The first photo is of Zelda Fitzgerald in 1929, just before her first mental break down. At the time she had taken up an obsessive regimen of ballet with the dream of becoming a professional ballet dancer. She was offered a place in a ballet school, but turned it down. Soon after she had her first break down.
The second photo is from 1931 after being bounced between three clinics, eventually diagnosed as a schizophrenic and kept under treatment in a psychiatric clinic in Pragins, Switzerland. The photograph is entitled ‘Recovered,’ but her calm was only temporary. She had another breakdown and returned to psychiatric treatment by February 1932.
I’m reading about Zelda and I found it so striking what mental illness does to a person physically.
I also felt it ought to be known that F. Scott Fitzgerald had a life outside of his ground-breaking 10th grade reading assignment (did you see that? I just put down the The Great Gatsby). He and Zelda were entangled in a relationship not entirely unlike what would happen if Heathcliff and Catherine were able to marry. Both ill in their own way, they were poison to each other, but could not will themselves to separate. F. Scott was of little help for his wife when her mind started to deteriorate, instead of trying to come up with a way to better himself (say, stop drinking so much as his alcoholism was a trigger for her psychosis), he would point the finger of blame to everyone except himself, including Zelda.
Mental illness is not a literary metaphor nor merely a plot point. Unfortunately, F. Scott Fitzgerald couldn’t seem to grasp this. He always said he married his books’ heroines, but I think it’s because he couldn’t see Zelda as more than one of his opulent characters he couldn’t grasp that Zelda went much deeper than they parties they attended. He never understood that he had a hand in Zelda’s state.
