Artigo Revisado por pares

The Cult of Artistry in Zelda Fitzgerald's Save Me the Waltz

2014; Penn State University Press; Volume: 12; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/fscotfitzrevi.12.1.0124

ISSN

1755-6333

Autores

Rickie-Ann Legleitner,

Tópico(s)

Poetry Analysis and Criticism

Resumo

Zelda Fitzgerald's life receives mostly sensationalized attention. Her biography, her struggles with mental illness, and her sometimes troubling relationship with her husband—all have been carefully considered in examinations of her only novel, Save Me the Waltz (1932). Additionally, her novel has been extensively compared to the works of her husband, especially Tender Is the Night and This Side of Paradise (see Castillo). Yet these biographical readings have limited our exploration of the larger implications of Zelda Fitzgerald's seminal work. While scholars have long known the role she played in the artistry of her husband, few have examined her work as distinct and independent from that of her famous partner.Zelda Fitzgerald's writing emerges from a long tradition of women's domestic and sentimental fiction. Historically, sentimental literature has been critically disparaged for supposedly being ill-written, overly dramatic, and unworthy of analysis. Yet thanks to the work of feminist scholars, we now recognize that these texts provide pivotal insight into the lives and realities of women and their undervalued contributions to the American literary tradition. Typically seen as a nineteenth-century genre, the influence of these women's works can be identified in the twentieth century and beyond. Other critics have analyzed Save Me the Waltz as autobiography, trauma or disability fiction, and experimental prose, yet through examining this work as part of the sentimental genre, we can identify significant influences and advances made in women's writing contained within Zelda Fitzgerald's work. By firmly establishing this novel's place in the sentimental genre, we can begin to understand the legacy of limitations that female modernist artists inherited from their predecessors and the steps they took to overcome outdated and unrealistic social expectations for women, especially wives and mothers.In her novel, Zelda Fitzgerald uniquely utilizes the marriage/motherhood plot to reveal how sentimentality haunts modernist literature. In the nineteenth century, works of domestic fiction often linked the female body and artistic creation—a connection later revised by French feminists, such as Hélène Cixous—as empowering in its ability to re-envision and surpass encumbering patriarchal constructions of the female artist. Within her own work, Fitzgerald similarly attempts to bridge the gap between nineteenth- and twentieth-century ideas of the female artist by depicting the continuing struggles of the mother/artist figure.1 Despite social advancements for women and new experimentation in aesthetic and form, Fitzgerald reveals that communal notions of domesticity remain inescapable for the independent modernist woman and artist alike.At a time when traditional patriarchal conceptions of family were supposedly shifting to meet modern standards, Zelda Fitzgerald sought new definitions of the domestic that reflected a more modern fluidity in concepts of space, familial roles, and identity—while simultaneously showing the difficulty of escaping long-established values. Lauren G. Berlant argues that the “unfinished business of sentimentality” perpetuates traditional ideals of motherhood and marriage in modern works. Even as modernist texts aimed to critique these paradigms, they concurrently preserved the Victorian fantasy of the family. Elizabeth Podnieks similarly asserts the following regarding Fitzgerald: [H]er identity was … shaped during the transition from Victorian expectations that women be “angels in the house” to Anglo-American modernist imperatives for both men and women to “make it new”; as an active participant in modernism … Zelda renounced convention and tradition in both life and art. But like so many women of her day, she remained precariously perched between a life of conformity and rebellion. (337) I contend that this “perch” is most notably seen in the way Alabama Beggs, Fitzgerald's Southern protagonist, comes to view her body as a blur between communal object in terms of her domestic responsibilities and individual subject in relation to her artistic pursuits. We witness Alabama's struggle to escape the domestic through her endeavors in dance. Yet she is never able to break entirely free of this seemingly restricted realm of women—through both her connection to her young daughter and the influences of her fellow dancers—a characteristic that actually strengthens her art. The communal female body links Alabama to sentimental heroines, while also radically redefining the female American artist as both an individual and a member of an empowered collective community. Save Me the Waltz is a pivotal modernist text that employs the marriage plot and the Bildungsromane