Baby, Boo-Boo, and Bobs: The Matrilineal Auto/biographies of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, Frances Scott Fitzgerald, and Eleanor Lanahan

[para. 1]: "The life of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald is, according to biographer Sally Cline, “the stuff of myth.” During Zelda’s lifetime, from 1900 to 1948, “myth-makers invented and reinvented Zelda Fitzgerald as American Dream Girl, Romantic Cultural Icon, Golden Girl of the Roaring Twenties and most often as a Southern Belle, relabeled the First American Flapper by her husband Scott Fitzgerald, the quintessential novelist of the Jazz Age, which he named” (1). Zelda also “invented and reinvented” herself as a mother, as well as a writer, dancer, and artist. She spent her adulthood mediating her maternal and creative desires, ambitions, and frustrations through a variety of forms, such as her autobiographical novel Save Me the Waltz (1932), her paintings, and her series of paper dolls. These works reflect some of the ways in which she perpetuated, challenged, and negotiated stereotypes and assumptions that divide and threaten women’s domestic and professional identities. Zelda and Scott’s only child, Frances Scott Fitzgerald Smith (who went by the name “Scottie”), explored similar themes in her writing. Five months before her death from esophageal cancer in 1986, Scottie began a memoir about her life as the daughter of the famous but tragic couple: Scott, an alcoholic, died of a heart attack in 1940; Zelda, a frequent patient of psychiatric hospitals, died in an asylum fire in 1948. Scottie’s daughter Eleanor Lanahan used the unfinished manuscript as the foundation for a biography of her mother, published as Scottie, the Daughter of …: The Life of Frances Scott Fitzgerald Lanahan Smith (1995), a text that also inscribes the autobiography of Eleanor."