“Am I going to go through the rest of my life flinching at the word ‘father’?”
– Tender is the Night, 209
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night is rife with fodder that begs to be looked at through a psychoanalytic lens. In creating this novel, Fitzgerald creates a world that reifies Jungian and Freudian thought, specifically in terms of Jung’s concept of anima women and Freud’s Oedipal stage (ubiquitous in the first half of the twentieth century).
Published in 1934,
Tender is the Night is Fitzgerald’s fourth novel. Protagonist Dick Diver is a troubled psychoanalyst, and, like Fitzgerald himself, he is plagued with alcoholism, brilliance, and a mentally unstable wife.
Tender is the Night chronicles thirty-four year old Dick’s life circa 1925, as he enters into a romantic relationship with a seventeen-year-old, very childlike actress. Through flashbacks, readers learn that his relationship with his wife, Nicole, started when she was only sixteen and he was ten years her senior. The world of Fitzgerald’s
Tender is the Night is constructed in such a way that the question of Oedipal desire (and fulfillment) cannot be avoided.
Notions of Oedipal desire are not the only psychoanalytic concerns of this text; present, too, are notion of anima.
Tender is the Night cannot be separated from anima women, as they provide the female presence of the novel. In his article, “Anima and the Animus,” Carl Jung explains that in every individual exists anima and animus; anima refers to the unconscious feminine principle and animus refers to its masculine principle. A man’s anima, in this framework, constitutes the man’s ideal female partner; Jung writes that the man, “in his love-choice, is strongly tempted to win the woman who best corresponds to his own unconscious femininity—a woman, in short, who can unhesitatingly receive the projection of his soul” (159). Anima women, then, are the women who recognize these projections and step into them, in order to gain recognition from the man. Marie-Louise von Franz writes:
Women are influenced by the men’s anima projections. For instance, they behave in a certain way (…) Even small girls find out that if they play the part of the father’s anima, put their arms round his neck, etc., they can get a lot out of their father. Father’s daughters push aside the mother who insists on clean fingernails and going to school. They say ‘Daddy’ in a charming way and he falls for the trick; thus they learn to use the man’s anima by adapting to it. Women who behave in this way we call ‘anima women’. Such women simply play the role intimated to them by the man in whom they are most interested [my italics]. They are conscious of themselves only as mirrors of the man’s reaction. Their love will tell them they are wonderful, but if there is no man around, they feel as if they were nobody. (188)
The women in
Tender is the Night are very much the women that Von Franz writes about here. Both Rosemary and Nicole’s existences are predicated, largely, on Dick’s desires; they live to serve his needs, and in doing so, fulfill their own need to be recognized. They have their own agendas and concerns, of course, but their main concern is always Dick’s attention and how to hold sway over it—Fitzgerald makes this clear from the start of the novel, writing of
Tender is the Night’s women that: “Their [Rosemary, Nicole, and Nicole’s friend Mary North] point of resemblance to each other and their difference from so many American women, lay in the fact that they were all happy to exist in a man’s world—they preserved their individuality through men and not by opposition to them” (53).
This idea is first introduced earlier in on in Fitzgerald’s depiction of Rosemary—“She saw him look her over from head to foot, a gesture she recognized and that made her feel slightly superior to whoever made it. If her person was property she could exercise whatever advantage was inherent in its ownership [my italics]” (23). When a man projects his anima onto a woman, I argue that he is making her an object of his own desire (this objectification, however, is not to be confused with sexual objectification); therefore, any woman who is, in fact, an “anima woman,” must be cognizant, on some level, of this objectification. Rosemary, clearly, is highly cognizant of this reality, and deals with in a pragmatic fashion, using it to her own advantage, as evidenced in this quote.
In
Tender is the Night, what Dick seems to want from his women is chiefly youth and beauty. As with Rosemary, Nicole’s identity is wrapped up in her physical beauty. At a dinner surrounded by her and Dick’s friends (as well as Rosemary herself), Fitzgerald writes that Nicole, “[saw] from their eyes how beautiful she was, she thanked them with a smile of radiant appreciation” (52-3); herein we learn that Nicole’s beauty is not inherent, but, rather, constituted by its recognition. Toward the end of the text, a man named Tommy Barban pursues Nicole while she is still married; Fitzgerald writes: She was happy; she did not want anything to happen, but only for the situation to remain in suspension as the two men tossed her from one mind to another; she had not existed for a long time, even as a ball” (276). Later, having engaged in affair with Tommy, he writes: “For the first time in ten years she was under the sway of a personality other than her husband’s . Everything Tommy said to her became part of her forever” (293). Both of these quotes demonstrate again the nature of women in this text—their very existence depends on the men who seem to design them. And the man, of course, who is chiefly responsible for both Nicole and Rosemary is Dick, through whom they continually seek recognition, reifying their identity as anima women.
