaine Showalter makes a link in The Female Malady between the diagnosis of schizophrenia and the idea of a woman dividing herself in two by being both the surveyor and the surveyed, quoting from John Berger’s Ways of Seeing: “A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself.” Berger goes on to use the example that at her father’s funeral the woman sees herself, weeping.
Compare this to Zelda’s eulogy of the flapper in McCall’s—the art of the flapper is “the art of being… being young, being lovely, being an object.”
So many actresses in the old Hollywood star system became mental patients, constructed by the gaze, by the studio’s publicity department (Clara Bow, Gene Tierney, Frances Farmer, Marilyn Monroe, Vivien Leigh, these are the ones diagnosed, so many more are popularly retroactively diagnosed). Frances Farmer and Gene Tierney as love interests of Tyrone Powers in the film Son of Fury. Both of them promising Hollywood golden girls, the perfect glassy portraits cracked under the pressures of the star system like the one painted of Gene Tierney in Laura, both institutionalized, given electroshock. Gene Tierney reformed, even went to work as a shopgirl in Topeka, Kansas, Louise Brooks, allowing her to be an outpatient at the Menninger Clinic. Frances Farmer became for a time an outlaw, a daughter of fury.
I looked in the mirror the other day and realized — I am beginning to style myself like a modernist. Hopefully more Mina Loy than Jane Heap. I already wear the weird costumes and cloche hats and spitcurls. One of the Midwestern women that went to Paris, and lived the life of jeweled glamour and cafe bohemianism. Except I am still here.
Mina Loy with her slim elegant sheath and matching cloche hat and darling pumps, dangling chandelier earrings (sometimes ready-mades, like thermometers). Katherine Mansfield’s colored stockings, her brightly colored silk costumes. That picture of the Baroness on the beach with Djuna Barnes while they were still young, their elegant pointed shoes, the Baroness is subtly dressed, for her, Djuna always posed like a fashion model, always elegantly turned out, her dark shiny hair in the chignon, the red lipstick, the jaunty hat. These women like silent film stars for me.
I love pasty skin like yours, says the woman at the Sephora in Pittsburgh, where I drive for two hours each way once a week to teach a writing workshop. I have gone to get very glittery dark green eye-shadow to contour around my lids. (The green nails of Christopher Isherwood’s Sally Bowles, his 19-year-old chorus girl in Berlin Stories.)
The flapper is a glittering object who offers herself up to the world and offers up her equally glittering bon mots to being jotted down and immemorialized. Zelda’s cinematic counterpart is Tallulah Bankhead, who grew up with her in Montgomery, Alabama. In Gatsby, Daisy possesses the flirtatious irreverent wit as befitting the flapper: “We’ll meet you on some corner. I’ll be the man smoking two cigarettes,” she jokes to the crushed-out Nick. Her language has a jazz-like syntax, a repetitive rhythm. “I’ll hope she’ll be a fool — that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.” Again an actual exclamation, by Zelda, although jotted down and reshaped by Scott, he posed with pen at the bedside of the birth of Scottie. Her real words were: “Oh, God, goofo, I’m drunk. Mark Twain. Isn’t she smart — she has the hiccups. I hope it’s beautiful and a fool — a beautiful little fool.”
He takes on the feminine voice, shapes the poetry of Zelda’s diary and dialogues. “Why she tore up the pavements with sly remarks… She didn’t actually write them down, Scott did, but she said them.”
She gives up her character, her conversation, freely to be documented, mythologized — as she (at first) wants to be famous.
The quick and lively banter of the flapper, offset with dramatic silences (her quicksilver MOODS). The staccato rhythms of Christopher Isherwood’s heroine Sally Bowles. Sally Bowles reminds me of girls who are witty and brilliant and stylish characters but not yet authors — like art-school chicks. They prefer living as opposed to writing, or living while highly conscious of the gaze. Today Sally Bowles would totally audition for America’s Next Top Model and be cast as the alterna-crazy.
The Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven who wrote: “I am keenly conscious of my ownself as if I were a theatre and spectator in one — only not the author.”
These actresses are okay at first with being his raw material. Nadja asks Breton to write a novel about her, June Miller wanted Anaïs to write one about her. Delighted in fact, until it feels like a violation, to always be drawn from. (June upon asking Henry for a divorce: “Now you have the last chapter for your fucking book.”)
While the girls are called vamps, there is something vampiric about him. He wants to possess her somehow, to make her his possession. “When I admire women, I want to own them, to dominate them, to have them admire me,” Fitzgerald once wrote.
Fitzgerald, later, in the Hollywood days, going up to girls at parties, pad of paper in hand, copying down their lines, asking for their stories.