“The Pathology of the Skin” in Tender Is the Night
Elena Janney
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night highlights urgent racial anxieties that plagued the white American psyche during the Jazz Age. The novel’s opening scene, set at a hotel beach on the French Riviera, immediately locates the stability of racial categories as a point of tension in the text. As a newcomer to Gausse’s Hôtel, young Hollywood starlet Rosemary Hoyt quickly perceives a division between “the dark people and the light” (Fitzgerald 5-6). These two social groups—the bronzed bodies “indigenous to the place” differentiated from the foreign white bodies of the “untanned people”—consist of white American expatriates and white American tourists, respectively (Fitzgerald 5, 7). When the two parties mix at a gathering hosted by the Divers, Rosemary worries at the “incongruous mingling” (Fitzgerald 29). This racialized language invokes the dread of miscegenation that attended American concerns with preserving the integrity of the “color line.” Thus, even in this racially homogenous milieu, an awareness of the strain of interracial encounter informs the in-group social dynamics of white Americans.
The twentieth-century phenomenon of tanning, as popularized by the leisure class, fundamentally destabilized the established racial taxonomy. As the traditional racial marker of pigmentation became mutable, a distressing potential for slippage between racial castes emerged. This anxiety, defined in the novel’s first moments, is paradigmatic in Tender Is the Night, because inasmuch as whiteness becomes an unstable racial category, national identity grows more difficult to judge and define. This first morning on Gausse’s Beach, Tommy Barban, introduced as “a young man of Latin aspect,” underlines this issue by reading out a list of ethnically ambiguous names from The New York Herald: “‘Mr. Pandely Vlasco, Mme. Boneasee… Corinna Medonca, Mme. Pasche, Mme. Paragoris, Apostle Alexandre, Yolanda Yosfuglu and Geneveva de Momus!’” (Fitzgerald 5, 18). These new arrivals to France illustrate that, on the Riviera, racial and national affiliations are becoming increasingly illegible. Despite its introduction in the guise of an amusing guessing game, the impulse to verify and authenticate national identity ultimately stems from deep-seated anxieties that give rise to an onslaught of hysterical representations of racial difference throughout the novel.
In Tender Is the Night, Fitzgerald consistently equates racial otherness, and especially blackness, with sexual pathology. Alarmist images of blackness and black sexuality—mythologized as more virile and animalistic by the warped logic of comparative racialization—seem to surge up in the text in conjunction with episodes of psychotic trauma. Fitzgerald’s elaborate coding of this hyper-masculinized racial other as a contaminant that threatens to pollute whiteness and corrupt sexuality reflects modern apprehensions about the emblematically disquieting potential for miscegenation. The insistent linkage of blackness and psychosis in Tender Is the Night means that the paranoia in a comment such as, “The versatility of madness is akin to the resourcefulness of water seeping through, over and around a dike,” speaks in equal measure to white hysteria about increased racial mobility (Fitzgerald 191-2). Using images of racial difference to evoke madness and contagion, Fitzgerald effectively constitutes blackness itself as pathological. The portentous presence of the racial other threatens darkly just beneath the text, flashing onto the surface at critical junctures to color the narrative with insanity, chaos, absurdity and menace.
