Misplaced Sympathies: Narrative Marginalization in F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night

F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night is a modernist novel which portrays the fall of the idealistic young doctor Dick Diver at the hands of his beautiful but unstable wife, Nicole. The book's structure is nontraditional, consisting of three main time frames in which the book takes place: the first part presented to the reader consists of a middle period on the Riviera, in which Dr. and Nicole Diver meet Rosemary Hoyt; an earlier period presented in the middle of the novel as an analepsis in which the back-stories of and relationship between Dick and Nicole are explained in detail; and a later, post-Riviera period, illuminating Dick's decline, Nicole's rise, and the consummation of the attraction between Dick and the shallow film star Rosemary. This final period occurs last both within the chronology of the novel and within the novel's narrative. This paper will examine three main passages focusing on Nicole, and how the portrayals in each affect the reader's perception of her character. The novel takes place on the French Riviera in the 1920s. Society's "progress"—including money, military victories, and film—is depicted in the novel as a negative force, driving people apart more than bringing them together. Fitzgerald uses traditionally sympathetic techniques in his novel to portray characters, particularly Nicole, in an anti-sympathetic way. He utilizes different points of view and innovative narrative techniques to get across his message of ultimate loneliness and depraved humanity.

F. Scott Fitzgerald takes unusual steps to marginalize Nicole's character. When a narrative takes on the persona or consciousness of a character it usually allows the character to become more realized and gain more of a voice in the novel, often explaining away actions that had been inexplicable before the shift in consciousness. However, Tender is the Night is written predominantly in a limited omniscient style of narrative, wherein the narrator is all-knowing. Despite this omniscience, there are times when the text takes on the thoughts and perceptions of Nicole. The book is also occasionally punctuated with short passages differing in both style and narrative mode, giving it more Modernist characteristics than Realist ones. The passages in which Nicole's consciousness narrates contain many signifiers that portray Fitzgerald's perception of reality in these new and exciting forms. As Milton R. Stern writes in Tender is the Night: The Broken Universe:

The work uses non-traditional and Modernist styles of writing to explore the contemporary and experimental paradigms available in the 1920s, including film, and new forms of power. These exciting new venues in humanity bring the reader back to the dark conclusion that despite these new avenues of expression, not much seems to have changed. Despite the opportunities available in the text both for Nicole to have real power, and for her to tell her side of things, she remains essentially powerless. Even though Fitzgerald's uses traditionally sympathetic techniques to portray Nicole, the reader generally feels unsympathetic toward her.

These short passages in which Nicole's consciousness dominates span gaps of many months, and reveal both her calculating nature as well as the extra vulnerability brought on by her mental illness. Her calculating nature is related both to her identity as a female, and to her position brought about by being a member of the moneyed class.

Nicole is introduced to the reader in the first section of the novel. This is the section in which Rosemary Hoyt's perspective dominates, and it occurs approximately five years after the events narrated in the lengthy middle analepsis of the book. The impression left on both Rosemary and the reader is that of a self-assured and cold woman who navigates easily in society and is unafraid to cut down those whom she finds inferior. At once, Rosemary is both attracted to Nicole (indeed, to both of the Divers) and somewhat appalled by her frankness and critical outlook, especially in this passage, which takes place on the French Riviera:

The narrative at this point denies Nicole's interiority, and she is speaking only about trivial matters. The early parts of the narrative take place, chronologically speaking, years after the events in which Fitzgerald's narrative grants Nicole limited interiority. It seems incongruous that the events in which she is given the most pathos occur years before those in which she seems merely a part of a crumbling and slightly cruel class. Yet the strategy of painting Nicole first as one kind of woman, then retroactively as another kind, works for the narrative and makes her a fuller character, as the reader has to reassess his or her opinion of the woman. Within a larger framework it is a problematic portrayal of a woman, giving rise to more questions than it answers. This can be illuminated by examining a passage that occurs while Nicole is convalescing in an expensive hospital under the care of Dick, who is both her doctor and her beau.

Fitzgerald hints that even without the structure of the world she had "created," there is still something animal within Nicole. With her world having crumbled and only her "instincts" to guide her, it seems, Nicole becomes an empty, vulnerable shell whose main instinct is to find a husband. The transition she makes between being properly "humble," acknowledging her mental shortcomings and how they will not help her find a place within her society, and then saying that she hates her doctor indicates exactly what the passage says: that there are two kinds of forces fighting within Nicole, those of cultivation and those of instinct. Those of instinct seem to be winning. It is a small thing to express hatred of a doctor, but coming on the heels of a "humble" admission that one is essentially unfit for society, it seems strange. Readers may chalk it up to Nicole's being a woman, or Nicole's being a particularly mercurial woman, but Fitzgerald seems determined to portray her in a more negative light.

