GENDER AND AGENCY IN TENDER IS THE NIGHT, SAVE ME THE WALTZ,
AND THE GARDEN OF EDEN
By
BECKY ANN WAGENBLAST
A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of
the requirements for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
WASHINGTON STATE UNIVERSITY
Department of English
AUGUST 2015
© Copyright by BECKY ANN WAGENBLAST, 2015
All Rights Reserved
© Copyright by BECKY ANN WAGENBLAST, 2015
All Rights Reserved
To the Faculty of Washington State University:
The members of the Committee appointed to examine the dissertation of BECKY ANN
WAGENBLAST find it satisfactory and recommend that it be accepted.
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Donna M. Campbell, Ph.D., Chair
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Debbie Lee, Ph.D.
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Donna Potts, Ph.D.
ii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I deeply appreciate the guidance, support, and insight of my Chair, Dr. Donna Campbell.
I will always be very grateful for the help she has given to me over the years. To Dr. Debbie Lee
and Dr. Donna Potts, I have immense gratitude as well. Dr. Alexander Hammond and Jana
Argersinger are also sincerely thanked for their encouragement, lessons, and insights over the
course of my graduate years.
The friendship of Dr. Shelly Richardson and Leslie Sena made my time at graduate
school one of warmth and fun that I will always remember fondly. Thank you, dear friends.
My family has made my education possible and supported me throughout. To them, I am
deeply thankful. My mother, Vicki, has been a wellspring of encouragement. Many thanks to
David, Sara, Amy, Ray, Jocelyn, Gretchen, Gabrielle, Kort, Genevieve, Paul, Bardie, Daisy, and
Lexi as well. My late father, Steve, would have been proud of me, I know. My curiosity to
learn, my memory, and sense of humor, I owe to my grandmother, Lee Ellen McLeod
Wagenblast. In another time, she would have been the first woman in the family to earn a
doctorate. And of course, I could never have done it without Dot and Margot, my own little
darlings.
iii
GENDER AND AGENCY IN TENDER IS THE NIGHT, SAVE ME THE WALTZ,
AND THE GARDEN OF EDEN
Abstract
by Becky Ann Wagenblast, Ph.D.
Washington State University
August 2015
Chair: Donna M. Campbell
This dissertation centers its readings of Tender Is the Night, Save Me the Waltz, and The
Garden of Eden through the women protagonists’ voices, a radical critical shift. By considering
the evolutionary attempts of Nicole, Alabama, and Catherine, regardless of their ultimate level of
success, their autonomy as individuals capable and worthy of development themselves is reified.
Examining their use of language, emotions, and actions reasserts their voices as creators of their
own narratives, recentering the texts as important explorations of Modern women through their
constructions of selfhood on the Riviera.
This important work of conceptualizing the self as other, outside the normative behaviors
and conditions expected of American women of the time, is figured in these stories (as in
American culture at large) as mentally unstable or diseased in some way; the characters make
poor decisions and commit regrettable actions; they destroy as much as they create. But by
courageously giving voice to their own sense of selves in a world which prizes muteness in its
women, their attempts at creation and agency are continually inspiring nonetheless.
iv
Chapter One examines F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night and the ways in which
Nicole is able to move from the oppression of dehumanizing silence to a powerful and selfaffirming fluency of language and selfhood. Chapter Two looks as Zelda Fitzgerald’s Save Me
the Waltz and Alabama’s struggles toward, and, sadly, denials of, individualization and agency.
Chapter Three investigates how Catherine, the transitioning protagonist of Ernest Hemingway’s
The Garden of Eden, is both a subversive factor against authority and is ultimately scripted as
doomed because of it.
v
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………………………………………………………………iii
ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………………iv-v
INTRODUCTION………..………………………….……………………………………………1
CHAPTERS
1. The Reclamation of Agency: Rereading Tender Is the Night as Nicole’s
Assertion of Self ..................................................................................................................9
2. Alabama’s “Equivocal Universe” in Zelda Fitzgerald’s Save Me the Waltz .....................45
3. Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden: Incantations of Betrayal ...............................78
WORKS CITED………………….……………………………………………………………121
vi
Dedication
To Mother
vii
INTRODUCTION
The Riviera of the mid-1920s, poised at the moment before its refashioning into a
summer playground for the stylish elite, was for a short time home to three of the defining
members of the Lost Generation, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. In later
years, all three would turn the light of the sun-drenched Rivieran sky onto this personally and
culturally significant time, exploring issues of change, language, and agency in their works.
Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, Zelda’s Save Me the Waltz, and Hemingway’s The Garden of
Eden all pivot around young and stylish couples seeking to create homes, relationships, and art
here on the coast’s liminal space. How the wives in these stories attempt to change, both
themselves and their interactions with the world, frame important issues of gender, language, and
selfhood. The authors, young expatriates seeking artistic inspiration and cultural freedom from
puritanical American restraints in post-Great War France, start from similar premises in these
novels–not entirely surprising, given their (somewhat contentious) friendships and shared
autobiographical histories–but their novels, and the outcomes for their (at times, anti-hero)
heroines, play out in important and differing ways.
The Edenic space of the Riviera witnesses the fall, and the hope of resurrection, of the
novel’s women protagonists–Nicole Diver in Tender Is the Night, Alabama Knight in Save Me
the Waltz, and Catherine Bourne in The Garden of Eden. They use the garden space of the
Riviera to create for themselves, against the patriarchally inscribed boundaries they are
suppressed by in colder, northern climates. By doing so, they threaten the inherent dominance of
white, heterosexual, American men and their authority as creators of their lives’ narratives. Here
in the warm, nurturing liminal landscape, with its fluid disintegration of hierarchal order as the
1
threshold between the interior of Europe and the Mediterranean Sea, the women can be healthy,
vibrant, and productive. Nicole, Alabama, and Catherine all attempt to transition from roles of
dependency to agency in these garden-like Latin climes. The Riviera provides a place of
possibility outside of the frenetic urban environments of New York and Paris, where warmth and
acceptance seem as unnatural as their gilded skylines. An even bigger threat to the women’s
freedom, the oppressive surveillance of the sanitariums of Switzerland, is left behind as well
upon their immersion into the Riviera. The cyclical nature of gardens, the filtering of
experiences through their husbands’ ever-watchful eyes, and the suppression of voice are present
throughout their lives, but here on the Riviera, the assertion of individual agency and the choices
Nicole, Alabama, and Catherine determine and enact create disruption and change.
