Aside from her initial allurement of Scott, what do you think first marked her inflatuation with him? To the brink that she wanted to be with him as he began his adventure towards a literary career?!

For me, I think what she first saw in Scott was his ability to be his own person, and take life by his own accord. She muses in the opening chapters about how freeing it would be to gain her personal freedom but that its cost was far greater than deciding upon walking in shoes or being barefoot in a city that was bent against abandoning propriety. She in turn, was caught by his ability to appear standing outside the sphere just shy of what she was accustomed to finding,... the familiarity of what she was bred to understand and what she originally felt she would accept as her way of living. F. Scott Fitzgerald ignited her deepest desires to live a life outside the boundaries of schooling as a Southern-bred debutante,... making her yearn for a carefree life of living through her dreams rather than her obligations.

I think what she saw in Scott was at first what she dreamt would be his future, due to unearthing his own desire to succeed as a writer, and inside that moment, she saw herself gaining the confidence to dare to be something more than what she was originally expected to become... a child bearing housewife with a full social calendar. A life that I think after meeting him, felt empty and hollow, less alluring and lackluster in its appeal.

I personally think if the passage about her readings were true, the affirmation that one destined to be great must not be held back set the course for her future moreso than any reckoning or desire that she might have bourne herself without its knowledge. I think that affirmation gave her worth and jettisoned her on a course to help shape someone else's destiny, almost before she considered her own fate and what she could do with her own gifts.

I think that the appeal Scott had for Zelda was that he offered a path that was different from the very narrow paths that were open to her growing up in a small, southern town. Had she not married Scott, Zelda likely would have married a prominent member of her own town, who shared her background and her class, and lived a life that was much like her mother's. The sparks of rebelliousness and artisticness that she had would have been squelched.

In marrying Scott, Zelda had the opposite extreme where the normal was looked down upon as being something that was not desired.

Given Zelda's fate, I think that she would have been better off if she had a life somewhere in the middle, that wasn't in the confining box of her home town but that also wasn't as untethered as the life she ultimately chose.

I agree with you, ElizabethM that perhaps her better option would have been to find the middle ground rather than by exchanging one extreme for the other,... yet part of me thinks that she wasn't the type of girl who had learnt the virtue of patience, as I think she had this inertia of energy that prevented her from wanting to 'wait and see' if a better option for her in marriage and in life would come along.

I applauded how you explained your response, because those were two elements that I had forgotten to embrace in my own reply: her rebellious nature and her artistic aptitudes. Its actually something that I was thinking of broaching today,... how her artistic view of life truly enchanced everything she did, because she first saw life through an artistic lens rather than a logical one.

For me, her infatuation with him came from the fact that he was an outsider, from another town and so unlike the people she knew growing up. Therein lies the attraction.