Roman Clodia’s Reviews > Heroines > Status Update

'... not only how women should behave, but how literature should behave'

'But what's wrong with writing out of anger? I am beginning to realize that taking the self out of our essays is a form of repression. Taking the self out feels like obeying a gagging order - pretending an objectivity where there is nothing objective about the experience of confronting and engaging with and swooning over literature.'

'When she experiences it, it's pathological. When he does, it's existential.'

'Zelda is not mentioned because Fitzgerald envisions his breakdown like Eliot's... impersonal, universal, philosophical... His collapse is noble, religious, historical, and above all masculine... Her crisis by contrast... is personal, petty.'

'A prohibition against writing the self. The hysteric can be photographed, she is not supposed to take her own portrait.'

'She [Jane Bowles] was written as a madwoman and then she became a madwoman. This was her shadow, her sheltering sky. Prophets and prophecies.'

'Her efforts to be an artist were see as part of her "obsessional illness".'

'Later, her [Zelda's] poor housekeeping was actually considered symptomatic of her illness. Her 'reeducation training' - the disordered or 'schizophrenic' woman needed to be reindoctrinated into her role as the good wife, the good mother.'

'Zelda crying out in the asylum that she is trapped in the pages of HIS book.'

'A different Vivien(ne) begins to emerge here, dangerous, madcap, a bobbed trainwreck... At some point she briefly decided to leave Tom (for another man?). He "hushed" up the scandal by committing Viv to a sanitorium in Malmaison outside Paris - the very same one Zelda was committed to during her first breakdown.'