The transformations the women put themselves through, using their outsider status as the
key to exploring new versions of themselves, becomes an art in itself. To change becomes a holy
act in this place that is neither the land nor the sea. To be near the sea and expatriated is to be
doubly alien, and the fear of being misunderstood is a powerful catalyst for production and
change. When the old oppressive ways of being return to their lives through patriarchal
transgressions, the women undergo traumatic shifts, a splintering of the individual between that
which is expected and their own sense of agency. This important work of conceptualizing the
self as other, outside the normative behaviors and conditions expected of American women of
the time, is figured in these stories (as in American culture at large) as mentally unstable,
diseased in some way; they make poor decisions and commit regrettable actions; they destroy as
much as they create. But by courageously giving voice to their own sense of selves in a world
which prizes muteness in its women, their attempts at creation are inspiring nonetheless.
2
All the women take considerable risks to create both a sense of self and to ground it in
Home. As wealthy, white expatriated women, they share the freedom, monetary and time-wise,
that class and money give them to explore the boundaries of identity and selfhood. And as wives
of successful and artistic men, their lives of travel and exploration afford them insights into
various ways of being and how they may wish to incorporate these into versions of themselves.
But as expatriated women, they do not have stable homes; instead, they must take their sense of
what “home” means with them and attempt to create it anew in transitional spaces. Movement is
a key factor in all of their lives. Whether driving, flying, or traveling by train, they move
rapidly, shifting between landscapes and necessitating skills of adaptation and integration. For
them, home is about relationships forged through a strong sense of self and connection to others.
But they do not preside over traditional spaces of domesticity; these are not angels of the house,
precariously perching atop their pedestals. Instead, they are active agents of change, attempting
to spin outward their evolving senses of inward growth. Using their own personal heritages, for
better or worse, to shape their sense of selves, they attempt to create the stability found in home
in shifting, temporary spaces.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night (1934) has long been celebrated for its depiction
of the brilliant young psychologist, Dick Diver, who sacrifices his life’s work and personal
vitality toward healing his schizophrenic wife and patient, Nicole. Even a brief familiarity with
the Fitzgeralds' own lives makes evident how greatly Fitzgerald culled their experiences to
fashion what is considered his masterpiece. The novel, which took him nine years to complete,
underwent many stops and starts in its construction, accommodating both the author’s frequent
bouts with alcoholism and the necessity of producing cash-generating short stories to provide for
Zelda’s various treatments at sanitariums following her nervous breakdown and subsequent
3
diagnosis of schizophrenia. In the novel, Nicole, too, suffers from schizophrenia, and her
psychologist/husband/father figure, Dick, uses the Old South morality he’s learned from his
father in an effort to treat her. Dick is a curator of life’s experiences, and he attempts to control
and shape everything in their world, from its physical spaces, to their friendships, and even
Nicole’s use of language. Ultimately, though, Dick devotes his oceans of vitality too
consistently outward, never developing a renewing source for his inner self. Nicole, meanwhile,
has evolved from mentally ill teenager to assertive and thoughtful agent of her own life, no
longer needing or wanting her sense of self to be directed by Dick’s controlling hand.
Zelda Fitzgerald’s counterpart to her husband’s Tender Is the Night, Save Me the Waltz
(1932), centers on much of the same autobiographical contextualizing background, but unlike the
phoenix-like turnaround of Nicole’s health and life’s potential, Zelda’s protagonist, Alabama
Knight, irrevocably loses a core part of herself–her marriage is “saved” at the cost of her
individualization. In contrast to Nicole’s (and Zelda’s own) schizophrenic mind’s splitting,
Alabama suffers from a literal split in her body. Like Dick, Alabama’s heritage is deeply rooted
in the Old South, and her sense of self only orbits so far as the pivot of her father, an Alabama
Supreme Court Justice, spins, even after her marriage to a promising young painter, David
Knight. Her attempts to leave the Judge’s masculine authority–as when she chooses to have an
affair with a French airman, Lieutenant Jacques Chevre-Feuille, in the honeysuckle-scented
Rivieran night, or to dance the ballet, first in Paris and then in Naples–are undermined by her
inability to sustain meaningful outward connections with the world, let alone within herself. Her
creative instrument, her body, is tragically cut in two by tendon surgery and with it her
productive, artistic dreams of self-expression. Instead, she is doomed to remain the silent muse
4
of her husband’s art. David paints his own version of Alabama, statically placing her on the
canvas, where her movements no longer threaten his authority over the narrative of their lives.
Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden, published posthumously from an unfinished
draft in 1986, explores the relationship of newlyweds Catherine and David Bourne. While on an
extended honeymoon on the Riviera, Catherine explores her androgynous desires, attempting to
erase any normative lines between herself and her new husband, David, who is an author. They
become androgynous twins, merging into a unit in the sun-bleached seascape of the Riviera. But
the engrained training of patriarchy’s authority runs deep in David, and he rebels against the
blurring of the lines, both physically and intimately, of who is husband and who is wife, and
retreats into his masculine past. Catherine’s attempts to further evolve their relationship include
the introduction of a second wife, Marita, into their marriage, but David, for all his excited
acceptance of the expanding numbers within their relationship, has no desire to develop the
narrative of their lives. Instead, he retreats into the stories of his African childhood, the site of
death and betrayals, obsessively rehearsing his guilt and refusing to move onward. Marita
supports David’s regression, but Catherine, deeply wounded by his refusal to fully embrace their
new life together and break free of his past, violently asserts her belief in the importance of their
co-narrative instead.
Recent critical works on Tender Is the Night, Save Me the Waltz, and The Garden of Eden
address important cultural contextual issues of essentialized gender constructions, the gendered
nature of body modifications such as tanning and dieting, and cultural and clinical constructions
of madness and sanity, providing a framework for examining how women transitioned from
traditional, subservient roles to dynamic and creative people utilizing liminal spaces in support of
their own agency and change. Their transitions make the women the creators of their narratives,
5
not just the mad muses, moving them from without to the within, no longer object but storyteller.
