“No One’s Muses Are Believable”: The Double-Bind of Female Desire in Aria Aber’s “Zelda Fitzgerald”
Photo by Caleb Maxwell on Unsplash
Micro Review of:
“Zelda Fitzgerald”
By Aria Aber
The New Yorker, 27 February 2023 Issue
February 2023
When we met, I was freelancing as a photographer while finishing my degree. He was older, more established in the industry. We began dating. I saw his large-format film camera, his home darkroom, and immediately it became apparent I was an amateur. I adjusted quickly: When he asked to photograph me, I relished being chosen, coronated as muse; inspiration. But one can crave being both perceived and beholder, desired and desirous.
In “Zelda Fitzgerald,” Aria Aber writes vividly into the ennui and keen eye of the titular writer, artist, and socialite’s imagined inner monologue. The poem is kindled by richly textured images and sounds: the consonance of whiskey bottle on walnut table, sibilance of husband’s hands on a glass, lushness of lanterns and Pernod. “No one’s muses are believable, said the painter / whom I loved for twelve weeks and who would / rarely touch me. To him, the female body / was a plant: it needed to be tended and spoken / to,” recounts Aber’s Zelda. This enjambment—spoken / to—lodges in my sternum: its implicit passivity cavernously familiar, such language a protective shield that nonetheless feels uneasy to absorb. “In his paintings that I like best, women wander through cities / and notice objects.” In these paintings, women are active; the female gaze finally holds weight. Yet this power is bracketed by the brushstrokes of a male imaginary. The muse is essential, but not equal.
Persona poems are complicated. Assuming another’s voice—extrapolating their beliefs, presumed feelings, imagined desires, and amplifying these notions—is an act of relational care, or violence, or both. Zelda has an affair; Zelda and Scott love each other; Zelda isn’t using her talents constructively, has gone mad, is dead. Everyone gets to write about Zelda except herself.
But persona poems also provide an opening. In listless desire, simultaneous centrality and marginality, Aber’s poem evokes a yearning to be seen: I see a woman’s face reflected back to me, framed within a viewfinder’s hairline borders. But whose? Zelda’s, the poet’s, or my own? Desire becomes a trap, a home. The body of a poem is the dialectical relationship it begets between poet, speaker, subject, and reader. I am called upon to implicate myself, so I do.
I sat motionless as my lover went beneath the camera’s focusing hood to frame my portrait. “My” portrait, I say, though it was never mine—he knelt, as if in secret prayer, stingingly opaque. “Had I known the boredom that my talents / had in store for me, I would still have asked for them,” concludes poem-Zelda. I understood then, as the shutter jolted in assent, the private mechanisms of power—who truly holds it—and I was jealous, but I was relieved, for finally I was certain: I ought to be the artist.
Aria Aber (@AriaAber) was born and raised in Germany and is currently based in Los Angeles, California. Her debut book Hard Damage won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and was published in September 2019. Her poems are forthcoming or have appeared in The New Yorker, New Republic, The Yale Review, Poem-A-Day, Narrative, POETRY, and elsewhere. A graduate of the NYU MFA in Creative Writing, she holds awards and fellowships from Kundiman, the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing, and the Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. She is the recipient of a 2020 Whiting Award in Poetry.
Madeleine Bazil (@mads_baz) is a multidisciplinary artist and writer interested in memory, intimacy, and the ways we navigate worlds—real and imagined. Her poetry and criticism is published/forthcoming in Seventh Wave Magazine, Pleiades, Stanzas Poetry Magazine, Sonora Review, One Hand Clapping, Dreich Magazine, and elsewhere, and she is a columnist for Where the Leaves Fall Magazine. She was long listed for Palette Poetry’s 2023 Rising Poet Prize.