Infidelity and Madness in Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night

Abstract

Fitzgerald’s last completed novel, Tender is the Night, has typically been understood as the author’s representation of the degeneration of an American dream through the decline of the main male character, Dick Diver.¹ A promising psychiatrist, Diver’s creativity and professional success are, much like Fitzgerald’s, stymied by external and internal factors such as wealth, drinking, and frivolous distractions.² In this novel, the primary blame for Dick’s retrogression lands directly on his wife Nicole Warren, both because of her money and her mental instability.³ For instance, Milton Stern argues that the “inner focus” of the novel “is the disintegration of the disciplined and creative ‘romantic’ [i.e., Dick Diver] within the ruinous world of the selfish and the impulsive [i.e., Nicole and her wealth]” (Stern, Golden Moment 308–9). Along with Stern, other critics have interpreted Nicole (and her sister, called “Baby”) as representing the changing force of modernity, elevated to this position by their family’s reputation and their financial power. Dana Brand writes, “Throughout Tender is the Night, women are associated with the cosmopolitan fluidity exemplified by American tourism, film and shopping” (Brand 137).⁴