Nicole Warren Diver and Alabama Beggs Knight: Women on the Threshold of Freedom
Despite Scott Fitzgerald's heated allegations that his wife Zelda had stolen his material for Tender Is the Night when she wrote and published Save Me the Waltz, her 1932 autobiographical novel, Fitzgerald scholars have generally failed to examine the similarities and differences between the two books. Although the situations and characters of Save Me the Waltz and Tender Is the Night are, in some ways, quite similar, the story each conveys is distinct. Critical examination of the two novels is most enlightening when they are viewed as a pair of perspectives on American womanhood in a decade of momentous change. Zelda Fitzgerald wrote the entire manuscript of Save Me the Waltz, her only novel, during six weeks in 1932 while she was a patient in a mental hospital; Scott had already been working for seven years on the novel that was eventually to become Tender Is the Night.' Although Scott managed to impose numerous revisions on Zelda's book before its publication,2 his rage over what he perceived as her infringement on his rights to the literary expression of their common experiences lingered. In 1933, during a conversation between the Fitzgeralds in the presence of Zelda's psychiatrist, Scott accused Zelda of "broaching at all times on [his] material" and stubbornly insisted that Zelda make "an unconditional surrender" to him, relinquishing her "idea of writing anything" in the interest of his career (Bruccoli, Some Sort 349-352). Fitzgerald need not have been so upset. With the exception of Henry Dan Piper, who devotes a chapter of his critical biography of Scott Fitzgerald to Zelda's novelÂ—noting that "Save Me the Waltz offers a more sensitive account of the deranged wife's view of her marriage than we find in her husband's version, Tender Is the Night" (204)Â—few of Scott Fitzgerald's critics examine Zelda's novel in any depth. But the feminist movement has given rise to a flurry of critical activity focusing on women's forgotten writings, and Save Me the Waltz, with its uncommon distinction of viewing from a woman's perspective events and characters made famous by a male author, has recently received considerable attention.3