Issues revolving about who serves as inspiration for whom pepper discussions of these critical
texts (a veritable who’s who of the literary Rivieran elite serving as composites for the
characters), as well as, particularly for the Fitzgeralds, those of plagiarism. Although
explorations of Tender Is the Night undulate with Fitzgerald’s popularity among literary critics,
Save Me the Waltz and The Garden of Eden remain largely non-critqued, and most discussions of
them still grapple with issues of publication and autobiography. In-depth literary analyses for all
three, though, insist on reading the women as not only ancillary figures, existing as appendages
to the real protagonists, the men, but as vampiric madwomen as well. Nicole, Alabama, and
Catherine all face similar dehumanizing silences first in the texts (their husbands, as creative,
public forces, co-opt and determine the women’s voices and narratives, giving further shape to
their own) and then secondarily through literary critics as well, who, very like the oppressive
husbands of the texts, persist in infantilizing or sexualizing–or, most troubling, both–the women
throughout. This dissertation departs from these limiting critical texts by reading the novels
through the women’s voices, understanding their use of language, emotions, and actions as
conveying their own evolutions, not as merely wives and muses, but as autonomous individuals
capable of attempting changes and assertions of agency of their own.
Chapter One of the dissertation reads Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night as not merely the
demise of Dr. Dick Diver, the brilliant and charming psychologist, but as Nicole’s reclamation of
agency and selfhood. Recognizing her triggers of psychosis, exploring her experiences, and
acknowledging the central influence of her past in shaping her present self, the text is revealed to
be a story of optimism and hope. Unlike Dick, who is caught in a romanticized version of the
past, Nicole evolves into a balanced and thoughtful person of integrity. The Edenic garden of the
6
Riviera supports the various pieces of the split Nicole to come together and flourish as one; she
becomes a Creator of growth. Transformation for the Nicole is possible on the Riviera for here
she can create and give voice to her own narrative. By making active choices of integration with
both the green and blue spaces of the Riviera, and the people in her life as well, Nicole is able to
move from the oppression of dehumanizing silence to a powerful and self-affirming fluency of
language and selfhood.
Chapter Two looks at the ways in which Zelda’s Save Me the Waltz illustrates Alabama’s
struggles toward individualization and agency. Alabama’s life, first ruled by her father, the
Judge, and then by her husband, David, (who, like Scott himself, literally creates a characterized
version of Alabama/Zelda into existence), is heavily shaped by her past. Indeed, Alabama never
pivots from her own center of the universe; she remains heavily entrenched in her parents’
Southern expectations and as David’s muse. Alabama’s attempts at self-definition take place in
out-of-balance spaces, where either modernity, patriarchy, or nature itself has gone berserk,
mirroring Alabama’s own derangement, physical and mental. She is neither the creator nor the
cultivator of these spaces, merely existing within them. Her attempts at agency are undermined
by her inability to create connections within the world. Lapsing into a denial of consciousness of
the self, she reiterates her role not as active agent, but as David’s muse.
Chapter Three investigates how Catherine, the transitioning protagonist of Ernest
Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden, at once acts as a subversive factor against authority and is
ultimately scripted as doomed because of it. How Catherine and David negotiate this merging,
first more successfully and then with ultimate resistance on David’s part, and what episodes and
their oppressive dismissal as insanity on Catherine’s part by David, who when threatened and
challenged to become something new retreats into his patriarchally sanctioned role as author of
7
their lives, are explored. David’s regresses into his childhood narrative of betrayal, while Marita,
the newly welcomed third member of their ménage à trois, takes on the role of supportive wife.
Catherine, frustrated and hurt by David’s retreat into his “simple” (selfish) consideration of their
life, responds in abrupt and violent ways. The relationship on all sides is damaged through the
hurtful use of language and limiting attempts toward individualized control. Unlike Nicole or
Alabama, Catherine’s ending remains unscripted, as she tenuously continues to change and assert
her version of their narrative, but all under the cloud of David and Marita’s questions regarding
her sanity. Instead of reading her words and actions as coming from a source of frustration and
pain, David and Marita reductively dismiss her as mad, thus ending the novel on an ambiguous,
and unhopeful, note.
Besides issues of autobiography and place, these novels hold in common questions of
language, gender, and agency. Who gets to say what, how this affects the outcomes of
individuals and families, and the validation of the women as autonomous agents of selves,
outside of the defining control of their husbands, all shape these texts. This dissertation centers
its readings of all the novels through the women’s voices, a radical critical shift. By considering
the evolutionary attempts of Nicole, Alabama, and Catherine, regardless of their ultimate level of
success, their autonomy as individuals capable and worthy of development themselves is reified.
Examining their use of language, emotions, and actions reasserts their voices as creators of their
own narratives, recentering the texts as important explorations of Modern women and their
conceptualizing of self on the Riviera.
8
CHAPTER ONE
The Reclamation of Agency:
Rereading Tender Is the Night as Nicole’s Assertion of Self
F. Scott Fitzgerald inscribed a friend’s copy of Tender Is the Night with, “If you liked
The Great Gatsby, for God’s sake read this. Gatsby was a tour de force but this is a confession
of faith” (Scribner xv). This “confession of faith” has long been read as the story of Dr. Dick
Diver, a brilliant man who bestows his oceans of vitality on the encouragement and fostering of
others. But there is more to the novel than this, for Fitzgerald’s faith was not just in the vitality
and influence of a brilliant and charismatic man, but also in the redemptive powers of the self.
This becomes especially evident when we read Tender not merely as Dick’s narrative but as that
of Nicole’s powerful reclamation of the self as well. Shifting our reading toward an exploration
of Nicole’s development transforms the text, uncovering a more hopeful, joyful understanding of
Nicole’s growth as an individual with integrity and agency of her own and opening up the story
to us in new and exciting ways.
The novel, broken up into three books, tells the story of the Divers through a series of
revelations and flashbacks. In Book I, we meet the Divers at their home on the Riviera, which,
in 1924, is still a winter-only vacation destination. Besides the local residents, only a small
expatriate band, directed through the careful orchestration of Dr. Dick Diver, their master of
ceremonies, are in Tarmes, a village on the sea. Hollywood ingenue, Rosemary Hoyt, whose
film “Daddy’s Girl” is making her a star, is welcomed into this fold. She quickly becomes
infatuated with Dick, who has a habit of adopting and charming characters, aiding their
development into their best, most exquisite selves, before he quietly moves on to the next.
