Tender Is the Night and F. Scott Fitzgerald's Sentimental Identities
336
Tender Is the Night and F. Scott Fitzgerald's Sentimental Identities
336Overview
In “Tender Is the Night” and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Sentimental Identities, Messenger traces the roots of Fitzgerald’s writing career to the deaths of his two infant sisters a few months before his own birth. It was their loss, Fitzgerald wrote, that made him a writer. Messenger highlights how the loss of Fitzgerald’s siblings powerfully molded his relation to maternal nurturing and sympathy in Tender Is the Night as well as how it shaped the homosocial intimations of its care-giving protagonist, psychiatrist Dick Diver. A concomitant grief and mourning was fueled by Fitzgerald’s intimate and intense creative rivalry with his often-institutionalized wife, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald.
While sentiment is a discredited strain in high modernism, Fitzgerald nevertheless embraced it in Tender Is the Night to fashion this most poignant and beautiful successor to The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald’s aesthetic and emotional preoccupations came most vividly to life in this major novel. Messenger describes how Fitzgerald, creating his character Nicole Warren Diver as a victim of paternal incest, finally found the sentimental key to finishing his novel and uniting his vision of the two narratives of “saving” the two sisters and reimagining the agony of his wife and their marriage.
Fitzgerald’s productive quarrel with and through sentiment defines his career, and Messenger convincingly argues that Tender Is the Night should be placed alongside TheGreat Gatsby as a classic exemplar of the modern novel.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817387976 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 01/15/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 336 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
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Tender Is the Night and F. Scott Fitzgerald's Sentimental Identities
By Chris Messenger
The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 2015 University of Alabama PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-8797-6
CHAPTER 1
"Rare," "Whole-Souled," "Vicious"
Fitzgerald's Ambivalence toward Sentiment in Book One of Tender Is the Night
From Fitzgerald's two mature novels, The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night, we learn about a love—perhaps it is peculiarly American—that is destructive by reason of its very tenderness. It begins in romance, sentiment, even "glamour"—no one, I think, has remarked how innocent of mere "sex," how charged with sentiment is Fitzgerald's description of love in the jazz age.
—Lionel Trilling The Liberal Imagination
Fitzgerald conceived Book One of Tender Is the Night through a series of sentimental stagings where the full range of sentiment's power is posited from a naive sympathy through sadomasochistic identification. Fitzgerald intuited Freud's redoubling of the traditional stakes of sentiment through the sexualized knowledge of its workings. Through these two linked subject positions, Fitzgerald fully partakes in a Humean emotional response to the roles of subject-object as well as a Freudian gloss on sentiment's imaginary in adversarial stances of embrace and denial. Tender Is the Night captures these moments in high modernism, ones that clearly define Fitzgerald's fictional needs and achievement. The most completely rendered scenes in Book One of Tender Is the Night are those with full historical, emotional, and aesthetic resonance—classic accounts of sentiment converting affect into philosophical and aesthetic disquisition.
When the American psychiatrist Dick Diver in Tender Is the Night looks across at a long table of "gold star muzzers [mothers]" in a Paris restaurant in 1925, he sees American women of different ages and social classes gathered together as a unit to mourn for their dead husbands, sons, and brothers who had fought with the Allied Expeditionary Forces in World War I. Fitzgerald concludes: "Over his wine Dick looked at them again; in their happy faces, the dignity that surrounded and pervaded the party, he perceived all the maturity of an older America. For a while the sobered women who had come to mourn for their dead, for something they could not repair, made the room beautiful. Momentarily, he sat again on his father's knee, riding with Moseby [sic] while the old loyalties and devotions fought on around him. Almost with an effort he turned back to his two women at the table and faced the whole new world in which he believed" (100–01). Dick's "two women" are his wife, Nicole Warren Diver, a paternal incest survivor and also his life-long unofficial patient, and Rosemary Hoyt, an eighteen-year-old American movie starlet who has recently had great success in Daddy's Girl. They represent the "whole new world" in which Dick and the twentieth century would come to "believe," the world of institutional and therapeutic sympathy represented by Freudian analysis and the performative world of Hollywood which would give visual power to a new popular dramatic rendering of emotional response. Taken together, Freudian love and movie love and their refracted representation would ultimately merge seduction and sympathy through sentiment's tangled account of primal scenes and their compensations by Hollywood in modernity's most popular art form. Freudian love and movie love are deeply expressive of twentieth-century sentiment that coheres through the Foucaultian view that sexuality tells us our truth and is our truth.