The reality of anima women is evidenced not only in Dick and his ladies, but in women such as Mary North, as well. That is not to say that Mary wants to fulfill Dick’s anima, but her own husband, Abe’s, anima. Fitzgerald writes of Mary in passing, and even there reader’s witness even a peripheral character’s identification as an anima woman: “She was following her husband somewhere, changing herself to this kind of person or that, without being able to lead him a step out of his path” (62). In inclusion of women such as Mary in addition to Rosemary and Nicole, the anima women becomes the paradigm of
Tender is the Night. An important note to remember is that the “the anima of a man will have many characteristics of his mother” (Von Franz 188), which brings us to the other major psychoanalytic concern of this novel—the Oedipal desire.
Tender is the Night teems with depictions of Rosemary and Nicole as children and girls rather than women, and furthermore positions Dick as their father figure. But, chronologically, before there love triangle has ever been realized, the Oedipal desire has already been fulfilled between Nicole and her real father.
In
Freud Revisited, psychotherapist Roger Horrocks posits that “loss, prohibition, threats of violence, [and] rivalry” make up the “language of the Oedipal triangles,” (120), and indeed, they do. Horrocks also points out that “for the girl, matters seem even worse” (120). For the girl, passing through the Oedipal stage represents a loss of of her ideal lover (her father) before she can ever possess him, violence in her perceived castration, prohibition of her incestuous desires by society, and rivalry with her own mother. This cannot be an easy transition. These conflicts, stemming from the even the pre-Oedipal years, are the very issues that can disturb the child long after childhood is over.
So what of Rosemary and Nicole? Rosemary’s own father is dead and Nicole’s father, Devereaux Warren, sleeps with his daughter. The text isn’t clear how old she was when this happened, but readers can ascertain it is before she is sixteen, in the care of an asylum in Switzerland (this, of course, is where Dick works and falls in love with her). While there, her father Devereaux Warren, admits he engaged in a sexual relationship with his daughter; Deveraux confesses that after the death of Nicole’s mother, they became very close, and then, in a characteristically Fitzgeraldian euphism, he says that “We were just like lovers—and then all at once we were lovers” (129). Deveraux is instructed to stay away from his neurotic (or, has Dick himself puts it “a schizzoid—a permanent eccentric” [349]) daughter after that point, and Nicole quickly gains a new father/lover figure: Dick.
Like a father, Dick reminds her to “be a good girl” (130) during her treatments, but like a lover, he marries her. Of his incipient infatuation with Nicole, Fitzgerald writes: “The impression of her youth and beauty grew on Dick until it welled up inside him in a compact paroxysm of emotion. She smiled, a moving childish smile that was like all the lost youth in the world” (328). It is Nicole’s youth, just as it is Rosemary’s, that attracts him. Both women are depicted as childlike, especially Rosemary, who Mary Burton, author of “The Counter-Transference of Dr. Diver,” argues is simply a new, younger version of Nicole, who is already twenty-four at the start of the novel, and twenty-nine by the end. Her inevitable womanhood leads Dick to look for a new woman-girl, which brings us to Rosemary.
Fitzgerald makes a point of constantly associating Rosemary with notions of childhood. Dick says of Rosemary: “She’s an infant (…) there’s a persistent aroma of the nursery” (167). Later on the novel, he also remarks that “Rosemary didn’t grow up (…) It’s probably better that way” (299). Time and again, Roesmary is portrayed in this fashion. Likewise, Dick is strongly positioned as her father figure, just as he was with young Nicole. In their first private conversation, Rosemary asks Dick about his profession:
‘Are you a scientist?’
‘I’m a doctor of medicine.’
‘Oh-h!’ she smiled delightedly. ‘My father was a doctor too.’ (63)
Moments later, he calls her a “lovely child” (63) and tells her “‘When you smile— ’ He had recovered his paternal attitude, perhaps because of Nicole’s silent proximity, ‘I always think I’ll see a gap where you’ve lost some baby teeth’” (64).
So, in this way, Rosemary (the new Nicole) and father-figure Dick begin their romance. But perhaps Rosemary’s relationship with Dick has more to do with her overbearing mother than her absent father. In her essay, “ ‘Acting Out the Oedipal Wish,” Rachel Devlin conducts a study of incest among adolescent girls in the U.S. from 1941-1965. She examines incest alongside Freudian psychiatry, and points out that “a girl’s re-discovered affection for her father at puberty was believed to be an avenue of escape from her preoedipal attachment to her mother—an attachement that was increasingly perceived to be overly intense, emotionally threatening, and potentially dangerous and girls entered adolescence” (611) and that during adolescence, it becomes necessary for a girl to “shift her attachement from her mother to her father” (618). Looked at in this way, in the fulfillment of Oedipal fantasies, the father figure is secondary to the that of the mother.
