Zelda Sayre, Belle

Abstract

There are few more memorable wives in twentieth-century American culture than Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, who married to the successful young author F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1920. His first novel, This Side of Paradise, had appeared a few weeks before their marriage. Because of his popularization of the Jazz Age, complete with its New York partying, elite college society, and alcohol, dancing, and flappers, readers tend to place his beautiful bride with the exotic name--Zelda--within those fictional contexts. In reality, Zelda Sayre had never been to New York City until she went there, accompanied by her older married sister, to wed Fitzgerald. Neither had she been abroad, nor had she gone to college. In fact, she had seldom spent a night away from her father's house. Zelda Sayre in fact a Montgomery, Alabama, girl, whose father a judge there in the state capitol. But more than that, Zelda Sayre a highly visible southern belle, soon to be immortalized in literature as the essence of the early-twentieth-century's thoroughly modern American woman. To change the definition of Zelda from flapper to is to move from the commercialized and risque image of woman as fast, easy--a speed--to that of the highly desirable but more traditional and consistently protected beauty. Flirtatious and flamboyant, the southern belle often a local celebrity. She the woman one courted, although she never assumed to be available. In the candid words of Virginia Foster Durr, a contemporary of Zelda's who grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, belles almost like visiting movie stars.... the epitome of success. Zelda Sayre, Durr wrote, was just gorgeous. She had a golden glow around her.... The boys would line up the whole length of the ballroom to dance with her for one minute. She just pre-eminent. And we recognized it. (1) The belle is peculiar to the South, and Fitzgerald, who grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota; Buffalo, New York; and Princeton, would have known little about belledom. Requisites of this time-consuming status at the close of the nineteenth century included birth into a certain social class along with the means to afford suitable clothes, train travel, and leisure. Several dozen callers on Sunday afternoons, as many letters daily, boxes of long-stemmed red roses, small square boxes of corsages, and the offers of fraternity pins, club insignias, and engagement rings--not to mention the actual dates, parties, and dances--kept the true belle busy from morning to night and into the next morning. The orderliness of the custom may have been difficult for outsiders to fathom, but within each social circle, rituals were firm: town girls could not be belles (again, social class--with a proper and recognizable family name--was crucial); neither could fast girls. The existence of the belle a tribute to the power, and the self-conceit, of the higher classes within the South: it reaffirmed patriarchy in that status as a belle entirely dependent upon the social standing of the girl's father. (2) Having money not the most significant part of being from the right social class. In the South people knew which families were which, and in Montgomery the Sayres were important people. Being popular as a teenager and a debutante a way of ensuring that the woman in question the right sort of girl, a suitable candidate for marriage, for, ultimately, the belle to take on the roles of wife and, particularly, of mother. Southern bloodlines, like southern manners, were not to be corrupted. Stemming from the aftermath of the Civil War, when the barriers between the white and black races became even more firmly entrenched--and horribly enforced through lynching--the politics of marriage grew increasingly significant. Because fortunes had been lost during both the Civil War and Reconstruction, social position maintained largely on the basis of family name and through one family's partnership in marriage with another stable and well-placed family. …