The final imagery of the passage draws parallels between natural images and ideas such as the air and the narcissus and that of the dress and the button. This suggests the desire for mastery over the natural environment—that not only is it natural and right for Nicole to bank even more of her fragile emotional life on a man, but that the convalescing woman is seeing some connection between the mastery of her clothes and the mastery of the environment ("bloom narcissus...air stay still and sweet"). The idea connecting mastery of the environment and keeping everything perfect for "him" reflects the idea of Nicole's feminine helplessness. Fitzgerald is subtly portraying the idea that for Nicole, whose consciousness finally reigns in the last sentence of this passage, there is a connection between her learned pathos, the desire for mastery, and the seduction of a man. Fitzgerald uses the narrative technique of free indirect discourse, in which thoughts are narrated but never explicitly stated as quotations.4

The actions of preparing her dress and touching the button are analogous and perhaps even superstitious actions designed to try and influence other occurrences, expressing her desire for mastery. Read in this way, Nicole seems pathetic, choosing to exert her control in this way. Yet this reading of a pathetic, atavistic Nicole is also prophetic. It shows her mind shattering while her financial power and hold over Dick increases, as in this passage, in which Nicole's agency increases, even while her feigned "helplessness" remains:

Here the reader experiences and increase of the glimpse into Nicole's psyche that the reader was granted in the passage which occurred at the hospital. Whereas the previous passage explicates other characters' responses to Nicole's speech, here her interiority has completely taken over, demonstrating a selfish and obsessive personality. As Nicole ignores or forgets others' responses to her statements or questions, privileging her own speech instead, the reader is left with only her biased viewpoint. Time may have become diachronic in the previous passage, as it deals with Dick and Nicole's interactions on separate occasions. It is conceivable, although unlikely, that these interactions are taking place all at once. However, this passage is inarguably diachronic, demonstrating Nicole's escalating selfishness on a variety of occasions leading up to the time when there were "three of them," indicating that a significant amount of time has passed because Fitzgerald hints at the presence of a baby. Nicole is speaking with many different characters in the third passage—the lawyer, her sister, Dick, and an unnamed underling whom she wishes to phone her husband. This passage also underscores the chiasmatic structure between Nicole and Dick, because as Dick loses agency, due in part to his vocationally fatal attraction to Rosemary and partly to his fish-out-of-water status within Nicole's society, Nicole begins to gain more agency. As in Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie, the female protagonist begins to gain agency and status as the male character loses it. However, Dreiser's novel is naturalist while Fitzgerald's is modernist. Dreiser's characters float through life, not making many significant choices, while Fitzgerald's characters crave agency. Fitzgerald's characters want to have mastery over their environs so that they can milk the world for all the success waiting in it.

One of the few ways in which the various conversations differentiate is the different styles of speech and levels of courtesy she takes with each of them. Nicole can be polite and businesslike with the lawyer, wheedling and somewhat joking with her sister while revealing her blue-blooded upbringing ("I know I'll never manage to spend it[. . .]all right, just let my share pile up"), and with her husband she is most intimate of all, although her speech betrays the sense of control she exerts over him. The idea of control is painted in the beginning of the passage, when she is discussing money, apparently with a lawyer and her sister, but Dick's voice is denied, if he was there at all. Dick is smitten by Nicole's presumed innocence, as according to Ruth Prizogy, this is what he prizes in women: "For like other Americans, Dick Diver has mistaken Rosemary's emptiness for innocence, exactly as he had mistaken Nicole's years before. Through Rosemary, the empty mask of a beautiful starlet, Dick too seeks sanctuary in childhood."6

F. Scott Fitzgerald makes the narrative more calculating to insinuate that Nicole is using her calculating nature to augment her girlish features. The narrative implies that Nicole is doing this in order to ruin Dick. But whose calculation has the agency? Nicole's voice takes over, and seems to be plotting. Dick is no longer her savior, but a nuisance, as she discovers through her rising agency that he does not fit in well with her old-money lifestyle. Through the innocence and vulnerability given her by her madness, she is able to wear a mask of the sort Prizogy discusses. This mask of innocence covers up for her identity as a willing participant in the act of incest with her own father, and allows Fitzgerald to portray Rosemary as a slightly more negative double of Nicole. Both women seem innocent at first, and the two of them help to bring about Dick Diver's downfall. But while Nicole was close to her father in a negative and destructive way, Rosemary is close to her mother in a positive and beneficial one: "A major irony of Fitzgerald's novel is that the theme of incest [...] is central to the work, whereas the most genuinely intimate relationship is that between Rosemary and her mother."7 The fact that Rosemary can participate in both this "genuinely intimate" relationship as well as her trysts with various men speaks of something fundamentally wrong with her character.

