The self-immolating woman writer. Zelda’s body enflamed with eczema. She died in a fire at the asylum. Like her Joan of Arc. Inge-borg Bachmann burning in her bed. The left side of Clarice Lispector burned while smoking in bed. FEAR DEATH BY FIRE. Zelda was possessed, but this is viewed as making her mad, unlike the men, unlike FLOW-bert. The blood jet is dangerous, a woman’s flow is dangerous. Buried within how Zelda was disciplined are these Victorian ideas of mental illness, that women shouldn’t overstrain themselves, that a woman was somehow too fragile to be an artist, Virginia kept down to an hour a day, Zelda kept down to two.
If Zelda shut herself away to work, it was considered a sign of her illness, the diagnosis that is always also a sort of confinement, for a woman, a subaltern, whereas if Scott does it it’s the model of the artist, in the tradition of Nietzsche or Flaubert. Deleuze’s notion of the “crack” taken from Fitzgerald’s essay, cracking up as slipping below the slippery surface — Henry Miller’s fucking, Artaud’s madness, Fitzgerald’s alcoholism — these are the writers who got to wonderland, but what about the women who were possessed? What about Jean Rhys writing Good Morning, Midnight in a year, drinking intensely, she wrote in bed, in the mornings, the bed littered with pages. At times tearing up her book, her contract. She too was perhaps near the CRACK. I’m not trying to argue exclusively for the romanticized model of the self-destructive writer, but to point out how they are remembered differently, the male genius versus the female dilettante or crazy chick, the hierarchical divide, one through mythology, the other a demonology.
It’s telling that Nancy Milford labels a third of her biography on Zelda “Breakdown,” beginning with Zelda’s immersion in dancing which has been read historically as pathological obsession, culminating in her first hospitalization. And yet, breakdown can also be breakthrough, as R.D. Laing has said. Perhaps all of life is a breaking down, as Scott Fitzgerald writes in the beginning of his “Crack-Up” essay, but there can be discovery in that process. Edna in The Awakening breaks down as well — yet she is so close to breaking through, to absolute selfdom, but she retreats.
That first photograph of Zelda taken after the asylum — in the sailor suit, she has scrawled the words “Cured!” across the bottom. This is the first time Zelda looks ugly. I think of this as her hag photo, she is serious, weary/wary, the pose of the artist. Cured! Cured perhaps from being the object, no longer being the young girl. For the hag is the writer. When she is expelled or violently expels herself from being considered a young lovely object (through age, illness, or madness).
Unica Zürn before the smiling, golden girl, an eerie resemblance to Sylvia Plath, yet later on the cover of her work of haunting and unraveling, The Man of Jasmine, the straggly unkempt, brunette hair, the intense, focused gaze.
The figure of the hag and the angel that haunts these modern women. Edna Pontellier doesn’t want to become either of her close female intimates, either the pianist Mademoiselle Reisz, who has thrown off all pretensions to femininity, or her friend Madame Ratignolle, the perfect mother. Just as Esther Greenwood in The Bell Jar imagines she must choose as models of her fate either her ugly female editor or the June Cleaverness of her mother. Just as Adrienne Rich so disturbed Elizabeth Hardwick, “she deliberately made herself ugly.” Cured!
The specter of the “ugly” feminist that still haunts us. For I still don’t want to be an ugly woman and when I write I am an ugly woman, I am rude and crabby, I am braless, my breasts knocking up against each other, I don’t wear deodorant or make-up, don’t leave the house for days, I forget what it’s like to be outside, a body, a body lumpy from lack of exercise and a hasty daily diet.
But Flaubert got all syphilitic from fucking the prostitutes and bath boys in Egypt, he became a gross old man so quickly as he was writing Bovary, long-haired and balding and potbellied, like Robert Lowell who went from being movie-star handsome to a sort of goatish professor-type. Or God how about Ford Madox Ford! I shudder to think of that wheezing walrus pressed up against Jean Rhys’ petite, perfumed frame. These men lost their looks or never had them and it never once stopped them from writing. I’m sure Paul Bowles never looked at his ass and worried that he looked like a stuffed sausage in his skinny jeans. I’m sure F. Scott Fitzgerald never spent hours worrying over his receding hairline in the mirror (and yet they could also write in a mirror, because they were never dismissed as simply doing that).
An intense writing period sometimes like some unending final exam week. (What is the difference between depression and being immersed within a project? For don’t you sometimes have to be the Before woman in the antidepressant ad, alone in the dark, struggling, before coming out on the other side?)
It drives me absolutely bonkers that the mythology of Zelda, as endlessly repeated by Scott’s biographers, by even her biographer, by her daughter, dictates some narrative that she was not disciplined enough, and that is why she did not succeed as an artist. She was absolutely disciplined. My god, she twisted and contorted herself into a dancer within years. She made paintings for decades that she only showed in a gallery setting a few times. She worked steadily on her stories, and then later graduated to novels. Or the other line goes, well, she didn’t pick just writing or just one art form, so she was all over the place (as if famous writers didn’t and don’t practice other art forms).
Zelda did not succeed as a writer because she was brainwashed into believing that she was ill and that her art came out of her illness, not her brilliance, so much so that she really became ill. In the course of her treatment and her war with her husband over her right to take herself back as her own material she was systematically broken and dehumanized, and her tools were taken away from her, and most importantly, her nerve.
It is this crucial period in Zelda’s life — the breakdown in which she still continued to create — that was the point of intense controversy and disagreement between the couple. She continued to paint and write stories while Scott worked on the “madness material,” laboring drunk and blocked over Tender for 7 years. He would read it out loud to her, he would attempt to pick her brain for her memories, her eczema inevitably returned, as it did when he was around, and she insisted on being hospitalized in Baltimore (most likely as a way to get away from him).
The story of Zelda’s attempts to write Waltz can be read as a cautionary tale of the muse who takes herself, her breakdown, as her own material. For Waltz is not only about Alabama attempting to become a dancer, but also Zelda, through writing the work, trying to become a writer, to take back herself from being a character.