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

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of limitations that female modernist artists inherited from their predecessors and the steps they took to overcome outdated and unrealistic social expectations for women, especially wives and mothers.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...