The work of Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison in parsing the symbolic role of African Americans in the white imaginary is useful for framing representations of racial difference in Tender Is the Night. In his essay “Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity,” Ellison asserts: “Despite their billings as images of reality, these Negroes of fiction are counterfeits. They are projected aspects of an internal symbolic process through which . . . the white American prepares himself emotionally to perform a social role” (118). Morrison expands on Ellison’s investigation into “the strategic use of black characters to define the goals and enhance the qualities of white characters” in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (53). She problematizes “the way black people ignite critical moments of discovery or change or emphasis in literature not written by them,” ultimately identifying the presence of blackness in the work of white artists as “a ‘metaphorical shortcut’ to evoke dread, foreboding or anarchy” (Morrison viii, x). It is by means of just this sort of “metaphorical shortcut” that blackness comes to connote sexual pollution in Tender Is the Night. Morrison argues that, among other things, this tradition of invidious association has resulted in the construct of “a dark, abiding, signing Africanist presence” throughout American literature (5)[1]. While Tender Is the Night certainly manifests a pronounced Africanist presence, the book’s setting in Europe complicates this “dark, abiding, signing” force with an “Orientalist” dimension. In “Secular Criticism,” Edward Said explains that, “the Orient and Islam also stood for the ultimate alienation from and opposition to Europe… For centuries, Turkey and Islam hung over Europe like a gigantic composite monster, seeming to threaten Europe with destruction” (608). Owing to their expatriate status, the white American protagonists of Fitzgerald’s novel experience the racial anxieties of two continents which, upon tangling in the text, truly transform the foreboding Africanist presence into a “gigantic composite monster”—a racial other undifferentiated and omnipresent in its threat.
The textual presence of this racial other in the novel is intimately bound to Nicole Diver’s schizophrenia, induced by the trauma of incestuous rape during childhood. All representations of blackness or racial difference coincide with and associatively intensify psychotic breaks preoccupied with sexual contamination. Through the majority of Book One, the reader remains unaware of Nicole’s latent illness, though it is the subject of telling allusions. Dick—Nicole’s husband and psychologist—nakedly characterizes her condition as “the dishonor, the secret” (Fitzgerald 152). In this way, Nicole’s madness and the sexual pollution that caused it effectively to operate like the racial secret (black blood) in American passing narratives of the period. This calculated analogy between Nicole’s illness and racial difference is sharpened by her own sister, Baby, who uses strongly raced language in describing Nicole’s psychosis, “thinking of her as a ‘gone coon’” (Fitzgerald 157). The invidious association between blackness and pathology is so powerful in this text that it is as if Nicole’s disease puts her in another racial category.
Predictably, the first example of an embodied Africanist presence in Tender Is the Night—the first appearance of black characters—coincides with Nicole’s first psychotic relapse and the revelation of her illness. This violent episode, dismissed by Dick as a “nigger scrap,” concludes with the discovery of a murdered black man in Rosemary’s hotel bed (Fitzgerald 110). In the course of this burlesque, the Divers’ flailing alcoholic friend Abe North succeeds in
entangling himself with the personal lives, consciences, and emotions of one Afro-European and three Afro-Americans inhabiting the French Latin Quarter. The disentanglement was not even faintly in sight and the day had passed in an atmosphere of unfamiliar Negro faces bobbing up in unexpected places and around unexpected corners, and insistent Negro voices on the phone (Fitzgerald 106).
This alarmist vision of “unfamiliar Negro faces bobbing up in unexpected places and around unexpected corners” adheres to the model of the ubiquitous, interchangeable racial other as a “gigantic composite monster.” In fact, this whole debacle was initiated when Abe failed to distinguish between the black man who allegedly robbed him and the black man he incorrectly accused. Confusion abounds in this farcical “grotesquerie,” as Jules Peterson, the black shoe-polish salesman who came to Abe’s defense, is hunted down and killed in Rosemary’s bed (Fitzgerald 107). The characterization of Peterson, alternately referred to as “a Negro from Copenhagen” and “Mr. Peterson of Stockholm,” suffers from this same phenomenon, as the color of his skin seems to confound the specificity of his identity in the text (Fitzgerald 98, 105). Racial difference is further collapsed into an encompassing otherness when Peterson is described as being “rather in the position of the friendly Indian who had helped a white” (Fitzgerald 106). In this scene, Fitzgerald reduces Afro-Danish/Swedish and Native American identities to interchangeable signifiers of non-whiteness, or perhaps more accurately, of anti-whiteness.
