Tender Is the Night Themes

Set in the 1920s, Tender is the Night depicts a group of wealthy American expatriates traveling around Europe during the Roaring Twenties. This period—between the end of World War I and the Wall Street crash of 1929—was a time of great prosperity in America and Western Europe. Fitzgerald himself coined the term “the Jazz Age” to describe the glamor and decadence of the era. In Tender is the Night, Dick Diver, the ambitious…

In Tender is the Night, Fitzgerald captures the cultural anxieties of the 1920s through the lens of the modern psychiatric clinic. Here, the doctors in the story treat alcoholism, homosexuality (at the time widely considered something that could and should be treated with conversion therapy), and various nervous disorders. Written at a time when society was still grappling with the aftermath and trauma of World War I, Fitzgerald chooses to explore these cultural anxieties…

Despite some progress in terms of mainstream attitudes to race and racial difference, the interwar period was nevertheless haunted by unequivocally racist attitudes—as evident in the works of writers like Fitzgerald and his white contemporaries. Trivial or insignificant ethnic minority characters form the backdrop to the European experience that the white expatriate community enjoys in Tender is the Night. As Dick and Nicole Diver and their set move effortlessly between various cities—partying frivolously thanks…