genre to reveal that the problematic patriarchal pressures of sentimental fiction are still present in late modernism. Moreover, it offers a new path for future generations of female artists to escape the ostensibly never-ending cycle of hindering patriarchy and to find a place of belonging among an emergent cult of artistry.The Bildungsromane, or coming-of-age novel, is a popular genre in modernist literature that has recently gained critical attention for its innovative reworking of classical understandings of development.2 Gregory Castle asserts that questions of identity are key in modernist Bildungsromane, as they are “the basis for so many representations of alienation, depersonalization, and anomie” (2). While Castle focuses on French and British interpretations of the genre, I contend these same questions are present in American literature as are similar cultural criticisms: “The social contexts for Bildung—vocation and recreation, personal relationships (marriage, parenthood, friendship), social obligations—persist but with a sense of cynicism and loss” (Castle 15). American Bildungsromane began to develop a cynical edge in the nineteenth century that becomes more pronounced at the turn-of-the-century and in modernist literature, especially in women's domestic fiction.In what I call the “domestic Bildungsromane” of the nineteenth century, a young woman comes of age and achieves adulthood when she has successfully married, typically after passing a moral trial deeming her fit for proper society. However, within this traditional, sentimental plotline, women are not always portrayed as models of development. While Ellen Montgomery is raised to become a pious and passive woman by her future husband in Susan Warner's classic sentimental novel The Wide, Wide World (1850), there are many domestic novels that stray from this culturally idealized plotline. Eliza Wharton in Hannah Foster's The Coquette (1797) resists the paradigm of marriage (albeit to her demise) in favor of flirtation and personal freedom; Cassandra Morgeson in Elizabeth Stoddard's The Morgesons (1862) rejects her grandfather's lessons on conformity and has an adulterous affair, and while she eventually marries another man, she writes her own life story, thereby actively shaping her identity; and Josephine “Jo” March in Lousia May Alcott's Little Women (1868) prefers masculine chores, appearance, and friends over feminine propriety and familial relations such as romance and marriage. These rebellious women in domestic fiction recognize the restrictions placed on their choices; they understand that marriage has been chosen for them without anyone asking their preference.Yet while women writers clearly created subversive points in their fictional narratives, they always maintain the strong emphasis on the normality of marriage as being integral to a woman's development. As Berlant contends: “The critique of patriarchal familialism that sentimental texts constantly put forth can be used to argue against the normativity of the family; at the same time, the sacred discourse of family values also sustained within this domain works to preserve the fantasy of the family as a space of sociability in which flow, intimacy, and identification across difference can bridge life across generations and model intimate sociability for the social generally” (21). So while women writers may rally against the limits of motherhood and marriage, they cannot completely break out of the mode of sentimentality, as this becomes a position of normalcy, comradeship, and security—a position that persists into the twentieth century.At the turn of the century, the domestic plotline becomes more complex as conceptions of the “new woman” offered women greater choice in how their identities would develop. Castle posits the special difficulty women had in envisioning a clear route to development at this tumultuous time: “She is at the borderline between two eras: one in which young women acquire only those cultural attainments that would enable them to become better wives and mothers and one in which they are free to aspire to the kinds of education and vocations that were traditionally the sole objects of male Bildung” (218–19).3 This difficulty continues in late modernism despite further progress in the women's movement and innovations in modernist narrative form. As we see in Zelda Fitzgerald's novel, women remain caught between two eras with no clear direction. Yet Rita Felski contends that the new woman begins to offer hope for an efficacious future: “[I]n the early twentieth century the figure of the New Woman was to become a resonant symbol of emancipation, whose modernity signaled not an endorsement of an existing present but rather of an alternative future” (14). This “alternative future” is arguably depicted in modernist literature, though its innovation is questionable as it remains grounded in sentimental depictions of marriage and motherhood.Women in the twentieth century had only begun to explore themselves outside of the domestic, marking the Bildungsromane genre as critical to their new developing sense of autonomy. Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland explain that “[a]lthough the primary assumption underlying the Bildungsromane—the evolution of a coherent self—has come under attack in modernist and avant-garde fiction, this assumption remains cogent for women writers who now for the first time find themselves in a world increasingly responsive to their needs” (13). While Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and Zelda Fitzgerald each experimented with development issues alongside stream of consciousness and unconventional narrative form, Fitzgerald's Bildungsromane plot purposefully remains tied to nineteenth-century sentimental roots. Her work never fully escapes the trappings of patriarchal domesticity, even though the female artist fiercely rebels against these conventions, revealing the enduring confines of these familial constructs.4Similar to traditional Bildungsromane, Zelda Fitzgerald's novel begins with Alabama's childhood and adolescence, which she spends in an unnamed Southern town. This is a significant setting when considering the stereotype of the South's long memory and the high premium its society placed on traditional family values;5 Alabama's very name embodies this place and rhetoric. Correspondingly, Alabama is not encouraged to develop talents beyond those that will help her obtain a husband. Although her skills at dance are acknowledged by her older sister and her sister's artistic lover—“‘The child has talent,’ they said, ‘it should be cultivated’” (Fitzgerald 17)—these skills are never refined since they would serve no real purpose in the anticipated marriage plot. Instead, Alabama drifts about through adolescence, enjoying the attention of an array of suitors without developing any practical talent outside of gaining a public reputation, which she characteristically brushes aside by claiming: “it was nice to have indications about yourself to go on” (23). It is this outside attention toward her good looks and smart behavior that comes to define her.However, Alabama is surprisingly introspective despite her learned focus on outward appearances. Before her marriage, she makes the insightful observation that “[o]ne person never seeks to share the future with another, so greedy are secret human expectations” (30). Alabama is critical of marriage and not blindly accepting of this convention, aligning her idea of marriage more closely with modern thought. Davida Pines contends that this dissatisfaction is common in modernist fiction: “If the cultural hold of the marriage plot might have been loosened at a particular moment in literary history, modernism seems the likeliest moment. Definitions of modernism typically emphasize the disruption of nineteenth-century literary and cultural traditions” (2). Yet this disruption is not so clear-cut in early twentieth century feminist depictions of marriage. While Alabama may have hesitations regarding marriage, she respects her upbringing and makes this expected commitment without realizing how severely it will hinder her personal development.6In a departure from the sentimental novel, marriage does not complete Alabama's coming-of-age plot; instead, it merely complicates her journey to knowing herself. She falls in love with David Knight, one of her many soldier suitors, and they decide to marry and live in New York so David can pursue his burgeoning career as a painter. David asserts his dominance and identity as a recognizable artist by taking the romantic gesture of carving two lovers’ names into a tree and using it to establish his superiority over Alabama: “‘David,’ the legend read, ‘David, David, Knight, Knight, Knight, and Miss Alabama Nobody’” (39). Alabama has yet to pin down her own identity, although David clearly sees no reason why this should ever happen if he is successful. In carving “Miss Alabama Nobody,” David displays the persistence of patriarchal marital constructs in which women's identities were defined by their husbands.The negative impact of David's dominance is not felt until several years into their union, or several years beyond where the domestic novel would typically “end happily.” Before the rupture, Alabama maintains outward appearances just as charmingly as she did in her youth: “But there are reports about that you two have made a success of your marriage.”“We are going to present it to the Louvre,” Alabama corroborated….