| Zelda Fitzgerald’s Save Me the Waltz,a novel about a woman who wants to be “a philosophical gourmand of possibilities”,is a cacophony of the sounds and sights of the roaring twenties embodied in the sensual possibilities offered by the author.Instilling in the novel a heady mix of multiple sensory experiences and intense emotions,Zelda saves no energy for the waltz of sensual exuberance.The catalogs of various body images,sensory engagements,and other objects of sensual luxuriance,though of scant narrative importance,lend Save Me the Waltz its pervasive air of sensuality,expanding the field of sensory experiences well beyond the basic senses to enlivened bodily experiences in the inhabited world.These catalogs,combined with exhaustive accounts of the heroine’s ballet practices,could validate a different interpretation of the novel that focuses on its embodied texture.This thesis attempts to employ key analytic rubrics in embodiment study to facilitate a more expansive criticism of this novel.The thesis is divided into five parts.Chapter One includes background information about the novel and the author,literature review,research questions and theoretical framework are introduced.Chapter Two examines the personal dimension of the heroine’s embodied experiences in these regards: a complex nexus of many elements that constructs or distorts Alabama’s body image;the functioning of body schema in Alabama’s ballet practice;body as an artistic creation;Zelda’s enactive and metaphoric approach to emotions in the novel.By inquiring into the interpersonal interactions among the ballerinas,Chapter Three focuses on interpersonal dimension of Alabama’s embodied experiences manifested in the habitus inscribed in the ballet practitioners who come from different socio-economic strata,the sense-making processes animated by the living body’s coupling with a specific physical environment as well as the human experiences shared by people in certain political and cultural climate.Chapter Four explains the means whereby the aesthetic integrity that leans on images of human body is achieved in this novel.Zelda’s idiosyncratic figurative language,her highly imaged style and episodes in her real life that might affect her aesthetic expression are investigated in this chapter.Chapter Five is the conclusion. |
