Jezebel: zelda fitzgerald

Who Should Play Zelda Fitzgerald In The Beautiful And The Damned?

Jessica — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 14:30:00 EDT

Keira Knightley is eyeing the role of Zelda Sayre (Fitzgerald) in a forthcoming biopic called The Beautiful and the Damned, which will be directed by Nick Cassavetes. This seems…completely wrong. Don't get it twisted, I like Keira Knightley a lot. However, Zelda was a mercurial, pampered and warm Southern belle with soft, Kewpie doll features. Keira is all angles and British straightforwardness and not quite fragile enough. I know, I know, it's called acting for a reason, but I still feel she is fundamentally wrong for the part, much like I feel Kate Winslet is all wrong for the role of Isadora Wing in Fear of Flying (Btw, when I said Winslet was "too vanilla" for the part I meant "not Jewish enough"). Renee Zellweger in her early days would have been the perfect choice, but she's too old to play the teenage-to-twentysomething Zelda. Who else would be good? Vote for some better choices, after the jump!

Keira Knightley Eyes 'Damned' [Hollywood Reporter]

Earlier: Poll: Who Should Play Isadora Wing In The Movie Version Of Fear Of Flying?

Zelda Fitzgerald Went Crazy Because She Was Schizophrenic, Not Because She Was Oppressed

Jessica — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 13:00:00 EDT

BlueStocking, a feminist online journal from Oxford that aims to "investigate the intellectual and artistic achievements of women," has an essay in their current issue making a case for the artistic importance of Zelda Fitzgerald. Mostly Zelda is thought of as F. Scott's wife, and writer Lindsey Meyers says Zelda was really "far more complex: she was also a ballerina, a painter and a writer who creatively explored her subjectivity through art." I've read a few of Zelda's essays, and while I found them to be mediocre at best, I see where one could argue for her artistic merit. Where I disagree with Meyers is in the implication that the "trap posed by the feminine ideal perhaps fueled Zelda's later madness." Zelda was not crazy because her world was sexist. Zelda was actually crazy. According to biographer Marion Meade who wrote about Zelda, Dorothy Parker, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Edna Ferber in Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin, Zelda was a diagnosed schizophrenic who at one point ate her own feces. When Zelda entered a Swiss mental hospital, Meade reports, the doctors said:

She was a patient likely to improve but never be cured...[she was initially] diagnosed as schizophrenic, and [years later her doctor] would describe her as a 'constitutional, emotionally unbalanced psychopath...in Zelda's case the onset of the illness could have come several years before she was ever hospitalized. Scott, in the fall of 1928, had made a cryptic entry in his ledger: 'Dirt eating in hotel.' (The psychiatric term is 'stool smearing' or 'stool eating.')...presumably no one knew of it but Scott. Whatever he saw was so disturbing that he tried to block it from his mind.

See? Actually crazy. Not just oppressed. BlueStocking also implies that Zelda and Scott's marriage was fucked because he married "his objectified image" of Zelda, and not the real woman. Again, not a cause of schizophrenia, and southern belle Zelda objectified the erudite Yankee artist image of Scott just as much as he objectified her girliness.

Feminist revisionist literary scholars have resurrected a lot of great writers — Charlotte Perkins Gilman of the The Yellow Wallpaper, Kate Chopin and her Awakening — and I think their time would be better spent unearthing other fantastic female writers from the prior centuries. Zelda's life was interesting and dramatic for sure, but continuing to argue for her artistic prominence is losing battle.

The Art of Being Zelda [BlueStocking — Click on "Current Issue" to find article]
Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties [Amazon]

The He-Man Woman-Haters Writing Club

Jessica — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 13:00:00 EST

A bunch of you wrote in yesterday, wondering why we hadn't covered the death of one of America's most infamous misogynists, Norman Mailer. I for one, was reticent to write about him because I didn't feel like speaking ill of the dead. But I changed my mind. To honor of the death of a man who stabbed his second wife with a penknife at a party and called the women's movement "dykily psychotic, crippled, creepish, fashionable, frigid," here's a quick list of the 20th century lady-hating writer hall of shame. One caveat: just because these writers are unfortunate in their portrayal of women, doesn't mean they shouldn't be read and heralded. Philip Roth, for instance, is one of greatest contemporary American writers, but that doesn't mean he's not a complete asshole.

Philip Roth: So the aforementioned Roth! Ol' Phil made his name writing about self-involved, Oedipally-complected Jewish men who fucked nearly-illiterate but gorgeous shiksas and then denigrated them later. Example: Portnoy's Complant where he dehumanizes his object of affection by calling her "the Monkey" and fixating on her physical attributes to the point of fetishization.
Ernest Hemingway: Zelda Fitzgerald once said that The Sun Also Rises was about "Bullfighting, bullslinging, and bullshit," and our girl Z was pretty much on the mark. Lady Brett Ashley, who is the pants-wearing, sexually-emancipated object of affection in the novel, causes only trouble for the men she comes in contact with. Because any woman who acts and dresses "like a man" is a threat to real men and appropriate notions of masculinity.

Charles Bukowski: Attacking Bukowski for misogyny sort of seems like kicking someone when they're down, since Bukowski was such an alcoholic mess most of the time. Sort of! The women in all of Bukowski's stories are one-dimensional cyphers if not actual prostitutes, but one particular story comes to mind in terms of its dastardly portrayal of a woman. It's called "Six Inches." Henry Chinaski, who is Bukowski's alter-ego, marries a woman named Sarah, who boasts a voracious sexual appetite. As the months wear on, Henry starts shrinking, and doesn't stop shrinking until he's 6 inches tall. At that point, Sarah calls him her little pet and puts Henry into her vagina. He describes the experience:

Sarah picked me up and placed me down between her legs, which she spread open just a bit. Then I was facing a forest of hair. I hardened my back and neck muscles, sensing what was to come. I was jammed into darkness and stench. I heard Sarah moan. Then Sarah began to move me slowly back and forth. As I said, the stench was unbearable, and it was difficult to breathe...Suddenly, I was ripped out of that terrible tunnel..."O, my darling! o, my precious little cock! I love you!"

That's right! Watch out for the vagina dentata, boys!

So there's a case to be made for Mailer, Roth, Hemingway, and Bukowski. Who else so you nominate for this literary hall of shame?

Norman Mailer, Towering Writer With Matching Ego, Dies at 84 [New York Times]