MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Despite Zelda Fitzgerald’s massive notoriety, she still has a namelessness associated with her literary work—just as Frankenstein’s Bride has no other name than her designated proximity to Frankenstein in James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein. Of course, as Whale’s film also points out by casting the same woman to play Mary Shelley as Frankenstein’s Bride, female authorship itself carries its own weight of monstrosity. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar echo this fact, particularly regarding Mary Shelley’s surrounding nineteenth century, arguing that “‘a woman that attempts the pen’” is seen as “an intrusive and ‘presumptuous creature,’” and “has grotesquely crossed boundaries dictated by Nature” (Gilbert and Gubar 8).

By putting Zelda Fitzgerald, Save Me the Waltz, and Bride of Frankenstein in conversation with one another, I will consider the way that female authorship was represented in proximity to monstrosity at the same time as Zelda Fitzgerald was trying to make her way as a writer and overall artist against the current of publications and stories that framed her as a figure of excess, absurdity, mental illness, and monstrous womanhood. In particular, Zelda’s experience with medicalization and institutionalization of mental illness (to which she included thinly-veiled references in Save Me the Waltz) emphasizes the association of womanhood with mental illness, especially in Fitzgerald’s surrounding 1930s cultures.

In this presentation, I will consider the construction of ability in relation to Zelda Fitzgerald’s main character, Alabama, in her only fully written novel, Save Me the Waltz. I will place this in conversation with James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein and the construction of women as monstrous, particularly with regard to authorship and publicity in 1930s America.