Yet Dr. Diver is equally caught in the nineteenth century's residual moral and sentimental strictures. The dignified and strong American women who make the room "beautiful" in their grief represent older strictures and contrast so forcefully with the two modern women under Dick's charge who are emotionally wrecked (Nicole) and unformed/commodified (Rosemary). The Gold Star Mothers in their mourning represent survivors from the heart of sentimental culture, a legacy from the nineteenth century's official discourses of sentiment and sympathy in a number of realms including fiction, poetry, domestic society, popular arts, and national narratives, both in America and in Europe. Instead of mothers mourning for dead men (sons), Fitzgerald radically alters the scene to the living, wherein Dick takes on the burden of sustaining the two women. The male psychiatrist objectifies Nicole and Rosemary by assigning them their roles in his sentimental reverie for a maternal past and in an uncertain desiring commitment to the therapeutic future.
As a final element in the mix, Fitzgerald has Dick remember his own Southern roots; he has him recall the image of the dashing mounted man in gray who represented martial daring but also romantic codes, "loyalties" that he learned "on his father's knee." In this rich sentimental scene, Fitzgerald portrays a very conflicted Dick Diver, part romantic nostalgic hero from an earlier century, part caretaker of a brave new world of psychoanalysis, which underwrites the twentieth century's quintessential sentimental and aesthetic environment in the West. He will move within these sentimental discourses and boundaries, figuratively from mothers to daughters, always as caregiver but also as brother, father, son, husband, seducer, dandy, drunkard, romantic idealist, general, director, actor, party host, nostalgist, and nurse.
Tender Is the Night is an ambitious novel; its formidable range finally brought to completion the project that Fitzgerald had fitfully reworked over the decade since The Great Gatsby (1925). In Book One, Tender's large cast of characters, dozens of European settings, and supposedly uneven narration have contributed to the relegation of the novel to second position behind the tight symmetrical gem of Gatsby. Tender, while redolent with gorgeous prose, wisdom of the heart, and ambitious historicizing, has often been difficult to bring together thematically and ideologically for the reader. This chapter provides an analysis of several key scenes in Book One of Tender to bring forth issues and achievements in the novel that can be more adequately discussed within a sentimental frame. Sentiment has a long and varied history in the philosophy and fiction of the West in the last four centuries, but it is safe to say that sentiment was never as derided as it was by early twentieth-century modernity and thus by the creative and critical tenets of literary modernism. When Fitzgerald writes "sentiment" or "sentimentality" in Tender in 1934, he does so in a chaos of signification. He writes in the midst of a clash between sentiment's residual Victorian power and influence as well as under the sign of an already established distaste for the sentimental as devalued and cheapened, a view he shared in some measure on the surface while he was obsessed with sentiment in the deep structures of his imagination. How Fitzgerald negotiates this varied sentimental field in different contexts in Tender defines paradigmatic conflicts over the multiple meanings of affect for authors, characters, and readers. This negotiated field charts the ways in which sentiment was evolving in the analytical and entertainment cultures of the modern and postmodern West.
