Zelda Fitzgerald’s Multimedia Self-Portraiture,
from Provocative Flapper to Subdued Clinic Inmate
Professor Elisabeth Bouzonviller
Doni Wilson claims that “[…] camps […] have developed over the Fitzgerald marriage, referring to the biographers and scholars who have taken sides as members of ‘Team Zelda’ and ‘Team Scott’”.[1] Without taking sides in this controversy, we will explore how Zelda Fitzgerald, the provocative Southern Belle from Montgomery, Alabama, left her conservative native South for an exciting “metropolitan venture”[2] in New York, and even several transatlantic stays, while trying at the same time to be a wife, mother and artist. From writing to ballet and eventually painting, she tried to find a female voice that could counterbalance her famous husband’s literary success and talent, and thus achieve her own artistic fulfilment. Through their own publications, her daughter, Scottie Fitzgerald Smith,[3] and her grand-daughter, Eleanor Lanahan,[4] will lead us to consider a visual and textual family narrative transmitted and built through females from three generations. Thus, Zelda’s life narrative will appear as a composite creation involving texts and images, which echoes Smith and Watson’s idea that “frequently women’s artistic production of the autobiographical occurs at the interface of the domains of visuality […] and textuality […]”.[5]
[1] Doni M. Wilson, “From Both Sides Now: Fiction, Fairness, and Zelda Fitzgerald.” The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review. State College: The Pennsylvania State University Press, vol. 11, 2013, 171-172.
[2] F. Scott Fitzgerald, “My Lost City”, My Lost City: Personal Essays, 1920-1940. Ed. James L. W. West III. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013, 110.
[3] Matthew J. Bruccoli, Scottie Fitzgerald Smith and Joan P. Kerr (ed.). The Romantic Egoists: A Pictorial Autobiography from the Scrapbooks and Albums of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (1974). Columbia: South Carolina Press, 2003.
[4] Eleanor Lanahan, ed. Zelda: An Illustrated Life. The Private World of Zelda Fitzgerald. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1996.
[5] Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. Interfaces: Women, Autobiography, Image, Performance. Anne Arbour: University of Michigan Press, 2002, 7.