“Most people feel nowadays that marriage and life do not go together,” said the American gentleman. (62) Alabama and David are seen as overcoming the odds in a chaotic postwar environment that no longer embraces traditions; their marriage is seemingly ideal by outdated standards. Yet it is these very traditions that haunt both Alabama and David and offer a very real threat to their union, which Wagner-Martin examines: “For all the seeming unconventionality of the Knight's culture, David's expectations are just as traditional as Alabama's father's, and—most unfortunate of all—Alabama's expectations are equally traditional” (203). Although they appear to continue to love each other while having extramarital affairs and living a life of fame and financial success, jealousies and unmet expectations erode their relationship, impacting both David's work and Alabama's continued development. While Pines suggests that “[m]odern novels encourage a revised marital ideal based on sexual equality and friendship” (12), Fitzgerald criticizes these revised marital ideals as elusive and overshadowed by residual nineteenth-century conceptions of marriage and female subservience.Alabama becomes jealous not only of David's affairs but primarily of his vocation—a position in which they are far from equals. She has nothing to occupy her time; she does not embrace her newly found role as mother nor is she stimulated by her role as a supportive wife to a successful artist: David worked on his frescoes; Alabama was much alone.“What'll we do, David,” she asked, “with ourselves?”David said she couldn't always be a child and have things provided for her to do. (79) Additionally, David quickly becomes frustrated with Alabama's domestic failures: “‘I don't see why,’ expostulated David, ‘when you complain of having nothing to do, you can't run this house satisfactorily’” (83); “‘Can't you at least not interfere, Alabama?’ he said. ‘Peace is absolutely essential to my work at present’” (87). David not only expresses dissatisfaction but also uses Alabama's discontent as a wife to justify his need for an extramarital affair: “My work's getting stale. I need new emotional stimulus” (97). Alabama is unhappy and unable to achieve an autonomous identity in a marriage where she is expected to give herself up to her husband's expectations and where her failures are vindictively punished. This strife leads Alabama to view her marriage as an unfair and unrealistic patriarchal construct: “Obligations were to Alabama a plan and a trap laid by civilization to ensnare and cripple her happiness and hobble the feet of time” (97). It is precisely time that Alabama loses in her marriage; her development as an artist is tragically delayed, revealing the limitations of the domestic on female creativity.Alabama eventually feels her own calling to become an artist, though this calling does not come as the result of losing her husband (Ruth Hall, The Deserted Wife) or of encouraged childhood precociousness (The Story of Avis, The Song of the Lark); instead, it comes from her dissatisfaction with marriage and its inability to fulfill her quest for identity.7 Alabama longs for something that is hers alone and that will aid her in her journey toward autonomy: she finds this in ballet. She has a visceral reaction to dance that is intimate and personal, enhancing its enticement and its eventual rewards: “Alabama's excitement rose with the appeal to the poignancy of a human body subject to its physical will to the point of evangelism. Her hands were wet and shaking with its tremolo. Her heart beat like the fluttering wings of an angry bird” (106). Dance is inherently connected to the body, a body Alabama has previously used only to attract men and to produce children—two acts that for Alabama lack personal intimacy and instead represent a communal expression of patriarchal objectivity experienced outside of the self.8Through this bodily expression, Alabama hopes to connect with her identity beyond patriarchal expectations. While it is her very body that would be exhibited in dance, it is not the public display Alabama seeks: “‘I'm sure you can do it—you certainly have the body!’ [a woman observes] Alabama went secretly over her body. It was rigid, like a lighthouse” (108). Alabama wants to escape this rigidity, to know her body as part of her identity rather than as part of a public/domestic persona.9 She seeks to move beyond the nineteenth-century ideal of the disembodied angel of the house and to connect with her sensual, intimate self. Here we see a modernist converging and conflating of nineteenth-century notions of separate spheres; as Castle argues, “The modernist Bildungsromane encourages the emergence of new conceptions of self-formation concerned with evading and resisting socialization, with disharmonious social spheres, or with hybrid, ambivalent, sometimes traumatic processes of identity formation” (64). Alabama cannot intimately know her body in the private domestic, as she is compelled to act the part of a supportive wife; so she must, ironically, seek her identity in the public realm of professional dance, complicating nineteenth-century discourse that aligned the self with the home. Fitzgerald embraces a modern conception of the female body that is unveiled, personal, and present without being simultaneously exploited or shamed.10French feminists have long asserted a direct relation between the female body and female artistry. Hélène Cixous's contended link between motherhood and creation is significant in terms of Fitzgerald's protagonist who struggles with balancing