Dick has participated in part of Rosemary's moral decline. "Rosemary is Jay Gatsby whose innocence has turned into destructiveness as ruthless, exploitative, and amoral as Daisy Buchanan's."8 And Dick has, of course, somehow been complicit in Nicole's mental decline and subsequent rise in agency.

Nicole may be losing her grip on reality, but when it comes to the navigation of these social circles with which she is most familiar, her voice still dominates. The end of the third passage balances out the second passage. It seems to be the payoff for her atavistic, superstitious actions. Indeed, this passage seems to have echoes of both the incubus and the succubus legends.9 Nicole, lacking moral awareness, seems to be preying upon Dick. Or, read another way, Dick is "lying upon" Nicole, perhaps taking advantage of her lack of competency. Now, siren-like, she tells him there is "No place to go except close," which seems like a statement of dominance: nowhere to go except close to each other. She then asserts that she loves the most (because the best relationships always involve emotional one-upmanship)—subtly, at the end of this passage, as in the last, Nicole elucidates to Dick the reasons he should stay with her. He has nowhere else to go: she has the power; the money is in her name. She loves him the most. Now there is a child. Even more subtly, and through her own words, Nicole is being painted: she is painting herself as a witch of sorts. She seems to have used superstition and feminine wiles—the combination of which, as suggested by the narrative, seems equal to cunning witchcraft— to trap Dick. This passage, oddly enough, seems to be the apotheosis of his folly, for it is in this passage that the woman herself is speaking. If the reader can resist her voice, perhaps Dick can, as well. It is this use of Nicole's voice that, instead of empowering her, marginalizes her. If one reads between the lines, one sees the opportunistic way in which her voice is inserted into the narrative. Fitzgerald subtly uses devices such as paralleling and association to create an anti-feminist Nicole, one whose "instincts" involve hooking Dick into marriage and drawing him closer when it might have been better for him to run away. These "higher" devices parallel those of Fitzgerald's narrative, which makes use of diachronic time and vocal privileging to fool the reader into thinking that Nicole is empowered when in reality, the act of narrating marginalizes her more than her position as a woman, or as a person of dubious mental competence, or even as a willing participant in incest ever would have. These subtle and sneaky narrative acts are used to reinforce and parallel the idea of the sneaky, grasping woman. As mentioned before, Fitzgerald's techniques are subtly misogynistic. As many before and since him have done, his use of a few modern ideas only barely covers up his decidedly old-fashioned ideas and misogyny.

1. Stern, Milton R. Tender is the Night: The Broken Universe. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1994. Italics his.
2. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. Tender is the Night. New York: Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1933. P. 20
3. Ibid 143
4. Murfin, Ross, and Ray, Supryia M. The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms (2nd Edition). Boston: Bedford / St. Martin's, 2003. "Free indirect discourse (or, more simply, indirect discourse) is the English term for the French style indirect libre, in which the thoughts, statements, and even dialogues engaged in by characters are recounted to the reader in a 'reportorial' narrative mode. An author employing free indirect discourse might write a sentence like this: 'She came to the realization that he would never change and told him she was thinking about leaving him; he was devastated by the news but told her to go ahead and make his day.' The French novelist Gustave Flaubert helped pioneer this style of writing in Madame Bovary (1857). Free indirect discourse has become an important subject of analysis for those critics interested in the 'grammar of narration,' that is, in a grammatical analysis of narrative. Such critics study the ways in which first-hand accounts of thoughts and actions differ from impersonal narrative accounts of those same thoughts and actions" (177).
5. Fitzgerald 159
6. Prizogy, Ruth. "From Griffith's Girls to Daddy's Girls," Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 26, No. 2, F. Scott Fitzgerald Issue, Summer, 1980, 189-221. Page 214. Italics hers.
7. Ibid 196
8. Ibid 216.
9. "In medieval legend, an incubus (plural incubi; from Latin incubare, "to lie upon") is a demon in male form supposed to lie upon sleepers, especially on women in order to have sexual intercourse with them." From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incubus_%28demon%29

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