Tender is the Night: The Loss of Values in Postwar America
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote Tender is the Night over the course of nine years beginning in 1925. The book was finally published in four issues in Scribers Magazine in 1934. While writing the book, Fitzgerald’s wife Zelda had to be committed to a Swiss sanatorium, and he experienced financial difficulties as his alcoholism began to spiral out of control. Fitzgerald observed the repercussions from the First World War and endured the Great Depression, all of which helped in making Tender is the Night a novel inspired by some of Fitzgerald’s most painful years and experiences.
Tender is the Night follows the rise and fall of a once-promising psychiatrist Dick Diver and his wife, Nicole Warren. Dick and Nicole are allegorical figures that stand for the New World, America: for the young generation with all its potential for greatness, hopes for the future, and high ideals. Nicole stands for the female side of the American identity, and Dick stands for the male side. Fitzgerald uses Nicole’s mental illness and trauma to symbolize the injury to American society caused by World War I.
Fitzgerald matches the dates of the improvements or regressions in Nicole’s mental illness to the important dates of World War I. Nicole Warren is born precisely with the twentieth century (1901), and her emerging sexuality coincides with the beginning of World War I in 1914. Nicole’s father, Devereaux Warren is “a fine American type in every way, tall, broad, well-made,” however; in the later chapters, it is revealed that inside, he is a pervert (110). Devereaux rapes Nicole in June 1917, the month in which American troops first landed in France. The French battlefields stained with American blood mirror Nicole’s sheets stained with her blood when the rape by her father takes both her virginity and eventually, her mind. Nicole does not realize the full horror of her experience until she enters Dohlmer’s clinic in Switzerland in February 1918, just as America did not realize the implications of her commitment to the War until American soldiers made their delayed entry into the fighting on the Western Front on January 31, 1918. Nicole’s entry into the clinic coincides with America’s entry into the Western Front.
The analogy between Nicole’s sickness and America’s participation in the war is extended and precise. Nicole suffers a “bad period” from February until October 1918: the Germans launched their last great offensive in March 1918, and American troops, who first appeared on the front lines January 31, 1918, fought intensely, impressively, but indecisively until October, when Germany began the general retreat which was to end with her surrender. The Armistice came in November, at which time Nicole inexplicably recovers from her illness and begins a “good period.” Nicole’s battle with schizophrenia personifies the battles between integrity and corruption and between health and madness in American society following the War.
Nicole’s husband Dick is the counterpoint to her struggle with mental illness. Dick’s last name, Diver, represents a person who plunges into deep water, and, in Freudian terms, water is the unconscious. As a successful psychiatrist, Dick would “dive” into the unconscious of his patients. He has a degree from Johns Hopkins, a Rhodes scholarship, an opportunity to study with Sigmund Freud in Vienna, and a career with so much promise that the government exempts him from military service in World War I (115). Dick’s exclusion from military service allows him to avoid the potential damage to his psyche that active military duty might have caused. Dick’s skillset and opportunities position him to be the greatest psychiatrist of the 20th century.
Instilled with faith in the values of “honor, courtesy, [and] courage,” Dick arrives in Europe untried and untested, his essential idealism still intact (204). He studies with Freud and then goes to work in Doctor Dohlmer’s Swiss clinic, where he meets Nicole. When Dick marries Nicole, he enters a world of vast wealth that commands respect and demands service as its right. Too late, he comes to realize that “he had been swallowed up like a gigolo, and somehow permitted his arsenal to be locked up in the Warren safety-deposit vaults” (201). That knowledge sends him spiraling into self-disgust, self-degradation, and self-pity. Dick’s obsession with “curing” Nicole is representative of his wish to “cure” the new American materialism. He tries to “dive” beneath the surface of Nicole’s psyche and mend what has happened to her and, by extension, to America. However, in attempting to do so, he falls victim to the Warren wealth. Nicole’s vast and ever-increasing fortune inevitably changes the balance of their relationship. As its pleasures gradually seduce Dick, he begins to abandon his work, which had once been the bedrock of his self-identity. Dick finds himself becoming as wrapped up in his damaged wife as she is wrapped up in her charming “Captaine” (124). Dick’s wish to heal Nicole begins to take a personal toll as “He could not watch her disintegrations without participating in them” (190–191). In fact, Dick and Nicole eventually become one being, as Dick signs his name “Dicole” (103). This merging of selves mirrors the close political and military relationship that America developed with Europe after the war: a new closeness that replaced the separate identity which America forcibly forged for herself with the War of Independence from England and the Declaration of Independence in 1776.
Fitzgerald frequently compares Dick to the Civil War general, Ulysses S. Grant. Grant was dismissed from the United States Army due to excessive drinking, spent a few years working as a clerk, but who eventually led the Union troops to victory over the Confederate army during the Civil War. Dick develops a drinking problem after he meets Nicole. On the final page of the novel, Nicole likens Dick’s career to “Grant’s in Galena” foreseeing that Dick’s career will end in mediocrity and disgrace, unlike Grant who recovered and went on to greatness (315). While morality prevailed for Grant’s America at the end of the civil war when slavery was abolished, morality loses to the corrupting influence of wealth in Dick’s internal battle.
