Tender is the Night
Authors: Giskin Day
Journal: BMJ (2007)

Tender is the Night is one of the earliest works of fiction to feature a distinctly modern psychiatrist as a major character. The novel documents a pivotal point in the literary depiction of psychiatric medicine. It is predicated on knowledge of Freudian concepts and shows acute awareness of increasing medical specialisation, yet the character of Dick Diver echoes many of the traits that Victorian authors found alluring of doctors as literary characters.

Dick and Nicole Diver are a wealthy, successful couple holidaying amid adoring acolytes. They saccharinely refer to themselves as the conjunction “Dicole,” and seem for all the world to be the perfect couple. As the narrative unfolds, the opening scenes retroactively take on the appearance of a mirror ball—plenty of glister, but a hollow core belies the sparkling exterior.

Dick Diver is a medical doctor, psychiatrist, and writer. When they meet, Nicole Warren is the mental patient of a friend. The Freudian theme of unresolved transference forms the axis about which their marriage turns. Dick is unable to sustain indefinitely the roles of father, lover, and doctor to Nicole. He is flawed as a husband, but also his clinical abilities as a psychiatrist to her seem deeply questionable. Dick is adamant that Nicole must subjugate her symptoms and any acknowledgment of the incest that triggered her illness. “Control yourself!” he insists whenever she has a “turn.” Nicole comes to realise that repression is unhelpful. She resents playing “planet to Dick’s sun.” Her cure is effected by divorcing Dick, thus resolving the transference—and affirming the novel’s pro-psychoanalytical credentials.

The explanatory models for madness in the novel are complex. For Nicole and her father, mental illness is the plausible consequence of distressing events, congruent with Freud’s theories on trauma as a trigger for hysteria. Yet, Dick Diver’s madness is a moral condition. The pleasure principle reigns in Dick’s weakness for alcohol, youth, and beauty. He finds it increasingly difficult to reconcile his own quasi-incestual sexual impulses, particularly in relation to the virginal, infantile actress Rosemary. But Dick’s indulgence is harnessed to an abrogation of social responsibility, especially in relation to work. He neglects his project on classifying psychoses and neuroses. His intellectualism goes to waste: “He had been swallowed up like a gigolo, and somehow permitted his arsenal to be locked up in the Warren safety-deposit vaults.” A critique of abandoning work is a leitmotif in much of Fitzgerald’s fiction, and reaches its apotheosis here. For all the novel’s commitment to modern themes of commercialism and voyeurism, Diver exhibits many of the familiar hallmarks of the Victorian doctor in literature. Reminiscent of Charles Bovary in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, he has his professional life proscribed by the social circumstances brought about by marrying “out of his class.” Like Tertius Lydgate in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (BMJ 2007;335:213, doi: 10.1136/bmj.39281.661250.59), he fails to show insight into the psyche of either his wife or himself in spite of being a member of a profession predicated on diagnostic skill. Also in common with his Victorian antecedents, the early promise of a brilliant career is never fulfilled. It all ends ruinously. 

Fitzgerald succeeds in fashioning a thoroughly modern novel, which recognises psychoanalysis as an important opportunity for fiction, particularly for sexual confession.