Save Me the Waltz: Analysis of Major Characters
"Save Me the Waltz" is a novel that explores the complexities of identity and desire through its major characters, particularly focusing on Alabama Beggs Knight, who serves as a fictional counterpart to characters from F. Scott Fitzgerald's works. Alabama, a young woman caught between societal expectations and personal aspirations, navigates a glamorous yet ultimately unfulfilling life alongside her husband, David Knight, who embodies the romantic allure of an artist. Their life is marked by extravagant escapes to various locales, but Alabama's quest for self-discovery often leads her to feelings of emptiness, highlighting the disparities between her desires and her reality.
The novel also portrays Alabama's family dynamics, including her stern father, Judge Beggs, whose detached demeanor contrasts sharply with her mother, Millie, who embodies a more carefree but limited perspective. Their interactions shape Alabama's understanding of herself and her relationships. Additionally, Alabama's daughter, Bonnie, admires her father while struggling to connect with her mother, emphasizing the generational complexities at play. Other characters, such as Jacques, a French aviator, and Gabrielle, an actress, introduce further layers of conflict and longing in Alabama's search for fulfillment. Overall, the characters in "Save Me the Waltz" reflect a rich tapestry of human experience, capturing themes of ambition, disillusionment, and the quest for meaning in a rapidly changing world.
Save Me the Waltz: Analysis of Major Characters
Author: Zelda Fitzgerald
First published: 1932
Genre: Novel
Locale: Alabama, New York, France, and Italy
Plot: Autobiographical
Time: Mostly the 1920's
Alabama Beggs Knight, the daughter of Millie and Judge Beggs, wife of David Knight, and mother of Bonnie. She stands in for the author and is the author's fictional counterpart to Nicole Diver in F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel Tender Is the Night (1934). The wildest of three sisters, she is well bred. The youngest of the three, and fourteen years old at the start of the novel, she envies the social life of her older sisters. After she marries David, a handsome military officer and painter from the North, they live a glamorous, but increasingly unsatisfying, life during the Roaring Twenties. They escape to Connecticut, New York, Paris, the Riviera, and Italy, then finally back to Alabama for the final illness and funeral of her father. Each escape seems to begin with an attempt by Alabama to define herself, only to leave her with a sense of emptiness. Even the birth of her daughter, Bonnie, cannot fill that void. She eventually takes up ballet and a lover, only to find those experiences palling on her. The novel ends with her return home for the funeral of her father. She thinks to herself that she will always return “to seek some perspective on ourselves, some link between ourselves and all the values more permanent than us… in our father's setting.” In her search for some direction in her own life, however, Alabama reflects about her father: “He must have forgot to leave the message.”
David Knight, Alabama's husband, based on F. Scott Fitzgerald. His very name suggests the romantic escape he represents to Alabama in her flight from her mother's suffocating weakness and her father's entrapping sternness. Although he is a “knight” to whom she is wildly attracted and later a painter whom she admires, he also evokes in her envy of his art and fame. Their glamorous life is filled with free-wheeling parties, intoxication, and debts.
Judge Austin Beggs, the father of three socially frivolous daughters. His “detached tenderness” serves as a center of gravity in the emotional volatility and dizzyingly paced life of his youngest daughter, Alabama. Disappointed by the loss of an only son in infancy, he is stern, and sometimes cruel, in providing financial and moral security for his family. His presence hovers in the background of Alabama's glamorous life, particularly when the shifting sands of experience seem constantly to dislocate her values.
Mrs. Beggs, often called Miss Millie, the wife of Judge Beggs and mother to their three daughters. She is as accessible as her husband is inaccessible. Her “wide and lawless generosity” contrasts sharply with her husband's “irrefutable logic.” Of limited intellectual capacity, she spends her life avoiding problems and fights her major battles over dresses remade for one daughter from an older sister's clothes. Miss Millie is incapable of making decisions or understanding complexities, so that when Alabama decides to leave school, she saves her mother the trouble of attempting to understand her explanation by merely switching the subject.
Bonnie Knight, the daughter of Alabama and David. As a child, she experiences increasing unhappiness with her mother and increasing admiration for her father. When she returns from visiting her mother in Italy, she is described as a princess and David as a knight. She is, indeed, her mother's daughter.
Dixie and Joan Beggs, Alabama's older sisters. The former writes society columns for the local newspaper.
Madame, a Russian ballet mistress. She provides temporary direction to Alabama, countering Alabama's sense of aimlessness in life, in her role as Alabama's ballet teacher.
Jacques Chevre-Feuille, a French aviator with whom Alabama falls in love. She meets him during the Knights' stay at a Riviera villa, Les Rossignols (The Nightingales). Bored while David paints, Alabama sees Jacques as another “knight.” Their relationship ends on a note of irresolution when he leaves for duty in Indochina.
Gabrielle Gibbs, an attractive film actress with whom David flirts. When Alabama returns to Paris from Italy, she increasingly feels “excluded by her lack of accomplishment,” and Gabrielle's elegance only serves to make Alabama feel inelegant.