Abstract
Until the feminist reassessment of her life and works, Zelda Fitzgerald’s artistic achievements were seen only through the prism of her husband’s success. This chapter focuses on the artist’s life narrative as constructed through her texts and images. The purpose of this chapter is to highlight the evolving cracks within a self-portrait which began as a playful, glamorous one to eventually betray the fissures of a shattered life and mind. From her early self-centered articles in the fashionable press to her distraught self-portraits and frighteningly deserted cityscapes of the 1940s, Zelda’s life narrative challenged a restrictive society by voicing her rebellious hopes and painful despair. A true artistic performance, it now calls for its own critical assessment.
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Notes
- 1.
Milford, Taylor, Leroy, Tournier, Michaux, Fowler and Siméon offer different approaches to her life.
- 2.
Linda Wagner-Martin particularly questions this hasty diagnosis and suggests Zelda might have suffered from a burn-out due to her desperate efforts to become a ballerina under Professor Egorova in Paris (182). According to her, other diagnoses might also have been “mania (perhaps a bipolar condition), […] a ‘substance-induced psychotic disorder’ (stemming from her overuse of both alcohol and nicotine” or “perhaps the more physiologically based ‘Psychotic Disorder Due to a General Medical Condition,’” for example “systematic lupus erythematosus” (Wagner-Martin 2004, 178).
- 3.
“In developing the notion of postmemory to account for the aftermath of catastrophic histories, I have thought precisely about the ways in which we might make ourselves vulnerable to what Susan Sontag has called ‘the pain of others,’ whether our ancestors or more distant subjects, in the past or the present. Postmemory describes the relationship that later generations or distant contemporary witnesses bear to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of others—to experiences they ‘remember’ or know only by means of stories, images, and behaviors.” (Hirsch 2014, 339)
- 4.
“The Fitzgeralds had always been public property, adepts at self-advertisement […] the ultimate fascination […] was what masters of invention they became, creating new versions of themselves, putting themselves into their stories, acting out their stories in real life.” (Mellow 1985, xvii, xx)
- 5.
Fitzgerald evoked the beginning of his famous writer’s life in the autobiographical essay entitled “Early Success” (Fitzgerald 1965, 57-63).
- 6.
Cf note 3.
- 7.
The draft of Scott’s first novel was initially entitled “The Romantic Egotist” (Bruccoli 1991, 94-99).
- 8.
More precisely, her maiden name came first and her married name was given in brackets.
- 9.
See Dreiser, Cather, Hardy.
- 10.
My emphasis.
- 11.
Villa St Louis, Juan les Pins, White Bear Lake Yacht Club Minnesota, Ellerslie Delaware, the Plaza Hotel in New York, Capri, Villa Marie at St Raphael, the Spanish steps in Rome and the cottage in Westport, Connecticut.
- 12.
“There seemed to be some heavenly support beneath his shoulder blades that lifted his feet from the ground in ecstatic suspension, as if he secretly enjoyed the ability to fly but was walking as a compromise to convention.” (Bruccoli 1992, 37)
- 13.
Zelda was first admitted to Malmaison clinic in Paris, from April 23 to May 11, 1930, then to Val-Mont, in Glion, Switzerland, from May 22, 1930 to June 5, 1930, and eventually she stayed at Les Rives de Prangins in Nyon, Switzerland, from June 5, 1930 to September 15, 1931.
- 14.
Some of Zelda’s paintings were also destroyed by fire by accident on two major occasions: at La Paix (1933) and at Highland Hospital (1948). Apparently, she and, after her death, one of her sisters also destroyed some of her works, which may have been deemed inappropriate or worthless (Lanahan 1996, 78).
- 15.
Our translation from the original French: “[…] la marque propre de l’autobiographie est la priorité reconnue à l’intime sur l’extrinsèque.” (Gusdorf 1991, 182)
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Bouzonviller, E. (2021). Zelda Fitzgerald’s Self-Portraiture: A Strenuous Performance from Ink to Gouache. In: Baisnée-Keay, V., Bigot, C., Alexoae-Zagni, N., Genty, S., Bazin, C. (eds) Text and Image in Women's Life Writing. Palgrave Studies in Life Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84875-0_9
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