Nicole, Dick’s strikingly beautiful and wealthy wife, seems to be only the hauntingly lovely
9
background to his life-affirming vitality. But there is more to Nicole, who, just like her large and
bounteous garden, may bloom under the right conditions, but is also capable of bringing
terrifying disruptions with her slips into apparent madness. As much is hinted to during a
Divers’ dinner party, but is quickly and violently hushed up by her champion, Tommy Barban, a
French/American veteran of many wars. The Divers and their friends (minus Tommy, who
leaves to fight yet another war) depart for Paris, where Dick becomes increasingly excited by the
attractions of the young blonde “Daddy’s Girl.” As the demoralizing decadence of Paris speeds
into a frantic crescendo, a racially motivated murder ends with Dick removing bloody sheets
from Rosemary’s hotel room and giving them to Nicole, telling her to clean and hide them, thus
triggering Nicole’s breakdown in their hotel bathroom.
Book II flashbacks to the Great War and reveals the histories, as individuals and as a
couple, of the Divers. Dick, a minister’s son who first attended Yale and then Oxford as a
Rhodes Scholar, shows great promise as a young psychologist. He does not fight in the war,
instead working behind the lines and treating the “lucky” (and wealthy) clientele of the Zurich
sanitariums. Here he meets and falls for a teenaged Nicole, whom he later learns is a patient
hidden away in a Swiss institution, the Dohmler Clinic, by her father, a wealthy widowed
Chicago industrialist, after exhibiting signs of schizophrenia which was triggered by her father’s
raping of her. Dick’s colleague, Dr. Franz Gregorovius, sees that Nicole is transferring her
childhood dependencies and emotions from her father to Dick, a development which both he and
Dick encourage. Although Nicole’s sister, the visiting “Baby” Warren, dismisses Dick as too
unconnected and poor for their family, Nicole and Dick marry anyway. Dick’s productivity and
promise seem to diminish as Nicole’s illness, and her treatment thereof, increasingly demand his
10
time. Between the births of their two children, Lanier and Topsy, and Nicole’s setbacks, the
nomadic travels of the Divers, searching for some lasting tranquility, commence.
They return to Zurich when Dick and Franz, aided by Nicole’s money, open their own
clinic. Nicole’s illness ebbs and flows with Dick’s interest in his drinking and women patients.
Nicole has a breakdown at a carnival, after which Dick leaves her and the children, ostensibly to
attend a conference in Munich. Here he sees Tommy Barban, as strongly masculine as ever, and
learns of their mutual friend’s, Abe North’s, murder. Dick then finds that his father, his moral
compass, has died as well, and he sails to Virginia to bury him and say goodbye. Dick returns to
Europe via Rome, where he once again meets Rosemary; they now consummate their
relationship, thus sealing his betrayal of Nicole. After getting into a drunken brawl, Dick avoids
Italian prison only through Baby’s intervention. Upon his return to Zurich, Franz makes plain
that Dick and his unprofessional behaviors are no longer welcome, and the Divers return to the
Riviera to make their home.
While Dick’s self-destructive behaviors escalate, Nicole finds that she has grown and
healed instead, and she is now strong and wise enough to live as her own self, separate from
Dick. Dick seduces Rosemary once again, but Nicole, no longer prey to this trigger, refuses to
be pulled into the maelstrom and chooses Tommy, who respects her as an autonomous person, to
be her partner. The Divers’ marriage is over, and Dick, now a symbol of youthful promise too
early spent, returns to America and an ignominious future. Nicole remains in Tarmes, making
her home with Tommy and the children, living a life of her own intentional action.
By changing our perspective as readers about Nicole’s outcome (a sadly radical critical
shift)–from one where she has merely substituted another man-as-authority-figure, this time
Tommy for Dick, in her cyclical transference of father-figures (as previous critics would have us
11
believe) to one recognizing her reclamation of self–we can now see that Nicole makes thoughtful
choices for herself, actively utilizing her own agency. Stripped of pretense, away from the
domineering influence of modern psychological medicine and degenerative cities, Nicole creates
a place of equilibrium for herself on the Riviera. Here, under the blinding white heat of the
Mediterranean sun, near the lapsing waves of the sea, she makes a home for herself at the Villa
Diana, and in doing so, discovers her own emotional and intellectual fortitude as well. In this
liminal coastal space, Nicole reasserts her latent potential for agency, becoming a creative
thinker, emoter, and actor of the self, outside of the filtering gaze of her husband/doctor/father
figure, Dick. Rather than a destructive figure, draining Dick of his life-force in order to achieve
her own, Nicole can now be read as a redemptive reclamation of the self, triumphing over
patriarchy’s degenerative grip and the morally bankrupt modern world.
The liminal space of the Riviera is the threshold to both the interior of Europe and the
Mediterranean Sea, which by its very essence is fluid, changeable, and provocative. A liminal
space, a space that is ever-shifting with its reversals and dissolutions and the chaos to hierarchal
order these transitions bring, is a familiar space to Nicole. Rather than skewing her sense of
balance, Nicole is able to shift and steady herself, enabling her to transition to the next stage of
her life with integrity. As a liminal space, the Riviera holds a tenuous relationship with its
borders, which ever seek to encroach and reclaim their sovereignty–hence, its conceptual, as well
as physical, state. The liminality of the Riviera is like “the American Frontier…not a fixed,
uninterrupted line. Rather, it is an oscillating situation, mobile and uncertain” (Maffi 105). Its
margins are nebulous, so Nicole’s ability for adaptation and fluidity becomes both necessary and
advantageous.
