Despite all of her phobias and aversions, especially linked to travel, Jane Bowles chose to marry an adventurer who had a decided affinity for the non-Western, the lesser traveled the better, all Hemingway and heart of darkness. But yet on these journeys, through northern Africa, central America, he expected her to snap out of her nervous, jangly self. He refused to cosset her. She needed to control her phobias, her nerves.
And yet Jane always pushed herself into experiences that terrified her. Infiltrating herself into the community of women who ran the grain markets in Tangiers. In Guatemala City she convinced a group of students to take her to a brothel, where the chief bodyguard of the dictator wanted Jane (she escaped through a window).
Her novel Two Serious Ladies is a quest narrative of two society girl-women, Mrs. Copperfield and Miss Goering, both hilariously socially ill-adept, both intense, interrogating, wanting to understand motives and desire. Both wealthy women terribly alone (one in her big house, the other in her marriage) who allow themselves to be fleeced for companionship — they are terrified of being alone, but also force themselves into situations where they feel terror.
Both The Sheltering Sky and Two Serious Ladies are companion texts of a marriage — how the Bowles each characterized the adventurous in their literary depictions of their marriage — the husband is searching always for the infinite, for a traveler’s authenticity, while the wife is also looking for a level of experience, of adventure, but it is in the ecstasy of abjection, of slumming.
It’s difficult to describe the strange ecstasy of Jane’s novel, the strangeness of the encounters, the ludicrous situations Bowles puts her characters in, and really, they throw themselves into, as a test, as penance, as a desire to unravel. Her characters are like Carole Lombard in My Man Godfrey, yet with an absurdist streak, all wide-eyed innocence and jumpiness and reversals, clumsy, stilted bodies punctuating dialogue. Everyone reacts to each other in a syncopated violence, that then quickly becomes lethargic. And the ladies feel an intense tenderness towards all of the orphaned characters they meet. Characters fall in love with each other and attach themselves to each other instantly, vampirically.
In Two Serious Ladies Mrs. Copperfield is terrified to go to Panama with her husband. Mr. Copperfield is portrayed as a pedantic doofus, always pouting when Mrs. Copperfield refuses to accompany him. In the novel Jane depicts the more traditional wife now free to explore her own self, to search for a jouissance of the streets. (Why couldn’t Scott have reacted as Paul did when he read — and edited, and helped steward — the work? You’ve made me kind of an idiot, he said to her. She grinned. That was all.)
Zelda’s Save Me the Waltz is an existential novel about a wife attempting to become an artist, like Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. In Waltz Alabama begins to dance to come into consciousness. In Paris, Zelda immerses herself in ballet study with Madame Egorova, attempting to contort and discipline her body into that of a great ballerina. Her wonderful and sadistic portrait of the dancers in the novel.
As the narrative has been written, it was Zelda’s obsession with dance, which takes her away from all her duties and parties, that catalyzed her first breakdown and subsequent internment in the Swiss asylum. She jumped out of a cab because she was so worried she was going to be late for rehearsal. In Scott’s ledger of that day, the language he will later use to philosophize himself: THE CRACK.
And so, Zelda was sent to Switzerland, wrapped up like a baby and held and urged against this new chosen life of the artist. She spent over a year in an asylum at Lake Geneva, where she was forcibly restrained and medicated. Her efforts to be an artist were seen as part of her “obsessional illness.” Dr. Forel, her doctor, diagnosed her as schizophrenic, a term coined by Eugen Bleuler, who observed her for an hour to confirm the diagnosis. (In turn, Zelda named Bleuler an “imbecile.”)
This is the narrative written about Zelda. It’s never disputed: this diagnostic label, schizophrenic. Or if it’s disputed, it’s seen as something else (she was bipolar, or BPD, not schizophrenic) with no awareness of these diagnostic labels as discursive categories.
Zelda Fitzgerald suffered from schizophrenia.
Zelda Fitzgerald was a schizophrenic.
In her review of Nancy Milford’s rather old-fashioned biography, Hardwick also doesn’t look critically at Zelda’s diagnosis, and instead attributes most of her fall to her diagnosed mental illness. She writes, “In her, alas, the madness was real rather than indulgence” (as opposed to, I would imagine, the indulged madness of Scott’s crack-up or Eliot’s fragmentation). This is the fiction behind our medical model of mental illness — that a diagnosis by a doctor (by one doctor, several doctors) somehow makes it real, when it is instead rhetoric constructed and corroborated by authorities who have much at stake in the terms that they themselves have invented.
It’s almost impossible not to psychologize Hardwick, the critic, as she psychologized her subjects, treating her as a character somehow in this drama, as she’s writing these essays while her husband has abandoned her. She doesn’t explicitly insert herself within, but she’s there, everywhere, in the essays. At times she seems to parallel Zelda and her string of institutions with that of Lowell’s (how the mad “entwine their relations”), seeing Scott as the long-suffering husband of the mad person like she was, she does this too in her essay on Sylvia, these essays in a way are the sane other half’s meditation on the vampirism of madness.
Yet part of Bleuler’s theories of schizophrenia ties into all the 19th century ideas of moral insanity — that Zelda’s “illness” was due in part to feelings of inferiority and an “incipient egomania.” (How can one be an artist without this ego?) In order to have a “normal marriage” Zelda needed to give up her “inflated ambitions” and engage in “activities appropriate to her talents and tastes.” This the doctors prescribed, her husband all along urging them on. The methods of shame and manipulation of the father-confessors, who then in turn are granted the authority to control and tell her narrative. HE DO THE POLICE IN DIFFERENT VOICES.
In Dr. Forel’s “reeducation program,” Zelda was trained again to be a good mother and a good wife (along with various forms of shock therapy, which realigned behavior, made for more tractable female patients). When she was released from the Swiss asylum her case was summarized as “reactions to her feelings of inferiority (primarily toward her husband)…” and ambitions that were “self-deceptions” which “caused difficulties between the couple.”
While in Switzerland, Scott urged Madame Egorova to write a letter deflating Zelda’s ambitions. Instead, the former dancer for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes wrote a letter saying that Zelda began too late to ever be a truly great dancer, but could hope someday to be a member of a company (Zelda was still crushed by this). It was around this time that Zelda received the offer to dance in Italy.
In Save Me the Waltz Zelda shows Alabama triumphing, if only temporarily — she goes and takes the solo role, goes and lives on her own in Italy, away from her role as wife and mother, this is a reversal of what happened in Zelda’s life. What a fascinating decision Zelda makes to have her character live her dream in her novel, only to come crashing down to reality, to containment and hospitalization (in the novel she must give up her dancing because she has severely injured her foot, although obviously Zelda is drawing from her asylum experiences, the new career of mental patient that aborted her dance ambitions). It would be so much more of an authentic, lived-in text if Zelda had been allowed to tell her own story, instead of being censored by her husband, the narrative that we know partly from Tender and partly from the biographies. Yet the work ends brilliantly, the death of the father, the return to “normal”—consciousness, Alabama decides, “is an ultimate betrayal I suppose,” which mirrors Edna Pontellier’s awakening, the sense of realizing that the traditional wife is not as free within society as she perhaps thought. The work concludes with a showing of the husband David’s triumphant ballet paintings, a coopting of the woman’s suffering that mirrors real-life, the man viewed as the artist. Zelda depicts a shuttering return to the surface after the plunge down below at the end, the chattering society parrots, spouting nonsense witticisms.