I know what you might think when Zelda Fitzgerald, wife of classic writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, is mentioned. You think of the debauched jazz-age golden girl who once drank champagne from her shoe and of the rebel who swam in flesh-colored bathing suits to feign skinny-dipping.
Or you might think of the schizophrenic locked up in sanitariums, who allegedly drove her husband to his ruin. You don't think of the anguished wife or of the independent writer punished by the society in which she lived. Many think of the myth, the legend and the symbol of Zelda.
After spending fall break traversing New York City with Scott's "Tender is the Night" in one hand and Zelda's "Save Me the Waltz" in the other, I've been thinking a lot about Zelda and her art. I've been thinking about her entrapment in a world that wasn't ready for her great and terrible love story. I've been thinking about how the glamorous enterprise of her marriage was played out on the international stage and about how seemingly everyone in her life stifled her art. She and Scott destroyed one another.
Is it really a love story? Scott and Zelda's love letters are as romantic as they come, that much is true. It would take a fool not to recognize that their love — as desperate and destructive it was, it was love nonetheless. But as much as I enjoy the legend of the grand, timeless romance, I hardly think a marriage in which one member is powerless is a partnership, and I hesitate to call their despairing, terrible whirlwind a love story.
When Zelda was institutionalized in 1932, she spent six weeks writing "Save Me the Waltz," a lush, evocative novel crafted from the same material with which Scott was struggling in "Tender is the Night."
Infuriated that she dare poach his material, he extracted a promise from his editor (to whom she had sent the manuscript) to prevent publication. When the matter was hashed out, Scott referred to her as a "useless society woman" and a "third-rate writer."
Only after he threatened divorce did she capitulate, allowing a butchered version of the novel to be published with his edits. Scott even went so far as to lift entries from her diary for inclusion in "Tender is the Night." Zelda famously claimed, "Plagiarism starts at home." Could that really be a love story?
They were beautiful and damned from the start and they each burned so brightly that they snuffed the other out. But don't get me wrong, this isn't a condemnation of Scott. This isn't to suggest that he was a monster. On the contrary, he worked and drank himself into an early grave in an endeavor to finance Zelda's frequent hospitalizations. There is a reason that he is a literary paragon and Zelda is not, though.
His writing is utterly iridescent and dazzling where hers occasionally stumbles. It is a talent to which I can only aspire. I don't object to Scott's success, but rather I object to the way it eclipses Zelda as an artist in her own right.
When I think of Zelda, I think not of decadence and destructiveness, but of a woman who was time and time again forbidden to find meaning in her life. I think of a woman determined to shape the life and art she wanted on her own terms. She sacrificed everything she held dear to have that: Her husband, her daughter and her sanity. I think that it's time to stop seeing her as the schizophrenic party girl who lived in her husband's shadow and finally give her the credit she deserves.
— Westenfeld is a freshman from Fort Wayne, Ind., majoring in English literature and creative writing.
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