these very roles. Cixous asserts that “[i]n women there is always more or less of the mother who makes everything all right, who nourishes, and who stands up against separation a force that will not be cut off but will knock the wind out of the codes” (882; emphasis added). Within the nineteenth-century cult of domesticity, an implicit bodily bond between mothers exists in their common objectification and subjection to childbearing and rearing. Cixous rewrites this link between mothers as an empowering force that can reshape even the dominant structures of patriarchy that attempt to suppress women and confine their bodies to the domestic. In consideration of Cixous's most notable quote regarding the female author—“There is always within her at least a little of that good mother's milk. She writes in white ink” (881)—we understand that the female artist cannot completely disconnect herself from motherhood or from this “cult” of women even in the act of individual creation: it is this very connection that should compel her hand. Although a woman's art may be invisible (white ink) in a patriarchal world, this female art establishes a link to all other women who would and can create.11Within Zelda Fitzgerald's novel, we witness Alabama's struggle to break free of the domestic through her endeavors in dance. Yet she is never able to break free of the realm of women, a characteristic that strengthens her art. In dance, Alabama's world shifts from one of appearances, domesticity, and men to one of internal development, public performance, and women. Alabama values her female colleagues, but she has trouble gaining acceptance because she does not dance to make a living: “Oh, but you will be a dancer!” the girl sighed gratefully, “but I do not see why, since you already have a husband.”“Can you understand that I am not trying to get anything—at least, I don't think I am—but to get rid of some of myself?” (133) Unlike Fanny Fern's nineteenth-century paradigm of the female artist Ruth Hall, who claims to write only from a need for money, Alabama dances to forget her married self and to develop an autonomous identity. Concomitantly, Alabama learns the benefits of creating and learning alongside women outside of the home—a unique, modernist development in the female Künstlerroman that enables Alabama to re-envision her domestic life and her artistic autonomy. This communal body links Alabama to sentimental heroines yet also radically redefines the cult of domesticity as an empowered cult of artistry, revealing an emergent twentieth-century modern construct of female creativity. Yet this construct is not yet stable, showing the struggle between object and subject, domestic and public, mother and artist that Alabama (and Zelda) faced during an uncertain time in American history.Alabama is deferred in her pursuit of art and identity because of her domestic obligations. She is aware of this loss, but she does not let it deter her in her creative pursuits, and she does not let others discourage her because of her late start. Alabama's desire to dance is questioned by her future instructor because of her age and familial position: “So my friend tells me you want to dance? Why? You have friends and money already.” The black eyes moved in frank childish inspection over Alabama's body, loose and angular as those silver triangles in an orchestra—over her broad shoulder blades and the imperceptible concavity of her long legs, fused together and controlled by the resilient strength of her thick neck. Alabama's body was like a quill.“I have been to the Russian ballet,” Alabama tried to explain herself, “and it seemed to me—Oh, I don't know! As if it held all the things I've always tried to find in everything else.”“What have you seen?”“La Chatte, Madame, I must do that some day!” Alabama replied impulsively….“You are too old. It is a beautiful ballet. Why have you come to me so late?”“I didn't know before. I was too busy living.”“And now you have done all your living?”“Enough to be fed up,” laughed Alabama. (115) Alabama is late in her pursuit of art; the idea of developing herself when she was young did not occur to her as it was not strongly encouraged nor was it a realistic option in her social world. It is only after she has become disillusioned with marriage and the ascendency of patriarchal cultural expectations that she seeks something new and personal.Alabama's ballet instructor, who is simply called “Madame,” is additionally significant as she is one of the first female mentors in a Künstlerroman—hinting at a larger legacy of female artists and the benefits of a communal artistic experience. Madame instructs Alabama and guides both her body and mind through counsel and example—a crucial model of success that Alabama might emulate. In the nineteenth century, women were typically circumscribed to the home, where they found insufficient artistic mentors either in their traditional mothers and siblings (The Deserted Wife, Little Women) or in exclusively male instructors (Ruth Hall, The Story