Sentiment always becomes, in Eve Sedgwick's phrase, a "structure of relation" (143), both "honorific" and "most damning," most often at the same time (150); she posits a slippage between identification and desire (159) in the complex associations of wanting to be and wanting to have. In multiple contexts, Fitzgerald in Tender explores and enacts sentiment while both naming and suppressing its conundrums. Indeed, in Book One alone, sentiment is rhetorically called a "rarer atmosphere" (34), "whole-souled" (57), and "vicious" (69); sentiment is also strictly implied (100–01) and markedly felt in its absence (112). Fitzgerald's emotional range can repeatedly be gauged by his inscriptions of sentiment in specific public-private environments: dinner parties, battlefield cemeteries, movie screenings, a group of grieving mothers, and a hysterical incest victim pleading for privacy. Furthermore, "Dick Diver" is a site where and in whom Sedgwick would feel the sentimental had come to be lodged after the 1880s: "the exemplary instance of the sentimental ceases to be a woman per se, but instead becomes the body of a man who ... physically dramatizes ... a struggle of masculine identity with emotions" (146). Sedgwick sentimentally locates for male bodies in gender studies what Nina Baym has classically titled the "melodrama of beset manhood" in American fiction and criticism. Sentiment never scrutinizes the true or the beautiful in splendid isolation but moves such concepts into relations between human subjects in coercive and intimate ways that we both crave and suspect. Indeed "moving" and being "moved" are key components for Chandler in describing sentiment's "landscape of shifting sight lines" (174). Never out of sentiment's thrall, Fitzgerald wars within the term while he relentlessly elaborates on its usage in Book One of Tender.
Sentimental dynamics are in play across a range of critical discourses on the emotions. Diana Fuss cites the Freud of Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921) to the effect that identification is always ambivalent, that it can be "an expression of tenderness" as well as a "wish for someone's removal," that the base of identification can be murderous as well as cannibalizing (93). Sentiment consistently plays with feeling as excess emotional capital in a distinctive erotics of material re-presentation. Sentiment is not generated in response to suffering but is produced within the dynamic of suffering within reader relations to a text. We as readers mime in a controlled environment our life-world emotional encounters, redoubled in textual recreation through the act of reading. Within Book One of Tender, Fitzgerald sought to portray and reflect upon emotion in what Elizabeth Dillon calls sentimentalism's "radical oscillation of claims" (515). Such an oscillation in the sentimental contract between intimate parties—what Zizek would call the parallax of the gap—underscores the ominous attempt by Dick Diver to achieve the union of "Dicole" with his incestuously raped wife, to be a couple tethered to one another at all times in the name of love and therapy. The logic of the care-full sentimental, however, is pushed toward the catastrophic end points of incest and rape themselves (Hendler 128), a fact hardly grasped by the reader in the shocking and mystifying collapse of Nicole at the conclusion of Book One. Fitzgerald in Tender Is the Night chronicles sentiment's strongest implications about male power's contradictory aims: to dominate women and the family, to try to save, protect, and seduce them, and to disastrously blur the differences.
