Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Tender Is the Night, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Excess, Destruction, and the Failed American Dream
Gender, Mental Illness, and Psychiatry
The Pursuit of Youth and Innocence
Racism and Otherness
Summary
Analysis
Nicole walks around her garden at the villa she and Dick have had built in Tarmes, a village up the hill from the beach at Gausse’s. She is 24 years old and her face is stern but lovely. As Nicole gazes out at the sea view, Dick appears from the house with a megaphone in hand. He announces to Nicole that he has, in fact, invited Mrs. Abrams for dinner; he wishes to throw “a really bad party”—“a party where there’s a brawl and seductions and people going home with their feelings hurt and women passed out in the cabinet de toilette.”
Once more Fitzgerald draws attention to a certain hardness in Nicole’s beauty, suggesting that she has experienced some difficulties during her life. Dick’s eccentricity is revealed when he calls to Nicole through a megaphone across the garden. The reader sees an image of a man so at ease in his indulgent and luxurious lifestyle that he won’t even walk across the garden to speak to his wife. Fitzgerald reveals a glimpse into the raucous and careless party scene of the 1920s through Dick’s description of fights, “seductions,” and hurt feelings.
Themes
Nicole senses that Dick is in one of his moods, exuding “the excitement that swept everyone up into it and was inevitably followed by his own form of melancholy.” Dick has an irresistible charm, whereby he holds the power to sweep everybody up into his own exciting, peculiar world, so long as they subscribe “to it completely.”
Rosemary and Mrs. Speers are the first dinner guests to arrive at the villa, and Dick welcomes them graciously. At Earl Brady’s request, the two Diver children, Lanier and Topsy, sing a sweet French song, prompting Rosemary to feel that Villa Diana is “the center of the world.” She is shocked when Violet and Mr. McKisco, Mrs. Abrams, Mr. Dumphry, and Mr. Campion arrive, believing them to be “incongruous” guests. Dick’s cool confidence and ease, however, soon convinces Rosemary that everything is quite perfect.
Rosemary is completely compelled by the magical loveliness of the Divers’ beautiful life, house, and children. Nicole forbids Dick from inviting the McKiscos and their set to the dinner party, but he has done it anyway, suggesting that Nicole has little sway in the face of her husband’s impulsivity and desires.
Themes
Rosemary finds Tommy Barban’s talk of war glum and repulsive and is glad to escape him and find Dick beside her instead. She is a romantic and feels the glow of his brightness around her. Sensing her mother’s approval to “go as far as” possible with Dick, she declares, “I fell in love with you the first time I saw you,” but Dick pretends not to hear.
Tommy represents a particular kind of traditional masculinity and is positioned in contrast to Dick’s. Where Dick embodies careful manners and American values, Tommy is an “uncivilized” warrior—he lacks restraint and represents physical strength. Fitzgerald highlights a moral decline during the Jazz Age through Mrs. Speers who, sensing an opportunity to teach her daughter something, encourages Rosemary to pursue a romantic relationship with Dick, despite their significant age difference and his marriage and family.
Themes
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