Consider the different advice she is given by her two literary advisors. There is the advice of her patriarch-editor, T.S. Eliot, about Barnes’ portrayal of The Baroness in Nightwood: “So don’t have any scruples about historical accuracy etc but just make USE of her.” Versus the more empathic advice of Emily Holmes Coleman, herself the author of the gorgeous, hallucinatory novel of madness The Shutter of Snow, which draws from her own experience being institutionalized. Regarding the biography Barnes is attempting to write: “Think of her in as detached a way as you possibly can — not as a saint or madwoman, but as a woman of genius, alone in the world, frantic.” In her letters the Baroness tells Djuna an agonizing story of a mother dominated by an abusive husband (that story of how when her husband was gone for a business trip she took her two daughters out and got their haircut short, dressed them in the stylish yellow shoes of the time, redecorated, went on a shopping spree, all this was seen as symptomatic of her illness, the compulsive shopping, the Bovarizing). Her mother who died of uterine cancer in the sanitorium. “My mother broke into beautiful shattered scintillating noble pieces.” In writing her mother the Baroness attempts to piece together these fragments, as Djuna attempts to resurrect her friend, tell the truth of her life.
So there is a difference, perhaps, in terms of how, say, Tennessee Williams collected women versus how André Breton collected women, all the tragic women that are portraits of his sister Rose forced into a lobotomy, his damaged Southern belles, his Blanche DuBois. Tennessee Williams who wrote a play about Zelda and wrote Jane Bowles’s obituary. He LOVED them, the LOVE is apparent in his play he wrote about Zelda, Clothes for a Summer Hotel, from his later pulp period.
An author loves his or her character if he or she has ever, really, cried for her, not what she represents, but for her, for her sad, lost life, this LOST GENERATION of brilliant girls, all the sad young girls. I who am bellowing for my heroines.
My underlinings in my copy of Nadja while taking a seminar on Surrealism in my one year in grad school reflect my still unformed feminist foment: the girl trapped as character not author.
Perhaps that’s why I find the narratives of Vivien(ne) and Zelda so haunting. Their erasure as subjects and subsequent demonizing is compelling in the context of the myths of modernism, but also they stand in for so many other anonymous bright girls, who never were able to become writers, who we’ll never know about. Who were stopped somehow.
I align myself with a genealogy of erased women.
I wonder, what is the effect of being made a character if one wishes to be an author? Of being re(written)? Jane Bowles who became convinced that her husband Paul had written Two Serious Ladies. Zelda who was institutionalized again following the serialization of Tender. Louise Colet who took to bed when Bovary was serialized (she recognized herself in those pages, the details of their loverly trysts).
What prohibited June Miller from becoming like her idol Katherine, whose last name Mansfield she took as an homage prior to her marriage (she who only wrote letters)?
The violence, perhaps, of being made into an object.
The SCENES she throws (he incorporates it into his own SCENES, she is scratched out, she cannot write).
Lucia crying, “I am the artist!”
Zelda in the asylum hallucinating Fitzgerald’s voice: “I have lost the woman I put in my book. O, I have killed her!”
Perhaps Madame Bovary’s disease is not boredom. It’s being trapped as the character in someone else’s novel.
Mirror, mirror. The hag hates the young girl. She wants to tear her heart out. She refuses an uncomfortable reflection — yet she once was young, she once was desired, she once was foolish. She is still doomed to caricature. And the young girl judges the hag — she thinks, I will never be like that, I will be loved, immortalized, forever, because I am special.
Eventually the beautiful, bright young girl runs away into the dark woods of anonymity. Heartbroken, torn to pieces. We don’t know what she thought of being drawn as a damsel in distress. Perhaps she grew up into a mad queen. For the most part we cannot access her narrative. She is lost to us. The lost girls.
Of course the two women are supposed to be enemies, not former and future selves.
All these myths of madness and the mirror. Who writes these myths? Who meditates on their reflections?
Young beautiful Narcissus who won’t leave the reflecting pool because he’s so obsessed with conjuring up his image.
The mirror. There is a crack in it.
Echo. Another myth of voice and silence. She is supposed to be in love with Narcissus, but really she’s mesmerized by the sound of her own voice. One version writes that she becomes a ghost, invisible, yet still speaking. The sentence she is serving — she says the same one over and over again. Who is there? Who is there? She repeats herself, history. She is punished for revealing too much. She has a talent for speaking. She does not write down her words and so they are taken away. She babbles brims over just to say something just to hear herself speak — speak, why can’t you speak.
All she can do is repeat — all she can do is repeat.
Mirror, mirror.
Who is fair? What is fair? Who gets to judge?
Part 2
We are visiting the mountain town of Asheville, a few hours away from where we now live in North Carolina. (A sudden reversal, I encourage John to take the position. We stay at my father’s house in the northwest suburbs of Chicago for a week in December while waiting for the movers to deliver our belongings. Returning to my childhood home, just like Zelda once she and Scott separated, a quiet life with her mother in Montgomery, punctuated by returns to the asylum or trips to exotic locales with her now-estranged spouse.)
While in Asheville we take a trip to the former campus of the Highland Hospital, where Zelda lived on and off, and finally died, trapped in a fire. A pilgrimage to see what remains. Which is physically only two buildings: the house of Dr. Carroll, and the main building, Highland Hall.
I walk around, trying to conjure up the past. The campus was bought out by Duke University long ago, and now houses a medical testing company. I take a picture of the soggy tennis court. Was it the same one Zelda played on during the day? Her physical exertions reported on by doctor to husband, seen as a sign of progress. She is always watched, surveyed. Her idea of progress wasn’t theirs, yet she learns, yes, she learns to play the game. (I just want to work, she tells them. They won’t let me work! Which was writing, or painting, or dancing. When she grew bored, bitter with being a character. When she wanted to transcend the wife role written for her. But stimulation was seen as bad for a woman’s moral character.)
That rare photo of Zelda blinking crossly against the sun. Or was it at the photographer? She has aged — because of the series of institutions, the strange medicines, the suffering. No longer the sleek seal body of a swimmer, yet still athletic. Fed a diet of Dr. Carroll’s peanut butter sandwiches on whole wheat (good, wholesome food, for good, wholesome girls and wives). I wonder which hill is the one she tromped up and down, to exhaust herself. Also volleyball and morning gymnastics. Along with this exercise she was allowed daily “occupational therapy” (she chose painting). Dr. Carroll was the one who injected her with horse serum, along with electroshock and insulin. (All these women writers who received a brigade of shock treatments, their doctors unconcerned about the resulting memory loss, how this can destroy a writer. Hemingway shot himself after the results of such “treatment.”)