The Divers Give a Party
Fitzgerald crafts a communal circle of sentimental affection through an early scene in which Rosemary Hoyt attends the Divers' elegant dinner party at the Villa Diana. Rosemary's impressions are a sentimental high point in Tender that almost magically transform the night for the expatriate Americans:
Rosemary, as dewy with belief as a child from one of Mrs. Burnett's vicious tracts, had a conviction of homecoming, of a return from the derisive and salacious improvisations of the frontier. There were fireflies riding on the dark air and a dog baying on some low and far-away ledge of the cliff. The table seemed to have risen a little toward the sky like a mechanical dancing platform, giving the people around it a sense of being alone with each other in the dark universe, nourished by its only food, warmed by its only lights. And as if a curious hushed laugh from Mrs. McKisco were a signal that such a detachment from the world had been attained, the two Divers began suddenly to warm and glow and expand, as if to make up to their guests, already so subtly assured of their importance, so flattered with politeness, for anything they might still miss from that country well left behind. Just for a moment they seemed to speak to everyone at the table, singly and together, assuring them of their friendliness, their affection. And for a moment the faces turned up toward them were like the faces of poor children at a Christmas tree. Then abruptly the table broke up—the moment when the guests had been daringly lifted above conviviality into the rarer atmosphere of sentiment was over before it could be irreverently breathed, before they had half realized it was there. (34)
The Divers' party is where a community of taste is formed; those fortunate enough to be in the sentimental moment are deemed the elect. They mutually reinforce each other in a tacit sharing of norms, in which aesthetic appreciation of their environment is enhanced by their sense of being "included" through the group sympathy that they share in what Dillon would call sentiment's "affective immediacy" (508, 515). In a chronotope, the assembled expatriate Americans are welcomed off the degraded "frontier" of the Riviera or of Rosemary's Hollywood, a "salacious improvisation" of its own, to an "American" table, one that gives them back themselves at their best; "detached from the world," they and the Divers almost appear to be floating in the stars. The people at the Diver table are in "the dark universe" on Tender's movie screen yet watching the "film" at the same time. They desire only to be included by Dick and Nicole who "expand" in performance as did Gatsby who "concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor" (Gatsby 48), sentimentally confirming your best sense of self where sympathy is projective identification. The sophistication of the guests is swept away as they become more like Victorian orphans ("faces of poor children at a Christmas tree"), yearning toward the Divers. In earlier manuscript drafts, Fitzgerald had written "sentiment" as "loving kindness" but its accent is lost "before it could be irreverently breathed," as if such a sentimental occasion is unbearable and unsustainable. Sentiment is a way to firm up what would be; it is a way of staying behind in sensation, to take another bite of space before falling through the image. The idea that sentiment will make the affect last is itself a sentimental view.
The affective mood provisionally summoned by Fitzgerald in the "rarer atmosphere" of the Diver party scene does not require a suffering subject but rather a democratic inclusion in an haute bourgeois moment of wellbeing. The performed scene features a group of party guests, not a family, an eclectic "American" round-up of an actress (and her mother), a composer (and wife), a popular novelist (and wife), a movie director, a soldier-of-fortune, a socialite matron, and two gay males, with a psychiatrist and rich patient-wife as hosts. The "dark universe" of stars is the "nourishment" and the only light, borrowing from the night of Keats' nightingale and warm South (see Chapter 7). Fitzgerald pulls back his curtain to show the constructedness of sentiment (a "mechanical dancing platform") and still wants his party guests (and readers) to be moved by it. Such is a shared aura of community, a very American one built at sentiment's table; the goal of hearts going out to one another is without tears and seemingly without stress or manipulation in its romance.
A writer with immense gifts to invoke an evanescent mood, Fitzgerald knew better than any of his readers and critics his power to imagine such sentimental moments, which is why when Dick Diver is praised for his ability to always say the right thing before his fall, he pronounces it as "a trick" and "a trick of the heart" (164, 216). Fitzgerald conceived sentiment as a "trick" of the language in which he soared and also mistrusted his affects. Perhaps the sentimental high point of romantic description in the Fitzgerald canon is Gatsby and Daisy's kiss on the Louisville street—"unutterable visions [wedded] to her perishable breath," "tuning fork touched upon a star"—that Nick Carraway immediately interprets through the haze of what he calls Gatsby's "appalling sentimentality" (Gatsby 112, emphasis mine). Nick's guilty pleasure and approbation at such language has stamped him as male, modern, and realistic for successive critical reading generations. In Tender as well, Fitzgerald initially discounts Rosemary's viewpoint as "dewy with belief" but then makes yet another room "beautiful." Fitzgerald can do the sentimental in different voices but never without an anxiety borne out of knowledge of its powerful fragility, so mistrusted due to modernist critical denigration.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Tender Is the Night and F. Scott Fitzgerald's Sentimental Identities by Chris Messenger. Copyright © 2015 University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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