of Avis, The Song of the Lark). Here we have a female mentor outside of the domestic who can educate Alabama, similar to Mademoiselle Reisz in The Awakening, but moving beyond this relationship's proclivity for unheeded social advice toward actual artistic guidance. As social circumstances have tied women to the home for centuries, there has been little to no official female artistic or literary tradition to inspire women or to strengthen their resolve, which Virginia Woolf in A Room of One's Own (1929) claims has a negative effect on the creative process. Yet only a few years later, we have a fictional example of a woman who finds a positive model and solidarity in a fellow female artist—an important first in the Künstlerroman genre, and a significant step toward achieving a larger communal experience of female artistic creation. This sovereign cult of artistry productively begins to replace the socially imposed patriarchal communal experience of domesticity.As Alabama is able to locate both a history of female artists and incipient notions of her identity, she simultaneously becomes more distant from her husband, who represents the restricting domestic. Additionally, as her marriage is linked to her performed public persona as a happy wife, Alabama feels the need to keep her private self away from her home, complicating traditional ideas of private and public spheres: “She must keep the studio apart from her life—otherwise one would soon become as unsatisfactory as the other, lost in an aimless, impenetrable drift” (128). Alabama's work is private and enlivening while her home life is public and confining, and so, as Davis aptly states, she quits her job as David's “accessorizing muse” (162). Her artistic self is detached from her role as wife and mother, and as such, those roles quickly lose all importance to Alabama.Alabama must give up her domestic obligations in order to further her development; in doing this, she begins to reconstruct her history as well as her identity. Notably, her youthful love of dance functions to drive her work: “This first glimpse of the dance as an art opened up a world…. She remembered unexpectedly the exaltation of swinging sideways down the pavements as a child and clapping her heels in the air. This was close to that old forgotten feeling that she couldn't stay on the earth another minute” (117). By recalling her childhood, Alabama in essence erases her marriage and begins to develop anew, disconnected from her husband. Alabama furthers this separation from David through her desire for artistic expression and the connection she sees between vocation and identity: “Men, she thought, never seem to become the things they do, like women, but belong to their own philosophic interpretations of their actions” (110). Alabama relates to art in a way that is implicitly tied to her identity and to her body; David, she feels, could never have the same connection to his art.Alabama begins to claim ownership over her body through her art; this ownership is more significant than her success as an artist, as it enables her to develop her independent identity. Alabama lets go of her public domestic persona—giving up social outings, marital and motherly obligations—in order to begin developing her autonomous, artistic self. She goes to the studio twice a day to practice; when she is home, she is exhausted, and she hides herself, thinking only of the studio: “At night she sat in the window too tired to move, consumed by a longing to succeed as a dancer … in proving herself, she would achieve that peace which she imagined went only in surety of one's self” (118). It is the very work which brings Alabama solace and helps her come closer to her actualized self; as Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin suggests in relation to Alabama, “[t]he joy is not in the achievement itself but in the achieving, in the work, the tense body, the sweat itself” (37). Alabama comes to know and own her body through her work, yet she recognizes the impediment of her age in terms of mastering her newly discovered physicality: “She wished she had been born in the ballet, or that she could bring herself to quit altogether” (151). Her age prevents her from obtaining lasting success via her body. Nonetheless, as she views her home life as fruitless, she cannot quit because she has nothing if she does not thrive on stage. She does not recognize a way to unite these two selves, revealing the limitations of pirouetting on the border between two worlds. Furthermore, while failure is a possibility for all artists, public accomplishment is especially uncommon for women. A drive to gain respect for her efforts compels Alabama, as this recognition would affirm her goals as socially normal and desirable. Alabama is determined—though the sentimental tradition sets her up to fail at any artistic pursuit that takes her too far outside the familial home.Alabama's purposeful distancing from her home and husband consequently has a

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