12
Critics have long hailed Tender as the unfolding of the tragic demise of its hero, Dick,
regulating Nicole to nothing more than an ancillary and destructive character. The focus on Dick
as the sole protagonist perhaps reveals more about the misogyny of its literary critics than the
novel itself. Nicole hasn’t counted for previous critics because for them the women in
Fitzgerald’s novels aren't capable of evolution of their own, only as supporting (and draining)
characters; thus, the tired dismissal of Nicole as vampiric. Reading Nicole as a redemptive
figure, one who ultimately chooses to do the active work of saving herself–not as a diminishing
of any other (Dick) but because she is worthy of a full life of her own choosing too–is an entirely
new approach to the novel. Tender becomes a heroine-centered text, albeit a flawed and
complicated (thus more realistic and interesting) one, with a message of hope instead of only (the
more critically typical) one of despair for Dick and disgust or pity for Nicole; indeed, we now
find promise, independence, and optimism in the novel.
Once we let go of the limiting misogyny of Nicole as destroyer, we better see how she
gradually takes control of her own narrative. From her staccato life in Paris, divvied up between
extremes of curated joy and terrifying pain–the aesthetic vignettes of cultured expatriated ease
that Dick (and Nicole’s wealth) arranges for them so neatly versus the increasing awareness of
her husband/father figure’s untoward interest in the “Daddy’s Girl,” Rosemary, culminating in
his presentation to her of the bloody sheets–and its often lyrical, but again disorienting, rhythm,
echoing the disjointed modern urban experience, we see the violation of security and the
resulting desperate spiral of illness. These staccato rhythms are the pattern of Nicole’s life
before she reclaims her story. In Switzerland, as first a patient and then a wife and owner of the
clinic, an overwhelming sense of surveillance invades her every moment. The psychologists, Dr.
Dohmler, Dick, Franz, and even Franz’s wife, Kaethe, watch Nicole, discussing and charting her
13
progress and slips, heartlessly dismissing the dangers of transference while ascribing complicity
in her devastating incestuous defilement. Now instead of curating a collection of amusements
for Nicole, Dick notes and even triggers her regressions, something, as her psychologist, of
which he must be aware, thus implicating him in her recitals of madness. And even during the
churn of travel, Nicole’s mental health is temporally punctuated by Dick’s pendulous intentions,
from attentive conservator of experiences to cool physician scrutinizing and vigilantly noting her
descents. Nicole breaks free from the tyranny of Dick’s control only when she purposefully
steps away from his curation and surveillance to fashion her own life and home on the Riviera.
Here, in the site that critics continually read as the spoiling of Dick’s potential, Nicole is able to
generate direction for her life, and not as a vampire or a succubus, 1 but as a matured, tested
individual, making adult decisions directed by her own will and sense of agency, a woman
capable of an evolution of her own.
Dick’s fading in life, while certainly invoking sympathy, is often critically interpreted at
Nicole’s expense. Joan M. Allen’s discussion of Tender is typical: “[T]he man who allowed
himself to be emasculated [Dick] by masked female destroyers [Nicole]…is irretrievably
damned” (Fitzgerald 131). The idea of Nicole depleting Dick’s vitality is not a new one. The
vampiric ways in which Nicole is described as draining of Dick of his life-force are misogynistic
and limiting, but they also miss the crucial aspect of Nicole’s recovery in the story, not just as
cause and effect of Dick’s downfall, but as a vehicle for action and meaning within itself.
1
In “Madwomen on the Riviera: The Fitzgeralds, Hemingway, and the Matter of Modernism,”
Nancy R. Comley restates the general (and enormously limiting) critical view that “Nicole Diver
is a modified version, a more subtly destructive schizophrenic wife, who, like a vampire, grows
stronger as she feeds on her husband, who declines in strength and will, and thus becomes
undesirable and indeed unnecessary” (284).
14
More recent criticism has attempted to address the cultural context in which the Divers
find themselves throughout the novel, including changing notions of self-representation through
tanning, the melding of ethnic identifiers and racial dynamics in the postwar years, the gaining
influence of psychoanalysis during and after the Great War and Fitzgerald’s complicated and,
ultimately, skeptical interactions with it. 2 Although this is important and necessary work, these
texts fail to redress the dearth of scholarship concerning Nicole as something other than either a
vampiric capitalist ruthlessly draining Dick’s vitality or, in a never-ending cycle of transference,
a dependent daughter/wife. It is surprising, and a little disappointing, that in over eighty years of
Tender criticism, texts identifying Nicole’s future as hopeful are virtually nonexistent.3
2
Notable contributions to this contextualization include Susan L. Keller’s “The Riviera’s Golden
Boy: Fitzgerald, Cosmopolitan Tanning, and Racial Commodities in Tender Is the Night,”
Tiffany Joseph’s “‘Non-Combatant’s Shell-Shock’: Trauma and Gender in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
Tender Is the Night,” Susann Cokal’s “Caught in the Wrong Story: Psychoanalysis and
Narrative Structure in Tender Is the Night,” and Chris Messenger’s “‘Out on the Mongolian
Plain’: Fitzgerald’s Racial and Ethnic Cross-Identifying in Tender Is the Night.”
3
Perhaps critics, leaning too heavily on Nicole’s recovery only being possible through Dick’s
intercessions and not through any evolutionary capabilities of her own, refusing to read Nicole’s
story as hopeful take their cue from Fitzgerald’s own lack of faith in psychiatry, found in his
repeated proclamations of distrust in the efficacy of Zelda’s treatments (as seen throughout
Bruccoli and Atkinson’s Letters and Bruccoli and Duggan’s Correspondence). This has proven
to be fertile ground for critics, including Jeffrey Berman, who finds Tender to show Fitzgerald’s
“limited tolerance of psychoanalytic theory” (38), and William Blazek, who asserts that the
novel finds psychiatry “corrupted by its own success as a money-making operation and by its
own contradictions and inability to accept its limitations” (71). More recently, James L. W.
West III has transcribed and critiqued a previously unpublished letter written by Fitzgerald in
1936 in which he makes the connection between what he considers to be a God-given gift–his
ability as a writer–and the dangers of allowing his creative faculty to be filtered through an
intermediating analytic explicit: “I never even faintly considered putting the high organized
thing which I will refer to as my talent into their hands. I would never consider trusting myself
to what passes for psychology-psychiatry in this country” (62)–a telling critique when applied to
his own creation, Dr. Dick Diver.