Dick’s father teaches his son the value of decency and provides him with the moral foundation for right action. Dick pays tribute and bids farewell to such concepts when he visits the graves of his ancestors on the occasion of his father’s death, for they have fallen victim to a new generation, in which he now includes himself:
Watching his father’s struggles in poor parishes had wedded a desire for money to an essentially non-acquisitive nature. It was not a healthy necessity for security – he had never felt more sure of himself, more thoroughly his own man, than at the time of his marriage to Nicole. (171)
Dick sees the death of his father as the death of good values. After his father’s death, Dick sees the passing of all those who once believed that “nothing could be superior to ‘good instincts,’ honor, courtesy, and courage” (266). His striking, brief eulogy, “Good-by, my father—good-by, all my fathers,” signals the end of an era; Dick is the last mourning survivor of all those dead, with “their weather-beaten faces with blue flashing eyes, the spare violent bodies, the souls made of new earth in the forest heavy darkness of the seventeenth century” (267). The “good instincts” and “spare violence” which for one historical moment, the end of the Civil War, had created the illusion of a common purpose have, in a different historical moment, the end of World War I, revealed their true incompatibility.
Fitzgerald describes a table of women as gold-star mothers and widows, women who had sacrificed sons and husbands to the war. Dick compares the irreparable state of the world to the plight of the gold star mothers with whom Dick comes to share a fate. The gold star mothers "had come to mourn for their dead, for something they could not repair” (130-131). As Dick becomes detached from his values, he becomes less capable of aligning himself with these mothers because he no longer mourns for what he has lost as wealth begins to take over. This signifies the internal conflict occurring within Dick resulting from the external conflict between opposing value systems in the modern world.
Cut loose from the old certainties by a world war and given the freedom that money provides, the Divers epitomize a generation in flux. Nicole brings Dick “the essence of a continent,” and he chooses it without fully understanding its power to corrupt and believing in his ability to create the world he desires (136). However, money does not bring Dick carefree happiness; instead, it brings him a sense of his corruptibility and an awareness of his purposelessness. In the end, the Villa Diana is not a haven from the glittering, gaudy, amoral world, but a microcosm of it. At Dick’s invitation, a whole brigade of callow and callous barbarians, the new world order, passes through its doors. Even the name of the villa itself comes to represent the callous materialistic attitude of those who stay in it. The Greek Goddess Diana is the goddess of the hunt, and the Villa Diana symbolizes the hunt for material wealth that Nicole and those like her embody. From a Jungian perspective of the collective unconscious, the world of the fathers epitomized by Dick’s father and the generations before him are dead and buried.
Nicole eventually leaves Dick for Tommy Barban as a way of illustrating what the new generation wants. Amoral and self-indulgent, Tommy is a soldier who worships money, which brings him “good” clothes, “good” food, and “good” “good” women; Tommy believes more than anything in the stock market, where he says that “everybody. . . is making millions” (45). The new generation abandons the values of the old generation in favor of being materialistic barbarians.
Representing America, Nicole Diver is forthcoming about her own injury – her mental illness. When Tommy Barban tells her that she is a complicated woman, she tells him he is wrong, while referring to her schizophrenia, saying: “‘No, I’m not really – I’m just a – I’m just a whole lot of different simple people’” (23). Nicole Diver illustrates this concept when she discusses how she pretends to be other people through her mental illness. She says:
Talk is men. When I talk I say to myself that I am probably Dick. Already I have even been my son, remembering how wise and slow he is. Sometimes I am Doctor Dohmler and one time I may even be an aspect of you, Tommy Barban. (34)
At the end of the novel, Dick cannot be precisely located: “his latest note was postmarked from Hornell, New York, which is some distance from Geneva and a very small town; in any case he is almost certainly in that section of the country, in one town or another” (315). Dick ends up an unsuccessful, drunken country doctor divorced, and living somewhere in New York State.
The connection between male domination and female madness in Tender is the Night is a piercing social commentary by Fitzgerald. However, Fitzgerald’s work is not heralded as a feminist work because instead of using female madness to highlight the plight of women in America, Fitzgerald used female madness to create an ode for a “better America,” a virgin country not yet ravaged by World War I. Fitzgerald argues against the unraveling of morals in favor of wealth in American society after World War I. Tender is the Night explores the mind diseased by conflicting desires as it focuses on Dick Diver’s struggle to resist the self-gratification in gaudy wealth for the disciplined effort of goodness and courage.
Indeed, the novel leaves us with the question that if even the most educated, honorable, gifted, and motivated to do good are corrupted by boundless wealth, is there any hope of people keeping their moral compass when faced with the power of money? Is everyone corruptible? Is “too much” money too much for moral health?