Peterson’s black body in Rosemary’s bed tangibly stains the whiteness of her sheets and more significantly threatens to destroy her reputation. Dick understands that “no power on earth could keep the smear off Rosemary” if a black lover—even a dead one—were publicly attributed to her (Fitzgerald 110). Fitzgerald treats Peterson’s corpse not as a loss in human terms but as an embodied contaminant. His blackness, and the sexual menace that it represents in the racist imaginary, threatens to taint or infect Rosemary indelibly. Moreover, in the moment that she turns to see that “a dead Negro was stretched upon her bed… [Rosemary] had the preposterous idea that it was Abe North” (Fitzgerald 109). It is as if his dissolution and embroilment in the violence ascribed to blackness actually throws the integrity of Abe’s whiteness into question. Abe effectively becomes black in Rosemary’s startled perception. What’s more, the French police persist in searching for a “Mr. Afghan North” even after being corrected to “Mr. Abraham North” (Fitzgerald 96). In this moment, Abe’s association with racial otherness contaminates him to the point of darkening and exoticizing his very name.[2]
On top of spurring the transformation from Abraham to Afghan, Peterson’s body bespeaks the trauma of Nicole’s incestuous contamination by her father. In the confusion of her psychotic breakdown, triggered when Dick hands her a bundle of bloody sheets as he rushes to salvage Rosemary’s virtue by expunging the incriminating stain, Nicole associates the blood of the murdered black man with the vaginal bleeding after her rape.
Nicole knelt beside the tub swaying sideways and sideways. “It’s you!” she cried, “—it’s you come to intrude on the only privacy I have in the world—with your spread with red blood on it. I’ll wear it for you—I’m not ashamed, though it was such a pity… I wanted to come dressed in a spread and they wouldn’t let me… I never expected you to love me—it was too late—only don’t come in the bathroom the only place I can go for privacy, dragging spreads with red blood on them and asking me to fix them” (Fitzgerald 112).
Even after Dick has neatly disposed of Peterson’s corpse, the black man’s blood is infinitely connotative—of sexual pollution, of rape, of dishonor, of anarchy, of violence, of death. Extremely apropos to this incident is Ellison’s observation that anti-black myths are “seen to be operating [in our literature] even when the Negro seems most patently the little man who isn’t there” (“Twentieth-Century Fiction” 119). Peterson’s body has been erased, the soiled sheets replaced with clean white ones, and yet the taboo of miscegenation and of hypersexed black masculinity still looms large in the narrative. To wit, this serviceable dark flesh is “shackled to almost everything [‘the white folk mind’] would repress from conscience and consciousness,” including and especially Nicole’s violent sexual trauma (Ellison, “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke” 48).
Each of Nicole’s other psychotic episodes is likewise tied to a point of contact with racial difference. The reader learns, retrospectively, that Nicole’s first relapse after leaving the clinic as Dick’s wife took place after the birth of her daughter Topsy. In the early years of the Divers’ marriage, Dick and Nicole traveled extensively for her health and, in an increasingly disjointed and paranoid written reflection on this period, Nicole muddles her travels in Africa with Topsy’s birth and with the mental “darkness” of her breakdown: “The night was noisy with drums from Senegal and flutes and whining camels, and the natives pattering about in shoes made of old automobile tires. But I was gone again by that time… That was why he took me travelling but after my second child, my little girl, Topsy, was born everything got dark again” (Fitzgerald 161). Born in madness, Nicole’s daughter bears a marker of racial difference—her name, which recollects the unruly young slave girl, Topsy, of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, described as “one of the blackest of her race” (Stowe 270). The fevered logic that so directly equates pathology with the racial other renders transparent the usually veiled panic around miscegenation. Nicole jabbers, “You tell me my baby is black—that’s farcical, that’s very cheap. We went to Africa merely to see Timgad…” (Fitzgerald 161). In the same way that this paradigm of illogical racial alarmism imputes a black lover to Rosemary, a black father is imputed to Topsy.