15
The special influence of place in Tender has been only more recently analyzed. Mario
Maffi’s “Untender Is the Night in the Garden of Eden: Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and the
Mediterranean” compares Tender with Hemingway’s Garden of Eden, grounding them in Leo
Marx’s 1964 text, The Machine in the Garden. Transplanting its ideas of the American frontier,
garden, and middle territory to the Riviera, Maffi asserts that the liminal space of the
Mediterranean Coast, “the middle territory” is destructive because the wives in the novels go
mad there. While he acknowledges that Nicole’s behavior is “experienced and narrated” by a
male point of view and “thus put[s] ‘madness’ between brackets, to indicate the ambiguity of the
issue,” he does assert that her “madness” “corrodes” and “empties” Dick of his vitality and
purpose (108). Maffi aids in our understanding of how the Riviera plays an important role in
Tender, but does not link it to Nicole’s progression of agency; indeed, he hardly discusses Nicole
at all, once again reductively critically regarding Tender as a male-centered text.
We begin our reassessment of the novel by noting what will become the Divers’ defining
differences here on the Riviera’s “bright tan prayer rug of a beach” (Fitzgerald 3). Dick, “a
spoiled priest” (Bruccoli, Reader’s Companion 6), 4 performs a ritualized cleansing of the beach,
stripping the sand of rocks whilst simultaneously bringing forth the best versions of his circle’s
selves. Nicole remains nonplussed, either because of a “modesty of possession” (Fitzgerald 7) or
because she has already learned that the appearance of Dick’s charm is greater than its actual
4
Matthew J. Bruccoli, preeminent Fitzgerald scholar, included a copy of Fitzgerald’s draft of his
“General Plan” for Tender Is the Night in the Reader’s Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
Tender Is the Night, of which Bruccoli and Judith S. Baughman serve as editors. The copy of the
“General Plan,” reprinted in Fitzgerald’s own handwriting, belongs to the Princeton University
Library as “Notes for the Third Version of Tender Is the Night, working title ‘Dick Diver.’”
Fitzgerald’s description of Dick as a “spoiled priest” is found on the first page of the draft’s
section titled “Sketch.”
16
substance. Her “string of pearls,” a concrete merging of her heritage of wealth with the natural
abundancy of the sea, lie across her sun-exposed “ruddy, orange brown” back (6). Nicole quietly
evokes her sense of connection to the environment through her physical merging with it (her tan
and pearls), whereas Dick depends on an adoring audience to give value and meaning to his
ritualized practices.
The “community” of tanned and fashionable expatriates is seen through Rosemary’s
eyes. Dick’s extraordinary charisma secures her loyalty to him: “He seemed kind and
charming–his voice promised that he would take care of her, and that a little later he would open
up whole new worlds for her, unroll an endless succession of magnificent possibilities” (16).
Dick is excited by the teenaged Rosemary’s quickening, telling her, “‘You’re the only girl I’ve
seen for a long time that actually did look like something blooming”’ (22). This allusion to
Rosemary as a blossom, undeveloped and unplucked, is especially interesting in consideration of
Nicole’s ability to bring forth life, both as a mother and as a successful and productive gardener.
As Alice Walker reminds us in “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens”:
I notice that it is only when my mother is working in her flowers that she is radiant,
almost to the point of being invisible–except as Creator: hand and eye. She is involved
in work her soul must have. Ordering the universe in the image of her personal
conception of Beauty. (241)
This radiance as Creator echoes Nicole’s interaction with her own garden, and it’s as Creator in
which Nicole grows her own sense of individuality as well.
The seemingly perfect “expensive simplicity of the Divers” (Fitzgerald 21) has begun to
shift and crack; “a qualitative change had already set in” (22). Back at the Villa Diana, their
home overlooking the sea, the Divers go their separate ways. Dick isolates himself in a one
room shack, ostensibly to write, although it quickly becomes apparent that the last thing Dick
17
will do is work. Nicole, conversely, tends her large and magnificently varied garden, terraced
from the house to the projecting cliffs below. She grows everything from lemons to eucalyptus,
peonies, nasturtiums, iris, tulips, roses, and vegetables in areas varying from dusty to one “so
green and cool that the leaves and petals were curled with tender damp” (25-26). Nicole utilizes
the opportunity her garden affords her to be creative; indeed, it seems to fit her interaction with
the world, where she contributes the essentials, not meaningless filler:
…she walked rather quickly; she like to be active, though at times she gave an impression
of repose that was at once static and evocative. This was because she knew few words
and believed in none, and in the world she was rather silent, contributing just her share of
urbane humor with a precision that approached meagreness. (26)
Nicole takes a similar approach to gardening; she carefully nurtures her growths by cultivating
them only where they’ll do best. This thoughtful and intentional interaction with the
environment produces beautiful results. Without artificial limitations imposed upon them, her
blooms are free to mature and reach their full potential. Working in tandem with nature, she is
able to be creative and productive; only the unharnessed sea lies beyond her reach (26-27). In
contrast to Dick’s self-imposed seclusion in his shack, Nicole is in sync with, and a powerful
force within, nature. “Nicole’s garden” (28) is where she regenerates her roots, both
horticulturally and personally.
The authenticity of Nicole’s garden is apparent to others as well. Rosemary sees “the
Villa Diana [as] the centre of the world” (29), with the garden eliciting a vital response. She is
responding to what Frances Hodgson Burnett, a lifelong gardener (and writer of gardens, secret
and otherwise), refers to as the connection between gardens, the future, and the sense of being
alive:
As long as one has a garden one has a future; and as long as one has a future one is alive.
It is remaining alive which makes life worth living–not merely remaining on the surface
18
of the earth. And it is the looking forward to a future which makes the difference
between the two states of being. (10-11)
The inspiration to actively being, to “looking forward to a future,” is apparent to all the garden’s
visitors, but it is especially meaningful to Nicole herself. It is this nascent individualized being,
and the agency that comes with it, which is so alarming to Dick, who alone seems to find
something sinister about Nicole’s garden.
Dick instinctively recognizes Nicole’s burgeoning agency as being directly linked to her
garden. Reacting to Mrs. Speers’s appreciative compliment, “What a beautiful garden!”, Dick
verbally demeans Nicole, alluding to her as-of-yet undisclosed mental illness by aligning her
with disease, decay, degeneration: “‘She won’t let it alone–she nags it all the time, worries about
its diseases. Any day now I expect to have her come down with Powdery Mildew or Fly Speck,
or Late Blight.”’ Because Dick sees Nicole as diseased, he aligns her with possible garden
blights; the outward bloom may be beautiful, he warns, but underneath lurks sickness and rot.
