Copyright by Elisabeth Sharp McKetta 2009 The Dissertation Committee for Elisabeth Sharp McKetta Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Asymptotic Autobiography: Fairy Tales as Narrative Map in the Writing of Zelda Fitzgerald Committee: Carol MacKay, Co-Supervisor Martin Kevorkian, Co-Supervisor Lynn C. Miller Wayne Lesser Samer Ali Asymptotic Autobiography: Fairy Tales as Narrative Map in the Writing of Zelda Fitzgerald by Elisabeth Sharp McKetta, B.A., M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin August 2009 In memory of Hope Hale Davis 1903 - 2004 Acknowledgements I would like express my gratefulness to the members of my dissertation committee: Samer Ali, for his excellent observations about how storytelling can be a lifeline; Wayne Lesser, for his faith in all of the possibilities of this project; Lynn Miller, for encouraging all of my explorations about performing Zelda, both in class and out; Martin Kevorkian, for his sage advice and terrific sense of humor; and to Carol MacKay, for the incredible time, knowledge, and support she put into this project. My heartfelt thanks go as well to Michelle Lee and Claire Canavan, whose role as my writing group made the dissertation experience entertaining and well-fed; and to Lisa Leit, who has encouraged me to think big when it comes to writing and everything else; and to Jean Cannon for the many times we talked things over in the Gregory hot tub; and to my parents, grandparents, and the entire Sharp/McKetta clan for inspiration, encouragement, and weekly brunch. Paramount thanks are due to James Stead for his contribution to my own fairy tales. Finally, I thank Zelda Fitzgerald, whose strange and beautiful prose spurred my curiosity and investigation into the link between fairy tales and autobiography. v Asymptotic Autobiography: Fairy Tales as Narrative Map in the Writing of Zelda Fitzgerald Publication No. _________ Elisabeth Sharp McKetta, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2009 CO-SUPERVISORS: Carol MacKay and Martin Kevorkian When a writer, usually a woman, uses fairy tales as a veil through which to narrate a story of her life, I call this practice asymptotic autobiography. In mathematics, the asymptote is a straight line that a curve approaches increasingly closely, but never actually touches. I define “asymptotic autobiography” as a term for discussing any personal narrative that deliberately employs fiction in order to tell truth. In this inquiry, I examine the use of fairy tale language in giving voice to women writers’ autobiographical representations, using Zelda Fitzgerald’s novel and letters as the focus for my analysis. My research and critical analysis will examine how Save Me the Waltz, which Zelda Fitzgerald wrote while she was a psychiatric patient in the Phipps Clinic, uses fairy tales to provide a mapping of the many performances that autobiographical selfhood entails. By experimenting with open-ended fairy tale conventions instead of vi being limited by clinical truths, and by contextualizing her personal history in the realm of the imaginary, Fitzgerald removes her story from the psychiatric ward and places it safely in legend. The first three chapters of this dissertation show how, in sequence, the autobiographical self becomes free through the use of fairy tales in three stages: once the autobiographer has worked to separate herself from being bound by illness or clinical reality (Chapter One), she is free to make the decision of which self or selves she wishes to narrate and perform (Chapter Two); only once she has established her sense of self can the autobiographer then locate her plot, her map, and her narrative (Chapter Three). In Chapter Four, I offer an example of asymptotic autobiography in the form of a one- person play script that I wrote and performed about Zelda Fitzgerald’s life and hospitalization, using as a frame the fairy tale “The Swan Maiden.” This hybrid essay- performance combines the play script itself with personal writing of my own in which I describe the difficulties I had approaching and performing the rich material of Zelda’s life. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface: Autobiography of the Quester..........................................................................1 Introduction: Asymptotic Autobiography as Critical Tool..........................................7 Enabling Narrative Through Asymptotic Autobiography……………………….13 The Endless Re-Writing of Fairy Tales………………………………………….16 The Limits of Traditional Autobiography……….……………………………….22 Method: Linking Fairy Tales with Personal Narrative…………………….….…28 Transformations of Fairy Tales into Truth……………………………………….36 Chapter One. “Happily Ever After”: Fairy Tales as Escape from Clinical Truth……………………………...