In the aforementioned scene where Rosemary is represented as Dick’s “lovely child” with missing baby teeth, Rosemary illumines the position of her mother in their Oedipal affair; Dick reminds her of the reasons it would be wrong to sleep with her, and mentions chiefly his love for Nicole, to which Rosemary responds: “But you can love more than just one person, can’t you? Like I love Mother and I love you—more. I love you more now” (65). It is painfully clear that she is trying to love him more than her mother; Elsie Speers, Rosemary’s mother, is always with Rosemary, watching over and guiding her every move. Rosemary is a bit of a puppet. Of their relationship, Fitzgerald writes that Rosemary “tried to think with her mother’s mind” (39) and, furthermore, “Rosemary had never done much thinking, save about the illimitability of her mother’s perfections” (40). Rosemary and her mother are tied-up to such a degree that Rosemary is desperate to find something to break the bond, for someone to achieve greater significance in her life than Elsie. This is why she is so intent on sleeping with Dick; it is all an effort to sever the umbilical cord and gain independence.
As Rosemary attempts this division with her mother and Nicole deals with her own “daddy” issues, the psychology of Freud cannot be avoided, nor can the psychology of Jung as the women readily assume the Dick’s anima projection. Burton points out that Fitzgerald was studying Jung at the time he was writing
Tender is the Night; Fitzgerald was clearly cognizant of both Freud and Jung as he composed his fourth novel, and it would be a disservice to ignore their presence in the text.
Annotated Bibliography
Burton, Mary. "The Counter-Transference of Dr. Diver." ELH, 38.3 (1971): 459-471.
As the title suggests, Burton takes a critical look at the counter-transference of Dick Diver in Tender is the Night. Burton posits that Dick suffers from a classic case of counter-transference after taking Nicole as a patient. Burton discusses Dick’s path of self-destruction as he falls in love with and marries Nicole. Burton argues that Dick’s adultery with Rosemary is, in fact, a product of the counter-transference. To fully assume the role of Devereaux Warren (the role that Nicole has transferred upon him), he must commit incest, which he does with Rosemary, who is, figuratively, America’s daughter and Daddy’s Girl. Additionally, Burton analyzes Dick the therapist in light of Fitzgerald’s own interaction with the work of Jung and Freud.
Horrocks, Roger. Freud Revisited: Psychoanalytic Themes in the Postmodern Age. Hampshire: Palgrave, 2001.
In this 21st century novel (ironically dedicated to the author’s mother), Horrocks positions Freud in the realm of modernism and postmodernism, and delves into the more savory of this theories. Horrocks successfully addresses criticism of Freud, and, moreover, analyzes the place of Freud in psychology today. I focused mainly on chapters nine and ten, “Contradictions in Sexuality,” and “Femininity, Feminism and Psychoanalysis” respectively. Herein, Horrocks writes that: “Freud’s out-and-out sexual etiology seems quite inadequate today, his stress on the instincts and on sex remains an important strand in the therapeutic armoury” (118). This quote speaks to the novel as a whole, and Horrocks attempt to reify Freud’s relevance today.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. Tender is the Night. New York: Scribner, 1933.
This novel is, of course, my primary text and what I would argue is the strongest of Fitzgerald’s five novels. Utmost of its concerns are the elusiveness of beauty and the shallowness of everything. This novel represents modernism at its finest; we learn through Dick and that all hope is dashed, and yet the world still turns, left with a man who is desperate, to the very last page, to make some sort of meaning out of the rubble around him. Narcissism and masks rule the day in this novel, just as they do in reality.
Jung, Carl. “Anima and the Animus.” Psychoanalysis and Woman: A Reader. Ed. Shelley Saguaro. New York: New York University Press, 2000. 158-75. Print.
In this article, originally published in 1917, Jung argues the existence of two inner principles that govern humans—the anima and the animus. The former is the inner feminine principle and the latter is, correspondingly, the masculine. Jung discusses the man’s suppression of the anima through the persona, which is, contrastingly, the mask the subject assumes for society.
Von Franz, Mary-Louise.“The Feminine in Fairy Tales.” Psychoanalysis and Woman: A Reader. Ed. Shelley Saguaro. New York: New York University Press, 2000. 187-201. Print.
The focus of this article is dissecting the nature of “woman” as evidenced in fairy tales, primarily that of Sleeping Beauty. Within this discussion, Von Franz brings up Jung’s anima, and, critical to my own argument, anima women. She also discusses those women who do not mold themselves to the anima projections of man.