The garden is a problematic site for Dick as it is both Nicole’s space of creative production
outside of his control and the evidence of her understanding of how to sustain life by growing it
where it will do best–the opposite of the isolation and stagnation found in Dick’s one room
shack. Shifting his focus from his “diseased” wife to the newest, youngest “Daddy’s Girl”: “He
pointed his forefinger decisively at Rosemary, saying with a lightness seeming to conceal a
paternal interest, ‘I’m going to save your reason–I’m going to give you a hat to wear on the
beach’” (Fitzgerald 28). He thus explicitly links his “paternal interest” (always a dangerous one
in Tender) with containment, youth, and purity–keeping the blooming girl a girl. For Dick
knows that once a woman starts to become tanned by the sun, syncopating with the environment
and no longer kept under the veil of patriarchy’s dominating aesthetics of how a girl should look
19
(to be–grossly–sexually attractive to a “paternal interest”), she can assert her own agency,
outside of the inscribed impositions of man. Nicole is beginning to show her own initiative and
independence, “blooming away” in her own garden, a move Dick defensively and belittlingly
aligns as a loss of “reason.” Nicole’s garden, and the self-autonomy that it symbolizes, is thus
seen by him as a source of disease working to erode his hyper-controlled life.
The novel’s first painful transition from enchantment to terror begins here in the garden.
The Divers are holding a party–what Dick hopes will be be “‘a really bad party…. I want to give
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’” (27)–with an assortment of contrary people. Not
only are their own particular friends, Abe and Mary North and Tommy Barban, there, but
Rosemary and her mother, Mrs. Speers, as well as the mocked outsiders of the beach, headed by
the gauche McKiscos. The evening begins well enough; indeed, the garden seems to effusively
wash the charm of the Divers over all those present, making them seem magically separated from
the common world:
The table seemed to have risen a little toward the sky like a mechanical dancing platform,
giving the people around it a sense of being alone with each other in the dark universe,
nourished by its only food, warmed by its only light. And, as if a curious hushed laugh
from Mrs. McKisco were a signal that such a detachment from the world had been
attained, the two Divers began suddenly to warm and glow and expand, as if to make up
to their guests, already so subtly assured of their importance, so flattered with politeness,
for anything they might still miss from that country well left behind. (34)
The moment is over as soon as it begins, “before it could be irreverently breathed,” but the
Divers and their magnetism has effected them all: “the diffused magic of the hot sweet South had
withdrawn into them–the soft-pawed night and the ghostly wash of the Mediterranean far below–
the magic left these things and melted into the two Divers and became a part of them” (35). The
bewitching beauty and inclusivity of the Rivieran night has melted into the party, and now, at
20
this elevated moment, the Divers are at the height of their collective charm. The “magic of the
hot sweet South” may be within both Divers, but the effects of its potential charms has wildly
different impacts on them.
Nicole, seeing Dick’s romantic interest in the blonde ingenue, withdraws to the house,
where Mrs. McKisco comes “‘upon a scene,’” a scene which she is immediately stopped from
disclosing by the protective Tommy (36). Nevertheless, the enchanted spell of the evening is
broken, and the guests begin to leave. It is here we see the truly burgeoning reclamation of
agency that Nicole is able to access in her garden. For, whatever the “scene” Mrs. McKisco has
seen in the house, Nicole and Dick resume their roles as charming hosts of the bewitching
moonlit evening:
Down in the garden lanterns still glowed over the table where they had dined, as the
Divers stood side by side in the gate, Nicole blooming away and filling the night with
graciousness, and Dick bidding good-by to everyone by name. (39)
Even after the mysteriously alluded to trouble in the house, Nicole has gathered herself together
and “bloom[s] away…filling the night with graciousness.” No longer content to be merely told
by Dick that she is about to bloom, she now does so for herself and into the perception of others,
“filling the night.” At this difficult time, once she is back in her garden, she is a contributor, the
Creator, of warmth and beauty. Her interaction with the source of her transformative impetus,
her garden, enables her to create a spontaneous and authentic generosity of spirit to share with
others, affecting their interactions as well.
Nevertheless, the break(down) has come. On their way back to the hotel, the guests
quickly descend into an argument as Tommy refuses to allow whatever was seen in the house to
be gossiped over, resulting in a duel between Tommy, the professional warrior, and Mr.
McKisco, the weak and vain author (no one is shot, but it is a sobering reminder that drunkenly
21
engaging in actual life (or death) shows a horrifying disregard for the importance of life) (49).
The Divers and their friends (minus the warring Tommy) retreat to Paris, where Dick is the only
American man with repose (51-52). But his status as leader is slowly eroding as he is slowly
exposed as emotionally existing in a romantic ideal of the past, rather than a more realistic
embracement of the present. His proclamation while visiting the trenches that the Great War was
“‘the last love battle’” seems especially sentimental and ridiculous when juxtaposed with Abe
North’s, an alcoholic veteran, exposure of the ridiculous futility of the war and his reenactment
of trench warfare, throwing pebbles as fake grenades and yelling, “‘The war spirit’s getting into
me again. I have a hundred years of Ohio love behind me and I’m going to bomb out this
trench’” (57-58). Rosemary, the infatuated teen, may be swept along with Dick’s old-fashioned
romanticism, but Nicole, who has seen this routine before, is more skeptical. Nicole sees how
Dick, ever the prepared tour guide, has brought his guide-books along with him–“indeed, he had
made a quick study of the whole affair, simplifying it always until it bore a faint resemblance to
one of his own parties” (59). Dick, caught in his idealized version of the past, slips further and
further behind, losing control of their collective narrative.