……43 Publishing the Woman who was “sick, sick, sick”……...….…………………….52 Haunted by the Ghost of the Asylum…………………………………………….62 The Communicative Power of Fairy Tales…..……………………………….….68 Chapter Two. “Myself versus Myself”: Fairy Tales as Performance of Epic Self…….………………………...……....73 “As Good as a Book”...………………………………….……………………….76 An Advertisement for an Advertisement…..…………………………………….87 Self as Performance in Autobiographical Writing……………………………...101 “A Silent Dancer of her own Woes”……………………………………………109 Chapter Three. “A Wonderful Philosophy to Comfort You”: Fairy Tales as Maps of Meaning…………..…………………………...…......123 “Born into Narrative”…………………………………………………………...127 viii Fairy Tales as Imaginative Maps……..………………………………………...134 Narrative as Promethean Lost Cause…...………………………………………140 Flawed Happily-Ever-After as Bearer of Hope….…………………....………..149 Chapter Four. Performing Contemporary Asymptotic Autobiography.....…..…..155 “Zelda Speaks of Swans”: An Autobiography in One Act...………………...…160 Rescuing Zelda F……………………..………………………………………...175 Appendix A: Zelda Fitzgerald’s Paintings………………………………......……...186 Figure One: Hansel and Gretel………………………………………….....…...186 Figure Two: Goldilocks and the Three Bears………………..………………....186 Figure Three: Times Square……….…………………………………………....187 Figure Four: Adam and Eve….………………………………………………....187 Figure Five: Wolff, Wolff……………………………………………………....188 Figure Six: Wolff Costumes……………………………………………………189 Afterword: The Future Relationship of Fairy Tales and Autobiography...............190 Bibliography...................................................................................................................200 Vita……..........................................................................................................................209 ix Preface Autobiography of the Quester I am a woman writer of fairy tale adaptations, autobiography, and literary criticism; I come to this project with both a scholar’s and a writer’s perspective. I have experienced firsthand the need for veiled autobiography, and I have noticed it in the work of many women writers: a language struggle to cloak the personal in some other genre, such as the mythic or the folkloric. Fairy tales and autobiography were my primary interests as an undergraduate English major at Harvard. I took multiple classes on folklore and fairy tales: Joseph Harris’s Southern Folklore, Simon Bronner’s American Folklore, and a seminar with Maria Tatar on Fairy Tales and Children’s Literature, among others. For four years during and after college I was a member of an ongoing seminar of local memoir writers led by Hope Hale Davis, and I grew interested in the half-fiction, half-truth ways through which women portray themselves as characters in writing. During my junior year I conducted an independent study on semi-autobiographical literature written by mentally ill women, including Zelda Fitzgerald, Anne Sexton, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The following year, for my Bachelor’s honors thesis, I wrote a memoir. At Georgetown University, where I received my Master’s Degree, I approached the study of fairy tales and autobiography through the lenses of performance and critical 1 theory. I presented a conference paper on the fairy tale “The Frog King,” in which I examined the heroine’s motive for throwing the frog against the wall (a natural response to an unfamiliar beast in one’s bed), and questioned the ways that the Grimms’ version— with this murderous impulse of the princess—has given way to a more popular version where the frog is transformed by a kiss. My MA thesis, titled “Manufacturing Zelda,” examined the ways in which Zelda Fitzgerald used fairy tales to manufacture her own image separate from the images her husband and psychiatrists had created of and for her. I drew conclusions linking fairy tales with early twentieth-century advertisements, and the fairy tale subject with the psychoanalytic subject. I analyzed Fitzgerald’s frenzied dancing career in the terms of fairy tale allusions about the dangerous, villainous women who dance—often to death in red hot shoes—as punishment at the fairy tale’s end. Thus, as I complete this dissertation, I will have spent ten years working with fairy tales and the autobiographical writing process, and over ten years thinking about the work of Zelda Fitzgerald. I have seen her artwork in a traveling exhibition called “Zelda by Herself”; I have visited the house in Montgomery where she and Scott lived, briefly, in the early 1930s; I have read her published letters, a number of the many biographies about her, and the available literary criticism