The modern psychiatric clinic functions as a symbol of society’s cultural anxieties at the time that Fitzgerald was writing. In the novel, patients are admitted for treatment for a whole host of illnesses and nervous conditions, reflecting how the psychiatric industry boomed and flourished in the post-war years. Dick is hired, for example, to cure a young man of his homosexuality, which at the time was considered a disease that needed curing. Fitzgerald also reveals the immense power afforded to psychiatrists to make profound decisions about other people’s lives, and suggests that this is fundamentally irresponsible. Not without irony, Fitzgerald depicts how Dick is entrusted with the task of curing a man of his drinking problem, while suffering with alcoholism himself. Nicole’s father, Mr. Devereux Warren, also presents an interesting case. In the wake of World War I, the figure of the American man symbolized goodness, morality, and heroism. On the surface, Mr. Warren is an attractive, respectable businessman that aligns with this ideal, and no one would suspect him of having raped his own daughter when she was a child. While others might perceive Nicole as mad, sick, or unwell because of her schizophrenia, which stemmed from this traumatic rape, Mr. Warren walks freely among society, never paying a price for the abuse of his daughter. The psychiatrists protect his sordid secret, and thus the sanitarium exists in a space outside of the law, where doctors like Dick and Franz are able to decide who is well and who is mad; who is good, and who is evil.
The Sanitarium Quotes in Tender Is the Night
Nicole took advantage of this to stand up and the impression of her youth and beauty grew on Dick until it welled up inside him in a compact paroxysm of emotion. She smiled, a moving childish smile that was like all the lost youth in the world.
“But I will carry you down in my arms,” Marmora protested intensely. “I will roller-skate you—or I will throw you and you will fall slowly like a feather.”
The delight in Nicole’s face—to be a feather again instead of a plummet, to float and not to drag. She was a carnival to watch—at times primly coy, posing, grimacing and gesturing—sometimes the shadow fell and the dignity of old suffering flowed down into her fingertips.
Dick, why did you register Mr. and Mrs. Diver instead of Doctor and Mrs. Diver? I just wondered—it just floated through my mind.—You’ve taught me that work is everything and I believe you. You used to say a man knows things and when he stops knowing things he’s like anybody else, and the thing is to get power before he stops knowing things. If you want to turn things topsy-turvy, all right, but must your Nicole follow you walking on her hands, darling?
As an indifference cherished, or left to atrophy, becomes an emptiness, to this extent he had learned to become empty of Nicole, serving her against his will with negations and emotional neglect.
“We must think it over carefully—” and the unsaid lines back of that: “We own you, and you’ll admit it sooner or later. It is absurd to keep up the pretence of independence.”
She was laughing hilariously, unashamed, unafraid, unconcerned. No one coming on the scene would have imagined that she had caused it; she laughed as after some mild escape of childhood.
On an almost parallel occasion, back in Dohmler’s clinic on the Zürichsee, realizing this power, he had made his choice, chosen Ophelia, chosen the sweet poison and drunk it. Wanting above all to be brave and kind, he had wanted, even more than that, to be loved. So it had been.
The Sanitarium Symbol Timeline in Tender Is the Night
