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the legend of zelda
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Reading Zelda's biographies, it is apparent that she considered Hemingway a "poseur." (She may have also felt threatened by Scott and Ernest's close, though competitive friendship). Zelda's reaction to Hemingway's novel The Sun Also Rises was: "Bullfighting, bullslinging, and bullshit." Ernest's "cult of masculinity" needled her because it excluded her -- Zelda could either worship Ernest, like Scott and Hadley and others did, or get out of the way. His way of life left no place for a talented outspoken woman.
Zelda struggled to express herself creatively during a time when a woman's place in the intellectual world was precarious. (In some ways, more than fifty years later, it still is precarious.) I want Zelda to be remembered as more than just "Fitzgerald's crazy wife." I struggle to understand and represent this brilliant, intricate, tormented person. I want to figure out what made her suffer.
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The introduction written by Scottie (Frances Fitzgerald Lanahan) -- Scott and Zelda's daughter -- explains that as a young college student she usually tore open envelopes from her father in the hope that they contained money, and she just discarded the letters in a drawer without reading them because at the time they were too painful for her. She reflected on writers in a paragraph that sheds some light on the plight of her parents:
The only people quite as insufferable as writers are painters. I suppose it is impossible to form the habit of inventing people, building them up, tearing them down, and moving them around like paper dolls, without doing the same thing with live ones. Good writers are essentially muckrakers, exposing the scandalous condition of the human soul. It is their job to strip veneers from situations and personalities. The rest of us accept our fellow beings at face value, and swallow what we can't accept. Writers can't: they have to prod, poke, question, test, doubt, and challenge, which requires a constant flow of fresh victims and fresh experience.
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--- http://www.poprocks.com/zelda.htm
Reading Zelda's biographies, it is apparent that she considered Hemingway a "poseur." (She may have also felt threatened by Scott and Ernest's close, though competitive friendship). Zelda's reaction to Hemingway's novel The Sun Also Rises was: "Bullfighting, bullslinging, and bullshit." Ernest's "cult of masculinity" needled her because it excluded her -- Zelda could either worship Ernest, like Scott and Hadley and others did, or get out of the way. His way of life left no place for a talented outspoken woman.
Zelda struggled to express herself creatively during a time when a woman's place in the intellectual world was precarious. (In some ways, more than fifty years later, it still is precarious.) I want Zelda to be remembered as more than just "Fitzgerald's crazy wife." I struggle to understand and represent this brilliant, intricate, tormented person. I want to figure out what made her suffer.
"
"
The introduction written by Scottie (Frances Fitzgerald Lanahan) -- Scott and Zelda's daughter -- explains that as a young college student she usually tore open envelopes from her father in the hope that they contained money, and she just discarded the letters in a drawer without reading them because at the time they were too painful for her. She reflected on writers in a paragraph that sheds some light on the plight of her parents:
The only people quite as insufferable as writers are painters. I suppose it is impossible to form the habit of inventing people, building them up, tearing them down, and moving them around like paper dolls, without doing the same thing with live ones. Good writers are essentially muckrakers, exposing the scandalous condition of the human soul. It is their job to strip veneers from situations and personalities. The rest of us accept our fellow beings at face value, and swallow what we can't accept. Writers can't: they have to prod, poke, question, test, doubt, and challenge, which requires a constant flow of fresh victims and fresh experience.
"
--- http://www.poprocks.com/zelda.htm