Tender Is the Night 443fessional work to focus on her. While he once
held promise as a young psychiatrist with several
well-received publications, he abandons his treatise
entitled A Psychology for Psychiatrists. As predicted
in Zurich, his personal and professional life revolve
around one person, and he finds himself alienated
from her, himself, and his professional interests.
Sadly, Dick does not even seem to realize his own
alienation until he meets Rosemary six years into his
marriage with Nicole. Punctuated by Nicole’s occa-
sional breakdowns and mindless conversations with
other Americans abroad, Dick’s life moves weakly in
mindless repetition.
After meeting Rosemary, however, Dick appears
to realize his own alienation. When Rosemary inserts
herself into the reality of Dick and Nicole, she arouses
Dick’s desire but leaves it unfulfilled. Left with this
unfulfilled desire, Dick, for the first time in six years,
begins to acknowledge his own alienation from him-
self and others. “The turning point in his life” inspires
him to feel his emotions, and, more important to
change. When Rosemary abandons Dick, he is left
wanting as he returns to his humdrum life. There he
finds Nicole the same as before, but he feels different;
he feels their disconnection, their alienation from one
another. Once he acknowledges this separation, he
turns away from her; he refuses his role of psychia-
trist at home, turns his back on his domestic duties,
and symbolically turns away from Nicole at night in
bed. Confronting his own alienation and letting go
of his past is a painful process; indeed, Dick engages
in many negative and destructive behaviors during
this time. He turns to alcohol, verbal and physical
violence, and extreme disillusion. Perhaps his lowest
point occurs after a night of debauchery when he
is mistaken for the rapist of a five-year-old girl and
becomes the object of public hatred.
Those acquainted with the positive “Lucky Dick”
find his transformation painful as well; the “Black
Death,” his term for himself, destroys others as he
metaphorically destroys himself. Through this pain-
ful destruction, Dick’s metamorphosis strips him
of everything, so he may experience a rebirth. His
father dies, he loses his job, and he loses the respect
of others. He loses himself, but he also loses his
wife and his intense alienation. For Dick, hitting
rock bottom moves him in new directions—but
not Nicole. She quickly replaces Dick with another
authoritarian male figure, Tommy Barban, with
whom she is likely to continue yet another repeti-
tive, alienated love in sickness and health. Dick,
on the other hand, returns to private practice and
moves deep into western New York after his pain-
ful transformation. Dick’s life is now simple, quiet,
solitary, and wandering, but more connected to his
own desires.
Erica D. GaliotoillneSS in Tender Is the Night
Psychological illness, rather than physical illness,
pervades F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night.
Dick Diver is studying psychiatry at Johns Hop-
kins University during 1917 when America enters
World War I. Grateful to escape actual combat after
joining the army, he is instead sent to the Dohmler
psychiatric clinic in Zurich, Switzerland, to finish
his medical degree. While there, he makes a strong
impression on a teenage patient, Nicole Warren,
during a brief meeting when she is captivated by his
uniform and he is unaware of her condition. When
the army assigns Dick an executive director position
at a neurological unit in France, Nicole writes him
roughly 50 letters over the course of eight months.
Through this emotional correspondence, Nicole’s
symptoms improve, and when Dick returns to the
clinic in Zurich, he seeks her out immediately.
Upon his return, Dick learns the truth about
Nicole’s mental illness through case files recounted
by his friend and colleague Dr. Franz Gregoro-
vius. Nicole’s early symptoms were characterized
by paranoia, fear, and anxiety: all in relation to an
illogical hysteria surrounding men who she feared
would attack her. Her older sister, Baby, and father,
Devereux, noted that these fantastical fits were first
directed toward male figures she knew, but as time
passed, her tantrums were more intense and included
men who were strangers. Diagnosed with the
divided personality of schizophrenia, Nicole leaves
Chicago for the Zurich clinic, but the doctors insist
on receiving more information from her father. He
reveals, after much pushing and resistance, that he
and Nicole developed a very close relationship when
she was 11 after her mother died. On one occasion,
their relationship turned physical and Devereux had