The threat of contamination is enacted yet again when the Diver family pays a visit to Dick and Nicole’s friend Mary North, lately remarried to the “Conte di Minghetti,” another ethnically equivocal racial other, who is “not quite light enough to travel in a Pullman south of the Mason-Dixon” (Fitzgerald 258). The reader learns that “Conte di Minghetti” is “merely a papal-title” and that he has an “Asiatic title” as well (Fitzgerald 258, 259). The Conte is described as belonging to “the Kyble-Berber-Sabean-Hindu strain that belts across north Africa and Asia, more sympathetic to the European than the mongrel faces of the ports;” Dick labels him a “Buddha”; and he has “two very tan children by another marriage” (Fitzgerald 259). It is as if the Conte’s divided ethnic and racial affiliations—southwestern Asia, northern Asia and Africa, Italy—render his identity suspect within the text, and his name is accordingly introduced in scare quotes that cast doubt on the reliability of his self-presentation. The text’s mistrustful attitude toward the Conte can likely be traced to the nature of his marriage to Mary, which, by the American terms invoked by reference to the Mason-Dixon line, is understood as miscegenous.
Fitzgerald sketches the greeting between the Divers and the Minghettis as lightly comedic due to the confusion of cultures and customs: “Their hosts were accompanied by an Italian major-domo carrying a staff, by a quartet of turbaned retainers on motorcycles, and by two half-veiled females who stood respectfully a little behind Mary and salaamed at Nicole, making her jump with the gesture” (Fitzgerald 259). In Tender Is the Night, the presence of racial difference invariably incites an absurdist humor, as in the episode of the “race riot” with Jules Peterson. Non-whites stand for an irrationality that infects otherwise orderly and lucid white spaces with chaos. Consider, for example, the bathwater episode with one of the Conte’s sons, who is “‘ill with some Asiatic thing they can’t diagnose’” (Fitzgerald 260). The text cannot separate the fact of this boy’s mysterious blight from the fact of his “very tan” skin; the two are mutually constitutive and united in the threat they pose to whiteness. The Divers’ son Lanier becomes convinced that he has been bathed in the same water as the sick boy and that it was “dirty” (Fitzgerald 261). Fearing contamination— “People think their children are constitutionally cleaner than other people’s, and their diseases are less contagious”—Dick and Nicole make a scene and manage to deeply offend the Conte by confusing his veiled sister for a maid (Fitzgerald 261). However, notwithstanding this direct point of friction, much of the tension that saturates this visit arises from the implicit idea of Mary’s race betrayal.
The issue at stake—the apparent source of significant authorial anxiety—is the prospect of modern American women as agents of “race suicide.” Mary’s union with an “ethnic” man, coming on the heels of Rosemary’s entanglement with the body of Jules Peterson, is soon followed by Nicole’s affair with the mercenary soldier Tommy Barban, yet another ambiguously raced male body in the text. Nicole notes “the foreignness of his depigmentation by unknown suns,” and “his handsome face was so dark as to have lost the pleasantness of deep tan, without attaining the blue beauty of Negros” (Fitzgerald 269). Tommy is heavily though inconsistently racialized—described as an “unmistakably Latin young man” even while it is revealed that he is half American and half French (Fitzgerald 6, 30). Tommy’s acquisition of phallic supremacy through his tanning incites the inevitable slip from “Barban” to “Barbarian.” Dick frowns on what he sees as his rival’s “irresistible racial tendency to chisel for an advantage,” and he experiences the sight of Nicole and Tommy together as the nadir of his decline (Fitzgerald 310). Dick imagines that he is the last man in the world so that “…then he would not have to look at those two other figures, a man and a woman, black and white and metallic against the sky…” (Fitzgerald 313). The depiction of the two figures, Tommy and Nicole, as an interracial couple signifies that Dick regards her abandonment of him not simply as an attack on his masculinity but on white supremacy as well. This image reflects a nativist paranoia about American “race suicide”—the fear that white women’s growing sexual independence would both undermine the patriarchy and pollute whiteness as a category.
