Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise Read Online Free PDF

years no full length life of Zelda Fitzgerald and no literary biography at all had appeared. After Nancy Milford’s controversial biography (1970) and Sara Mayfield’s memoir (1971), both of which disturbed the Fitzgerald family, there was a long literary silence. Scottie, Zelda’s daughter, was extremely distressed by what she saw as an unnecessary focus on Zelda’s mental condition and her sexuality in the earliest biography. Milford was ‘urged’ to remove many of those references before her biography was published . 10 Despite Scottie’s dislike of Mayfield’s book, she generously gave that book also her permission. After Scottie’s death her children, though equally generous over permissions, nevertheless felt they should honour her views so retained certain biographical impediments by restricting a considerable amount of medical material in the Princeton archives. I was fortunately able to see all of that material.
    During those thirty-one years the Estate gave permission to one academic study (Hartnett 1991), one study of the Fitzgeralds’ marriage (Kendall Taylor 2001) and several papers on Zelda’s writings. In 1996 Zelda’s granddaughter Eleanor Lanahan edited an illustrated book which focused on Zelda’s art. What was still missing was a full length literary biography which saw Zelda as an artist as well as in her other roles.
    I therefore approached the Trust initially with a request centred on Zelda’s overlooked art. After long discussions, Eleanor Lanahan and other family members recognized that in order to grapple with the social and psychological as well as artistic forces that shaped Zelda’s work, I would need maximum information and help. Mypath was cleared, my task unimpeded. I was given full access to all papers available, to family members and to people still alive who had known Zelda, including some of her Southern Belle girlfriends.
    Zelda’s medical condition plays a key part in this biography. I was fortunate in being given access to most medical records now available and was allowed to read those hitherto under seal. 11 I also spoke twice to Zelda’s last psychiatrist, 12 who held a different view of her diagnoses from that recorded in the legend.
    I looked at how the label ‘schizophrenia’ was applied to women. Evidence suggests that Zelda’s failure to conform to a traditional feminine role has, to some extent, been buried within a diagnosis of mental disorder. Zelda was a courageous woman who struggled to maintain her sanity in the face of the horrific treatments she was forced to undergo. It became obvious that she suffered as much from the treatment as from the illness itself. My particular challenge was to try to separate illness from treatment.
    Zelda’s hospital label in the Thirties was schizophrenia; by the Fifties her last psychiatrist suggested (too late) that it might have been manic depression. Though the treatments for these mental diagnoses in periods separated by two decades were somewhat (though curiously, not entirely) different, that difference had less to do with diagnoses than with methods of control considered appropriate during each era. If letters and journals from other women patients in the Fifties/Sixties/Seventies are compared with Zelda’s of the Thirties/Forties, we see that emotions engendered in all absentee mothers and artists inside closed institutions were remarkably similar. Fear, frustration, resentment and despair attached themselves to incarceration, imprisonment, enclosure. Bewilderment, guilt and powerlessness clung to the role of absentee motherhood. The evidence from Zelda’s writings and comments from people close to her show such feelings led to incompetence over practical matters and swings from extreme harshness to wild indulgence towards her daughter Scottie.
    Reading Zelda’s notebook, which concentrated on making patterns from chaos, seeing her need for ‘aspiration’ (this word occurs on almost every page of one of