Zelda Fitzgerald: Meet the Original Flapper
You’re probably familiar with F. Scott Fitzgerald as the author of The Great Gatsby and four other iconic novels that earned him the popular title ‘Prophet of the Jazz Age’ — but if Scott Fitzgerald was his generation’s prophet, Zelda Fitzgerald was its goddess. If you’re only familiar with her as Scott’s wife, it’s time to re-evaluate this notorious 1920s It Girl as a person and an artist in her own right.
Born in 1900 at the very start of the 20th century, Zelda Sayre was named after the gypsy heroine of Robert Edward Francillon’s short story “Zelda’s Fortune” — and later served as an inspiration for Legend of Zelda creator Shigeru Miyamoto, who named the eponymous princess after her. Zelda was already infamous as the most daring and rebellious girl in her hometown of Montgomery, Alabama when she met visiting soldier Scott Fitzgerald. 19-year-old Zelda was a ballet dancer whose high school graduation quote summed up her approach to life at the time: “Why should all life be work, when we can all borrow? Let’s think only of today, and not worry about tomorrow.” 23-year-old Scott, meanwhile, was very much thinking about his future career as a writer, and already at work on his autobiographical first novel, This Side of Paradise. Over the course of their courtship, Scott began moulding the book’s lead female character after Zelda. By Scott’s request, his publisher even used Zelda’s face as the model for the cover art.
This became a decades-long pattern, as Scott came to rely on Zelda — her personality, her witticisms, even her own journals and writings, which he sometimes copied whole passages from — as his primary muse and inspiration. A friend of the couple noted, “I have seen Scott jot down Zelda’s remarks on odd pieces of paper or on the back of envelopes and stuff them in his pockets. At times, his pockets were fairly bulging with her bon-mots and bits of spontaneous observations.” In a playful review of Scott’s second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, Zelda pointed out, “Mr. Fitzgerald — I believe that is how he spells his name — seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.”
As newlyweds, fresh off Scott’s early success as a bestselling debut author, the Fitzgeralds became controversial celebrities, notorious for their drunken antics and wild parties. Dorothy Parker (who met them while they were sitting on top of a taxi after being kicked out of a hotel) wrote, “They did both look as though they had just stepped out of the sun; their youth was striking.”
In the early 20s — in her early 20s — Zelda was the prototype for a new kind of 20th century woman emblematized by short hair and short dresses: the kind who (according to Scott) had “an extraordinary talent for living”; the kind who (according to Zelda) “was conscious that the things she did were the things she had always wanted to do.” Together, the Fitzgeralds popularized “flappers” as a term for these unconventional, independent women — and Zelda became their icon. Zelda wrote that the ideal flapper had a talent for “dramatizing herself” — and throughout those early years she spent with Scott as the golden couple of New York City and Paris, Zelda constructed an almost mythical persona that was more of a character than a person: a blank page upon which the world could project all the glamour and excitement of the era.
Though Zelda was content to play the role at first, she grew frustrated with being cast as her husband’s pretty, frivolous sidekick and resentful of his reluctance to allow her to develop any serious creative ambitions of her own. As another friend summarized, “Mr. Fitzgerald is a novelist and Mrs. Fitzgerald is a novelty.” When Zelda decided that she, too, wanted to pursue writing, Scott at first helped her publish several short stories — many of them under his name. But when she eventually wrote and attempted to publish an autobiographical novel of her own, Save Me The Waltz (which saw the heroine, named Alabama, struggling to stop being “a back-seat driver in life” by earning respect for her own accomplishments independent of her artist husband), Scott was furious, feeling that by pulling from their shared life experiences she was stealing ‘his’ material. (He was almost a decade into working on Tender is the Night at the time, whereas Zelda managed to write her own novel in just six weeks.) “I want you to stop writing fiction,” Scott told her during a heated discussion moderated by her psychiatrist. Calling her a “useless society woman” and a “third-rate writer”, he accused her of “broaching at all times on my material just as if a good artist came into a room and found something drawn on the canvas by some mischievous little boy.” “Well, what do you want me to be?” asked Zelda. Scott’s answer was simple and telling: “I want you to do what I say.”
After revisions were made at Scott’s demand, Save Me The Waltz was finally published — and was a critical and commercial failure, earning Zelda only $120. She never wrote another novel. In his journal, Scott outlined a strategy to keep Zelda from attempting to write again: “Attack on all grounds. Play (suppress), novel (delay), pictures (suppress), child (detach), schedule (disorient to cause trouble), no typing. Probable result — new breakdown.” Tender is the Night was released two years later as a thinly-veiled fictionalization of Zelda’s struggles with mental illness, allowing Scott total creative control over that aspect of Zelda’s narrative.
Four years before the Save Me The Waltz fiasco, Zelda’s first mental breakdown had come at the age of 30. Scott blamed this on her obsessive ballet training (another attempt at a creative pursuit apart from her husband), while she blamed it in part on his alcoholism. Diagnosed with schizophrenia (though today she is thought to have actually been bipolar), Zelda spent the rest of her life in and out of mental institutions until her death in a fire at a North Carolina asylum in 1948, eight years after Scott died of a heart attack in Hollywood. She was 47 years old.
Zelda’s story is glaring proof that even the rebellious, unconventional Jazz Age was ultimately not an age that was kind to women who aspired to earn their own living through creative work — especially if those women were already married to creative men. During her stays in mental asylums, Zelda was periodically forbidden to work as her doctors attempted to ‘re-educate’ her to accept her position as a dutiful wife and mother — a treatment that had the opposite of its intended effect, as she wrote to Scott, “Enforced inactivity maddens me beyond endurance.” Zelda turned to painting as a way to release her pent-up creative energies, and several of her paintings were displayed while she was still institutionalized in an exhibit that she titled “Parfois la Folie dest la Sagasse” (“Sometimes Madness is Wisdom”). A later, 21st century review of the exhibition by art curator Everl Adair concluded that it “represents the work of a talented, visionary woman who rose above tremendous odds to create a fascinating body of work — one that inspires us to celebrate the life that might have been.”
Image Credits: Wikimedia
