The Legend of Zelda
The Fitzgeralds, the ~Modern Woman~, and using madness as a method of making people frivolous
There are a handful of writers throughout the American literary canon who I’m pretty sure were just absolutely insufferable. Maybe they were fuck-boys (Thoreau and Salinger for sure), others were predators (too many to list), and others were just like, twerpy guys whose prose emits the strong scent of Axe body spray and their own self-adoration.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, to me, falls into the latter category. He became rich when he was in his early 20s, basically invented the ideal of the Nouveau Riche in the United States, and, before Zelda, had previously attempted to climb the class system by courting another socialite. Not to mention that he had a face that was more punchable than Colin Jost and Martin Shkreli and Jose Altuve combined.
But the main reason that I know that Scott was probably a pretty Olympic-sized prick was that he committed one of the cardinal sins of love relationships: He used the perception of mental illness against his wife, most likely to ensure that she never got more famous than him.
Because if you know literally one single thing about Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, it’s that she was a crazy she-wolf, the most manic of all Manic Pixie Dream Girls, and a small woman with a big bob and an even bigger need to be institutionalized.
It’s possible that we all “know” this about her not because it was necessarily true, but because Scott made it true. And because he was the famous writer, his word became gospel. But Zelda was more than a ~crazy~ girl. She was also a product of her time, of her class, and of her own myriad interests. And people saying she was crazy and making her feel crazy might have been what ultimately ended her life.
I was a fragrant phantom, wasn't I?
Zelda Sayre, born in 1900, was an archetypical southern belle. She had parents who were pillars of the community and she was raised to be a gracious hostess and a nice, polite wife. She met Scott at a dance just after she graduated from high school when he was briefly in the military. At that time, though, he was poor so she didn’t marry him. She did marry him once his first book sold - which is like, not surprising, since in 1918/1919, most fancy white women went from being Stay At Home Daughters to Stay At Home Wives.
She later described the day they met, which was her 18th birthday, in a letter to him:
The night you gave me my birthday party… you were a young Lieutenant and I was a fragrant phantom, wasn’t I? And it was a radiant night, a night of soft conspiracy and the trees agreed that it was all going to be for the best.
They did get married and they stayed married until his death, even though they separated toward the end and both definitely had affairs and often got into drunken fights that were certainly violent. But they were also deeply passionate about each other, writing hundreds of extremely flowery letters back and forth. Through these letters, we can see a little bit more of her personality, like when she wrote about having an idea for “a book or story, I hadn’t decided which” when, after two pages, she decided it wasn’t going to work. About this quick fit of inspiration, she wrote:
And so you see, Scott, I’ll never be able to do anything because I’m much too lazy to care whether it’s done or not—and I don’t want to be famous and fêted—all I want is to be very young always and very irresponsible and to feel that my life is my own—to live and be happy and die in my own way—to please myself.
This is an interesting little bit of context, I think, because it’s the kind of self-deprecation that comes when someone isn’t sure that their snotty boyfriend is going to like the thing they’re working on. Also, this is definitely someone either a.) in the middle of a manic episode, or b.) with undiagnosed ADHD.
Anyway, all of this is to say that there was a lot going on with our girl Z and most of it has been boiled down to, once again, “bitches be crazy.”
If you feel bad for never having questioned the narrative of Zelda and Scott, don’t. I never did. Plus, honestly, Zelda gives big That One Girl Your Friend Dated Once And Holy God She Was Exhausting energy. And she really did have a very publicly weird personality and she did (maybe you didn’t know this part) die in a mental institution, though it was because the wing caught fire. But still.
It’s important to underscore the fact that Scott often went out of his way to make her seem like a legitimately fragile little bird, always on the verge of falling from the nest. By basing his heroines on her, he was able to paint a very clear portrait of her flights of fancy.
Meanwhile, she literally painted. This is one of her paintings. Isn’t it pretty? She was very talented and doesn’t get a lot of credit for that.
Anyway.
Writing for The Ringer about the Amazon series starring Christina Ricci and how Zelda has been mischaracterized, Erin Michelle Dean succinctly explained their relationship:
From the start, then, there were two Zeldas in the Fitzgerald marriage. There was the living, breathing person, and there was the Zelda that Scott kept putting on the page. He did this over and over again throughout the marriage. When Daisy Buchanan, in The Great Gatsby, says, “I hope she’ll be a fool — that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool,” she’s famously speaking Zelda’s words at the birth of their daughter, Scottie.
It’s hard not to notice, though, that Zelda’s own writing - and there was a lot of it! - never really gets mentioned in the bigger story of their lives. She was a muse and a wife and that’s kind of all we get to know. Her own interests and her own pursuits are always used as a way to say something about him, or their relationship. And while he did encourage her to write, it was always under the generally agreed-upon premise that he was better. He was an author. She was an author’s wife who sometimes wrote.
