Women Writing the American Artist in Novels of Development from 1850–1932: The Artist Embodied

Abstract

Women Writing the American Artist in Novels of Development from 1850–1932 does not shy away from addressing some of the most persistent and, it must be said, pernicious suppositions about women’s writing. Refreshingly, it does so not through hagiography of its subjects or setting up a battle of the sexes. Instead, it offers a reading of the development of women’s writing on its own terms from the mid-nineteenth century to the modernist age. Legleitner establishes E. D. E. N Southworth as the rising source of the female Künstlerroman in the U.S., tracing an emerging tradition over eight decades through Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Kate Chopin, Willa Cather, Jessie Fauset, and Zelda Fitzgerald. (For nonliterary specialists, Künstlerroman is the somewhat clunky German term designating one of three subgenres of the Bildungsroman, the novel of development. While the Bildungsroman typically traces an individual’s passage from youth to adulthood, concluding with the protagonist’s assimilation into mainstream society, the Künstlerroman focuses on the maturing of an artist and usually concludes with a rejection of middle-class mores. The other two subgenres are the Entwicklungsroman, the autobiographical novel of self-invention, and the Erziehungsroman, which focuses on formal training or schooling in the hero/heroine’s growth.)The American writers that Legleitner showcases in this study are shown to be deeply involved in a project to express their desire for independence against their domestic limitations and through their creative mastery of the body. Rather than an antagonistic project begun to “oppose” men and male-authored fiction, the author demonstrates that the novel of development favored by these women was introspective and deeply involved in expressing the concerns most fundamental to their lives. Should the resulting fiction resist patriarchal values—and it does—one understands the resistance as ancillary. That is, the female experience that it uncovers and enshrines is of paramount importance, and the criticisms of patriarchy that emerge are vital but ancillary. These works are about women meditating on their lives and voicing their desires, not talking against men. It is a subtle but effective critical direction that avoids depicting women’s writing as a reactionary phenomenon, instead engaging with it as a parallel tradition independent of the creative criteria of the male-dominated canon.The final chapter of Women Writing the American Artist (181–210) will likely be of particular interest to readers of The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review. Legleitner closes her study with a close reading of Zelda Fitzgerald and what she calls the “cult of artistry” in Save Me the Waltz (Collected Writings 1–196). First, it is invigorating to see Zelda Fitzgerald placed within a proper literary-critical framework. There is no trace of her as the hobbyist writer that generations of feminist critics have sought to exorcise from the narrative. Gone is the pretext that amateur or apprentice fiction is the only way to brand Alabama Beggs-Knight’s story, which deserves to be remembered as one of the best narratives about professional ballet in both the American and modernist traditions. No longer is Waltz mired in its reputation as a “largely autobiographical novel” (Tavernier-Courbin 24).Instead, Legleitner makes the radical decision to engage with Zelda as an experimental writer in keeping with Ezra Pound’s modernist imperative to “MAKE IT NEW” (Pound 265)—a framework that places her work on an intriguing collision course with historical modernism. It was a common belief that women writers of popular fiction shirked the revolutionary mantle of modernism, instead carrying over into the new century traditions of sentimentalism and domestic writing best left behind. Instead of attempting to minimize the role of either of those two modes—so despised by male modernists and critics—Legleitner shows how some woman writers, including Zelda Fitzgerald, decided to rework nineteenth-century traditions to their creative advantage. She demonstrates that they drew strength from the canon but worked within, outside, and beyond it both to ground and advance the expression of women’s experience, which was, in many ways, changing, but in significant and limiting ways, remained the same.Contrary to the elitist disdain heaped upon women’s writing in the early decades of the twentieth century, this study reveals that, in meaningful ways, women writers like Zelda Fitzgerald were indeed creating new narratives out of the clash between marital confines and artistic ambition; they were doing it in their own highly innovative ways, too, forging unique structures and styles every bit as fresh and unconventional as D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers or James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Thus, Legleitner speaks of Zelda’s engagement with sentimentalism for the explicit purpose of experimenting with the Künstlerroman form (185–87). The author makes it clear that she attempts something valuable (and congruently modernist) by reworking traditionally female genres instead of abandoning them for “masculine,” High Modernist ones.Modernist scholars will be familiar with the association of the elite modernist project with masculinity and the accompanying vilification of popular novels authored by women. Ironically, no greater criticism of women’s “middlebrow” writing existed than that penned by Virginia Woolf. Although Woolf did not disbar women from the highbrow club (she granted herself, Jane Austen, and Charlotte Brontë membership), middlebrow culture looked, to her, to be a “mixture of geniality and sentiment stuck together with a sticky slime of calves-foot jelly” (“Middlebrow” 182). In her famous closing jibe in “Middlebrow,” she bristled that, should “any human being, man, woman, dog, cat or half-crushed worm [dare] call me ‘middlebrow’ I will take my pen and stab him, dead” (186). In Women Writing the American Artist, Woolf and To the Lighthouse feature as an apt counterbalance to Zelda Fitzgerald and Save Me the Waltz. Legleitner showcases Woolf’s attempt to establish Lily Briscoe outside of the contemporary gender norms for women enshrined in the character of Mrs. Ramsay (187–94). Lily and Woolf are, however, isolated by their desire to be female artists on a par with the so-called high culture of modernist men, necessitating their self-exile from the “middlebrow” sorority.By contrast, Zelda Fitzgerald’s novel is shown to draw upon the tradition of women’s writing and embodies its strength and inspiration in the female-dominated world of the ballet troupe. It provides Alabama Beggs-Knight with community and support and passes down a liberating artistic tradition and training. Alabama is nourished by this environment, flourishing in her creative identity outside of the home. She is also rendered artistically destitute when cut off from the troupe by injury.Often, the ending of Save Me the Waltz reads like a poignant reflection of the abrupt end of Zelda’s ballet career in 1930 after physical exhaustion and mental breakdown. Through the lens of communal support and female tradition, however, Legleitner finds a more positive story. Alabama’s daughter Bonnie is inspired by her mother’s nascent career and initiated into the sisterhood of female artists (205–6). Thus, although writers like Woolf rail against sentiment as restricting women, Legleitner makes a solid case that it is the cord that binds women’s creative efforts. Furthermore, severing it perpetuates harm against the self-same writers. After reading this work, one feels that taking seriously themes and traditions such as the domestic and sentimentalism instead of sidelining them may lift up more women writers than those highlighted within. In doing so, more critics can stop speaking about Zelda as an artist frustrated or stymied by marriage and mental illness and start engaging with her seriously as one: an artist, formerly known as Zelda.