Representations of pathological racial difference imperil whiteness and sanity throughout Tender Is the Night, but it is ultimately Dick, the standard-bearer of white American masculinity, and not Nicole, who emerges as the true victim of this dark contagion. This development demonstrates that images of racial otherness ultimately appear in response to apprehensions about the decline of white masculinity—in other words, of Fitzgerald’s America. Accordingly, Dick envisages his dissipation in racial terms, as a “Black Death” and an affliction of his “black heart” (Fitzgerald 219, 224). Morrison points out that “the fabrication of an Africanist [here, a composite Africanist/Orientalist] persona is reflexive; an extraordinary meditation on the self; a powerful exploration of the fears and desires that reside in the writerly conscious,” and nowhere is this more apparent than in Tender Is the Night (17). Dick operates as Fitzgerald’s surrogate in the text, playing out a slew of authorial anxieties. And as Dick slips away into obscurity at the end of the novel, having returned to America reduced and alone, the book’s reason for casting so many postwar social changes—increased class and racial mobility, greater sexual empowerment for women, mass immigration, growing awareness of homosexuality—in a negative light becomes clear. In Tender Is the Night, Fitzgerald laments the loss of white, patriarchal American primacy, imagining it menaced on all sides by racial others, by sexually aggressive women, by immigrants, by homosexuals, and so on. In the same way that black men are imagined as a threat to white masculinity, sexually independent women’s gains are shown in terms of men’s loss. Over the course of the novel, Nicole achieves her recovery entirely at Dick’s expense, and she eventually moves on rather than “continuing her dry suckling at his lean chest” (Fitzgerald 279). Fitzgerald’s ambivalence about modernity has everything to do with the dangerous breakdown of familiar social hierarchies, which challenges his sense of American identity. At Dick’s father’s funeral—the emblematic death of the white American paterfamilias—near the end of the book, Dick and Fitzgerald wallow in nostalgia for a bygone age of uncontested white patriarchal supremacy: “He knelt on the hard soil. These dead, he knew them all, their weather-beaten faces with blue flashing eyes, the spare violent bodies, the souls made of new earth in the forest-heavy darkness of the seventeenth century. ‘Good-by, my father—good-by, all my fathers’” (Fitzgerald 204-05).
Elena Janney ‘18 is an Art History and Hispanic Studies major who can’t stop taking English classes. When she’s not at Vassar, Elena can be found in the Agnes Martin Gallery at SFMOMA or wandering the hills of Bolinas Ridge. She dreams of one day visiting Walter De Maria’s New Mexico Lightning Field during a summer storm.
Works Cited
Ellison, Ralph. “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke.” Shadow and Act.
New York: Random House, 1952. Print.
Ellison, Ralph. “Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of
Humanity.” Images of the Negro in American Literature. Ed.
Seymour L. Gross and John Edward Hardy. Chicago: U of Chicago,
- 115-131. Print.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. Tender Is the Night. New York: Scribner, 2003.
Print.
Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary
Imagination. New York: Vintage, 1992. Print.
Said, Edward. “Secular Criticism.” Critical Theory Since 1965. Ed.
Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle. Tallahassee: Florida State UP, 1986. 605-622. Print.
Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. New York: Bantam, 2003.
Print.
[1] Morrison uses the term “Africanist” to express “the denotative and connotative blackness that African peoples have come to signify, as well as the entire range of views, assumptions, readings, and misreadings that accompany Eurocentric learning about these people” (6-7).
[2] In a similar situation later in the narrative, when Dick has slipped into his wholesale decline, whiteness is again compromised through negative association. Dick winds up in an Italian jail after brashly insulting a group of taxi-drivers with confused racial slurs, and upon his release an angry crowd mistakes him for “a native of Frascati [who] had raped and slain a five-year-old child” (Fitzgerald 234). In this low hour of his humiliation, Dick’s racial identity is challenged even as he is implicated in sexual violence. The erosion of his whiteness in this moment functions as a sort of “metaphorical shortcut” to produce anxiety in the text.