As a result, we only know of Zelda in the Scott-and-Zelda kind of way. He even put his byline on a lot of her writing because….reasons? Seems like a totally chill and not at all controlling and jealous thing to do.
How Crazy Was Zelda?
So was she actually crazy, or just gaslight into the next century by a raging drunk who had put her on a pedestal?
Hard to say. Again, Dean writing for the Ringer:
When Nicole Diver of Tender Is the Night begins to break down, that’s Zelda too: In Scott’s archives is a chart he’d made while sketching out the novel, laying out the precise similarities and differences between his character’s medical history and his wife’s. Zelda was hospitalized for the first time in France in April 1930; she’d spend the rest of her life in and out of clinics and hospitals. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia, though most people seem to agree that she likely had something more like bipolar disorder, a term unknown at the time.
It’s impossible to discount the fact that she did spend a considerable amount of time in and out of mental health institutions for various things. However, it’s important to point out that a.) weaponized institutionalizations were pretty common against young women and b.) Zelda came from an upper-class family and was married to a wealthy writer, so they had the money to send her to a hospital when she was becoming Too Much.
It’s also impossible to discount her behavior in life, much of which was unpredictable and moody - but then again, she was purely a woman of the 1920s, and shattering the mold of a Nice Lady was kind of the entire vibe. She was 21 years old in 1921, she had money and social connections and a famous husband and a pedigree and more gorgeous dresses than most women could have hoped to even see in a lifetime. She smoked and drank and danced and showed her knees and swam in public and flirted with boys. Then again, she also once set a bathtub of clothes on fire when Scott was having an affair. She threatened to drive the car over cliff. She threw herself down a flight of stairs.
These details come from a 1970 biography of Zelda but again, I am forced to ask: How much of this was baked-in mental illness and how much of it was the result of living with a controlling man who was often gallivanting with folks of all genders and telling Ernest Hemingway what a trollop his wife was. Almost certainly, the answer is “a little of each.”
In a 1996 (!) New York Times article called How Crazy Was Zelda, Peter Kramer explored her symptoms and the ways she was described, summarizing the basics as:
Zelda's spending sprees, her ''passionate love of life'' and intense social relationships, her melancholic response to disappointment and the relatively late onset of her illness (she was born in 1900) point toward a mood disorder, as does the alternation between frank psychosis and a sparkling, provocative personality.
But you can see very, very clear examples of gaslighting and emotional abuse from Scott in just about everything he ever wrote about her (although not to her), which certainly adds fuel to theory that she was only ever as crazy as he made her feel and seem.
This is an excerpt from a letter that Scott wrote to her doctor in 1930:
As to her writing: there is no longer any competitive element involved. There was a time when she was romping in on what I considered ''my'' material, disguising her characters under such subtle names as F. Scott Fitzpatrick, when I thought she was tearing at the very roots of my profession, in other words, of our existence. She finally got the idea and desisted, but rather bitterly. At any rate all that element of competition in material which I had to turn into money, or if possible, into art, and which she was competent to turn only into essentially inefficient effort, we can now assume to be in the past.
She can write in the sense that all non-professionals who have a gift for words, can write. Somebody once said that every intelligent American thought that they could always sell a plot of land, make a good speech and write a play. Her equipment is better than that but it does boil down to the slang phrase she can't take it.
WHAT A DOUCHE.
In that same letter, he goes on to blame his lack of writing for the Saturday Evening Post on her institutionalization, which legitimately makes me wonder how much of “his” writing was actually hers? She even accused him at one point of lifting entire passages of his books from her diary. Maybe while she was in the ‘bin, he didn’t have any new material?
So. How crazy was Zelda? And, perhaps in a broader sense, how crazy were any women who were placed under the metaphorical bell jar at any point in the last forever centuries?
The long answer to all of this is: We don’t really know. We can’t know. We know that the people around her thought she belonged in an institution. We know that she entered into mental healthcare of her own volition on numerous occasions. But we also know that she was not raised to take care of herself, nor was she raised in a world that was very supportive of independent young ladies.
Some people are crazy, some people are made crazy, and some people end up crazy and you never really know which came first.
At this risk of having too much of this newsletter be about her and not by her, I want to include a bit of her own writing. You know, her writing that was published under her name.
A southern moon is a sodden moon, and sultry. When it swamps the fields and the rustling sandy roads and the sticky honeysuckle hedges in its sweet stagnation, your fight to hold on to reality is like a protestation against a first waft of ether.
xoxo don’t let fuck boys dim your shimmer