Gender, Mental Illness, and Psychiatry Theme Analysis

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 through Nicole Warren, who suffers with schizophrenia as the result of childhood trauma. This choice may have been informed by Fitzgerald’s personal life; his wife, Zelda Sayre, was hospitalized after being diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1930. In order to cover his wife’s medical expenses, Fitzgerald had to put aside his novel writing to produce more lucrative short stories. Similarly, in Tender is the Night, the reader sees a promising young psychiatrist, Dick, abandon his career in order to care of his mentally unwell wife, Nicole. Fitzgerald thus positions Nicole as a burden, the sole factor preventing Dick from really fulfilling his potential. With this, Fitzgerald paints a complicated picture of gender and mental illness: on the one hand, Fitzgerald elicits sympathy for Nicole by depicting her troubled and lonely life, and on the other, Nicole is wrought monstrous—a neglectful mother, and a drain on her husband.

Fitzgerald explores contemporary attitudes to madness through Nicole, who suffers from mental illness as the result of abuse and trauma. Nicole arrives at Professor Dohmler’s sanitarium when she is just 16 years old. Her father, Mr. Devereux Warren, complains that she “isn’t right in the head,” presenting her as a troublesome burden that he can no longer cope with. When Dohmler investigates further, however, Nicole’s father admits to raping her as a child, which immediately explains her nervous condition and fear of men. Mr. Warren never faces any legal “consequences” for the sexual abuse of his daughter, and instead pays a great deal of money to have her permanently admitted to the sanitarium. By revealing her troubled and isolated childhood in Book 2 of the story, Fitzgerald elicits sympathy for Nicole, who is presented as a victim of her past. Nicole is haunted by her childhood trauma throughout her life. Fitzgerald reveals Nicole’s troubled internal world by revisiting a scene from the beginning of the novel during Book 2. From Rosemary’s original perspective, Nicole was glamorous and beautiful the first day they first met, flicking casually “through a recipe book for Chicken Maryland.” Fitzgerald presents Nicole’s version of the same day, however, through her first person stream of consciousness. Her internal monologue is fragmented and frantic, like her state of mind: “everything is all right—if I can finish translating this damn recipe for Chicken a la Maryland into French. My toes feel warm in the sand.” The few pages that trace Nicole’s innermost thoughts and feelings are punctuated with ellipsis and dashes, capturing how distressed and anxious she is, despite her “exterior harmony and charm.”

Dick and Nicole’s problematic doctor-patient, husband-wife relationship speaks to a long history of male medical professionals asserting power and control over their female patients, and reveals the sexism woven into the social fabric of the 1920s. Apart from a few short sequences, Nicole’s voice remains largely absent throughout the story, and the reader predominantly learns about her madness through other characters. Whether it’s heated discussions between Dick and Baby Warren, Nicole’s sister, about how best to care for her, or conversations between Mr. Warren and Nicole’s psychiatrists, Nicole’s illness is positioned as a burden and a trouble for those around her. The most extreme manifestation of this is the suggestion that Nicole’s illness is to blame for Dick’s failure to become a brilliant and successful medical man. Fitzgerald depicts Dick’s inability to fulfill his professional ambitions as a great tragedy, caused largely by his duties to care for Nicole: “his work became confused with Nicole’s problems; in addition, her income had increased so fast of late that it seemed to belittle his work.” Dick is both distracted by Nicole’s periods of illness, and emasculated by her wealth, which serves to undermine his masculine pursuits. This interpretation, however, overlooks the fact that it is Nicole who is trapped within a controlling and toxic marriage, manipulated by a man who abused his professional powers as a psychiatrist when becoming romantically involved with a 16-year-old patient. Indeed, throughout the story Nicole is “deprived of any subsistence except Dick,” and she is emotionally dependent on him and his approval.

Nicole’s madness comes to climax after she receives a letter accusing Dick of “having seduced” a patient’s daughter. It is true that he kissed the “flirtatious little brunette,” but he denies the accusation, saying “this letter is deranged […] I had no relations of any kind with that girl.” When Nicole subsequently runs away, Dick is patronizing and manipulative as he tries to calm her down: “this business about a girl is a delusion, do you understand that word?” When Nicole replies saying, “it’s always a delusion when I see what you don’t want me to,” it becomes clear Nicole has been confined in their marriage, trapped in the roles of patient and child. Perhaps unintentionally, the novel’s treatment of Nicole reveals the dark side of psychiatry in the 1920s, as it becomes clear that psychiatric diagnoses are used as instruments of patriarchal power, wielded by men in the story to control and oppress their wives, daughters, and patients.