tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5114353219480265259.post3742815289329074786..comments2024-01-07T14:25:51.724-08:00Comments on Sgt. Tanuki's Lonely Hearts Club Blog: F. Scott Fitzgerald: Tender Is The Night (1934)Tanukihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00010917992146986329noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5114353219480265259.post-23222764095161031982011-11-17T17:03:00.275-08:002011-11-17T17:03:00.275-08:00Thanks for the comment, Cat! God, I'd love to...Thanks for the comment, Cat! God, I'd love to be in your Gatsby class. I haven't discussed Fitzgerald in a classroom situation since my junior year in high school.<br /><br />All of what you say about his treatment of the female characters, and Dick's yearning for patriarchal authority, is true, and something that I had been aware of without being aware of it, so to speak. I'm so glad you mention it. <br /><br />It helps me realize that, for a book that's all about beauty, there's something really ugly at the heart of it. And I don't mean something as simplistic as "F. Scott is sexist." I mean, the book is so full of self-pity. <br /><br />Like, if we take Dick as Fitzgerald's self-portrait, and Nicole as his portrait of Zelda, then it's F. Scott bellyaching that this woman ruined him. If that's too simplistic - if we're meant to assume that there's more fictionalization going on - then, what, it's saying that the psychologist, the artist, the only one who Truly Understands, is doomed to be used up and discarded by those he helps with his precious insights? Martyr complex much?<br /><br />I don't think that by saying that I'm trying to say that it's a lousy book - the writing hasn't lost a step, and some of the scenes have great power. But, hmm...Tanukihttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00010917992146986329noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5114353219480265259.post-15638819637611028622011-11-17T07:32:25.799-08:002011-11-17T07:32:25.799-08:00I love this post--thank you! It's been a surpr...I love this post--thank you! It's been a surprisingly long time since I've read *Tender Is the Night*, surprisingly long given that I teach *Gatsby* almost every year. Everything you say here rings true to me. *Tender Is the Night* frustrates me more than *Gatsby*, I think, because so much of Fitzgerald's critique of hedonism and the modern generation's directionlessness centers on the figure of the sexualized and object-obsessed woman. This is true in *Gatsby* as it is in *Tender Is the Night*, but somehow it bothers me more in the increasingly manipulative and dangerous Nicole than in the simpler femme fatale Daisy (though obviously the two are incarnations of each other). Also, Dick's fantasy of returning to a simpler girl is chastened by the sense that all women are somehow commercial and manufactured in the modern period, as Rosemary is the little-girl-lost movie star. These themes are present in *Gatsby* undoubtedly (Jordan the cheating golf celebrity, the would-be starlets at Gatsby's party), and yet they frustrate me more in *Tender Is the Night* because Dick's mournful lostness is so much the psychological center of the novel. Somehow Nick is more cynical and Jay is more idealistic in a way that doesn't ask me to feel terrible on behalf of men who don't know what to be when the option of being the traditional patriarch is taken away...Anyhow, those are somewhat rambling thoughts about the novel, but your remarks about Nicole's curating sparked them because it seems like women hold this crucial relationship to objects in the book...because they threaten to become objects themselves, both in a way that seems passive (Nicole as patient or lover to be exchanged) and in a way that seems dangerously active (Nicole as implacable barrier to Dick's desires). Her narcissism, invested in objects, turns her self into an object too.Cathttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02826838358315364238noreply@blogger.com