The prosperity of the Jazz Age brought new possibilities for young Americans, who often traveled to Europe to escape the United States’ puritanical moral codes and the prohibition. While the younger generations drank and smoked more, wore more revealing clothes, and expressed more sexually liberated behaviors, a moral panic increased among older generations, who feared for the loss of innocence in society. Capturing this tension, Fitzgerald’s characters in Tender is the Night are obsessed with the power and beauty of youth, which for them symbolizes innocence, possibility, promise, and hope. Fitzgerald shows, however, how youthful innocence is often vulnerable to exploitation, and how the pursuit of youth inevitably results in destruction and misery.
Fitzgerald introduces the theme of innocence through Rosemary Hoyt, who epitomizes all the promise of youth—beauty, purity, and possibility. Rosemary’s beauty and charm are inherently tied to her youth and innocence. When she arrives at the beach on the French Riviera, her cheeks are flushed from “the strong pump of her young heart,” her “magic” is likened to the “flush of children after their cold baths,” and her “body hovered delicately on the last edge of childhood—she was almost eighteen, nearly complete, but the dew was still on her.” Similarly, Rosemary’s character in the Hollywood movie Daddy’s Girl is “so young and innocent.” She was cast for the role precisely because she radiates an image of sweetness, virtue, and goodness. It is Rosemary’s liminal position between childhood and adulthood that makes her so appealing to Dick and the rest of his party—she no longer behaves like a child, but she has not yet been corrupted by the adult world. Too young to have been touched directly by the horrors of World War I, Rosemary symbolizes hope and purity.
As wealthy, hedonistic expatriates, Fitzgerald’s characters harbor the illusion that they are somehow capable of capturing the beauty and vitality of youth forever. For Nicole, the pursuit of youth means tanning, dieting, and shopping—hallmarks of modern femininity. She also frequently compares herself to Rosemary, who is six years younger: “Rosemary was beautiful—her youth was a shock to Nicole, who rejoiced, however, that the young girl was less slender by a hairline than herself.”
For Dick, however, clinging to his youth means seducing young, beautiful women. It is impossible to ignore Dick’s troubling sexual attraction to youth and innocence. After kissing Nicole for the first time, when she is only 16 years old, he remembers “that nothing had ever felt so young as her lips.” Similarly, after his first kiss with Rosemary on her 18th birthday, Dick continues to draw attention to her age, infantilizing and patronizing her. He calls her “a lovely child” and assumes a “paternal attitude” towards her. Dick loves Nicole, who is both young and beautiful, but arguably he pursues Rosemary because she represents an innocence that Nicole never possessed. When Dick met Nicole—although childlike in her madness—the incestuous rape she experienced as a child at the hands of her father, Mr. Warren, meant Dick couldn’t see her as truly pure or innocent. For a short while, Dick’s romantic relationship with Rosemary does allow him to possess the power of youth and innocence—or at least the illusion of it. Just a day after distancing himself from Rosemary, citing her age as one of the reasons they can’t be together, Dick changes his mind. They kiss “ravenously” in a taxi, intoxicated by the feeling of “an extraordinary innocence” between them.
Fitzgerald presents how Dick’s destructive pursuit of youth and innocence is both exploitative and impossible to achieve. Dick’s desire for Rosemary presents him with an impossible paradox: to pursue a sexual relationship with her would be to sully and destroy her innocence and virtue, the characteristics he so desperately wants to conquer and possess. When Dick meets Rosemary in Italy, three years after their original infatuation, he is desperate to know whether she is still a virgin. When Rosemary realizes “she did not want him to be like other men, yet here were the same exigent demands, as if he wanted to take some of herself away,” it becomes clear that Dick’s interest in Rosemary is about control and exploitation. He desires her young body, her immaturity, her impressionability, and her virginity, because he enjoys the power that her youth gives him.
As Dick loses control over his career, his health, and his relationships with Nicole and Rosemary, he becomes preoccupied with demonstrating his own youthful vitality. Back in the Riviera, he remembers a trick he used to perform on the aquaplane. Meanwhile, Nicole realizes that “the closeness of Rosemary’s exciting youth” has prompted Dick’s desire to show off his physical strength, but even proximity to Rosemary can’t give Dick the vivacity he longs for. After failing to execute his trick in front of Rosemary and her young friends, “Nicole saw Dick floating exhausted and expressionless, alone with the water and the sky.” Lonesome and defeated, Dick is forced to finally accept his powerlessness in the world. Compared to the “water and sky,” he is nothing; even Dick Diver can’t hold back the hands of time.
Related Themes from Other Texts
The Pursuit of Youth and Innocence ThemeTracker
The Pursuit of Youth and Innocence Quotes in Tender Is the Night
Her eyes were bright, big, clear, wet, and shining, the color of her cheeks was real, breaking close to the surface from the strong young pump of her heart. Her body hovered delicately on the last edge of childhood—she was almost eighteen, nearly complete, but the dew was still on her.
Her naïveté responded whole-heartedly to the expensive simplicity of the Divers, unaware of its complexity and its lack of innocence, unaware that it was all a selection of quality rather than quantity from the run of the world’s bazaar; and that the simplicity of behavior also, the nursery-like peace and good will, the emphasis on the simpler virtues, was part of a desperate bargain with the gods and had been attained through struggles she could not have guessed at.
“You were brought up to work—not especially to marry. Now you’ve found your first nut to crack and it’s a good nut—go ahead and put whatever happens down to experience. Wound yourself or him—whatever happens it can’t spoil you because economically you’re a boy, not a girl.”
They were full of brave illusions about each other, tremendous illusions, so that the communion of self with self seemed to be on a plane where no other human relations mattered. They both seemed to have arrived there with an extraordinary innocence as though a series of pure accidents had driven them together, so many accidents that at last they were forced to conclude that they were for each other. They had arrived with clean hands, or so it seemed, after no traffic with the merely curious and clandestine.
Only the image of a third person, even a vanished one, entering into his relation with Rosemary was needed to throw him off his balance and send through him waves of pain, misery, desire, desperation. The vividly pictured hand on Rosemary’s cheek, the quicker breath, the white excitement of the event viewed from outside, the inviolable secret warmth within.
—Do you mind if I pull down the curtain?
—Please do. It’s too light in here.
“Look, I’m in an extraordinary condition about you. When a child can disturb a middle-aged gent—things get difficult.”
“You’re not middle-aged, Dick—you’re the youngest person in the world.”
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.
For three years Dick had been the ideal by which Rosemary measured other men and inevitably his stature had increased to heroic size. She did not want him to be like other men, yet here were the same exigent demands, as if he wanted to take some of herself away, carry it off in his pocket.