Their differing viewpoints of life–Dick’s nostalgic longing for an idealized past and
Nicole’s consciously choosing to be grounded in the present–become more glaringly evident
throughout their stay in Paris. Dick’s romanticized version of prewar chasteness was never
available to Nicole, who, we learn, was forced to marshal her mother and older sister, the “Baby”
whom her mother forces to risk her own life so she may sell her off to the highest bidder (shades
of Rosemary in the pool, except reversed–Mrs. Speers saves a pneumonia-ridden Rosemary,
saying she has dived enough (17), whereas, Mrs. Warren instructs Baby to strap on an ice pack
and dance (55)) through Europe, coming into adolescence in the dirty, shameful street of the
22
Sainted Fathers, the Rues des Saints-Péres (67). Without the assurance of a mother’s protection,
Nicole must take on the adult role of grown woman, taking care of her own mother and older
sister, long before it is appropriate. Dick, on the other hand, indulges his fantasies of
romanticized youth for far too long, allowing his attraction to the young Rosemary to endanger
his own marriage. His disapproval of Rosemary when she threatens to break the script of
virtuous chastity by actively pursuing more adult behaviors than his passé paternalism finds
acceptable (61, 64), shows how shallow his own cosmopolitan facade is; he may act the man
about town, but he is morally outraged when the worldly routine becomes more than a show.
Rosemary, raised for the stage, instinctively recognizes Dick as a performer, even, much to his
embarrassment, arranging a screen test for him (69). At an avant-garde party, where Dick’s
smooth respectability is terribly out of place, Rosemary overhears some young sophisticates
discussing the Divers–“‘they give a good show…. Practically the best show in Paris,’”–
dismissing Dick’s phrases as old and tiresome, but still “‘one of the most charming human
beings you have ever met’” (72-73). For all of Dick’s charm, his reign as star of the
performance is waning.
With the loss of public adoration, Paris becomes an urban landscape even the urbane
Dick cannot control. Events take a shocking turn for the worse as scandals, including murders,
race riots, futuristic parties, and the utter dissipation of art, talent, and friendships, escape Dick’s
grasp and flourish in a nightmarish modern dystopia. Conversely, while seeing Abe (who is
returning to America in hopes of sobering up and fulfilling his earlier promise as a composer) off
at the train station, Nicole does her best to maintain balance in their world. Her important and
practical difference from Abe and Dick, who are both lost either through romantic illusions or
alcoholism in the past, is revealed in her exchange with Abe:
23
“Tired of women’s worlds,” he spoke up suddenly.
“Then why don’t you make a world of your own?”
“Tired of friends. The thing is to have sycophants.”
… “I am a woman and my business is to hold things together.”
“My business is to tear them apart.” (81-82)
The sick and resentful Abe no longer has any interest in creation or connection; he only wants
sycophants (like Dick has) and to destroy that which he no longer succeeds in, what he dismisses
as “women’s worlds.” Nicole, as a life-sustaining Creator instead, knows that she must hold and
nurture others while shaping a new world. It is this wisdom that will ultimately bring Nicole
through the horror to come.
But first, the world must split apart–which horribly seems to happen all in one
nightmarish day, as its events frantically whirl into a terrifying maelstrom with tragic
consequences. It begins with a murder in the train station, followed by Dick’s obvious increased
attentions to Rosemary (and not his wife). Then Abe drunkenly instigates a race riot, which
culminates in the tragedy of a black man’s dead body bleeding out on Rosemary’s hotel bed
(with all the attendant racial and sexual transgressions staining it as well). Dick hastily arranges
for the removal of the murdered body, and thus the shame and scandal that would be attached to
his “Daddy’s Girl” if the truth was revealed. Rosemary follows him into the Divers’ rooms, only
to hear “louder and louder, a verbal inhumanity that penetrated the keyholes and the cracks in the
doors, swept into the suite in the shape of horror took form again.” Nicole, having been given
the “Daddy’s Girl” bloodied bedspread by her husband/father figure, sits shrieking on the
bathroom floor. She has no way of knowing it’s actually Jules Peterson’s, the murdered black
cobbler's, blood she’s been asked to clean or why she’s being asked to conceal the physical
evidence of a shameful act. Rosemary witnesses the evolution of Nicole’s madness as she weeps
over the bedspread, confronting Dick with his participation in her betrayal:
24
“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 never expected you to love me–it was too late
for that–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.”
Dick’s only response is to “control herself,” a surprisingly ineffectual (given his profession and
professional relationship to her) response. But no matter how much Nicole wishes for privacy or
Dick tries to control (and conceal) it, Rosemary, the “Daddy’s Girl,” can see the end result of the
father in the bedroom, bloody bedspread and all. With this horror comes the realization that
“now she knows what Violet McKisco had seen in the bathroom at Villa Diana” (112).
With this ominous allusive arc between the breakdown in Paris to the mysterious incident
in Tarmes, we are flashbacked in Book II to Zurich in 1919. Dick, who had been “too valuable,
too much of a capital investment to be shot off in a gun” (115), is returning to Switzerland,
where he has studied, from France; he had briefly served in a neurological unit for the Army, but
instead of practicing, he performed executive work and wrote a short textbook (117-18). He is
now in Zurich to work with his friend and colleague, Dr. Franz Gregorovius, at the Dohmler
Clinic. Dick has been exchanging letters with Nicole, one of Franz’s patients, in “‘a transference
of the most fortuitous kind’” (120). Nicole’s letters hint not only at what she may be
transferring, but also to her deep frustration, not at the event that has led to her
institutionalization, but at being denied a discourse about it. Nicole sees issues of language
being the primal ones of her life.
Nicole’s use of language, her frustration at others’ reticence, and directness versus
evasion are issues she returns to again and again throughout her letters. Early on in their
correspondence, she tells Dick, “I can speak three languages, four with English, and am sure I
could be useful interpreting if you arrange such thing in France I’m sure I could control
25
everything with the belts all bound around everybody like it was Wednesday” (122). Nicole is
obviously very linguistically capable and willing to verbally interact to the world. This is
strikingly dissimilar to how she’s previously been described (as already discussed, in Book I, she
is described in her “repose” as “rather silent” as “she knew few words and believed in none”
(26)). Teenaged Nicole speaks four languages, volunteers to be an interpreter–a role Dick as her
husband will take on to the extent of translating experiences, not just words, as chief curator of
their lives–and asserts that she could “control everything,” linking her control with symbols of
masculinity, the heavily belted officers of the Great War marking their dominance over the ranks
in their rigidly held together (and sexually masochistically overtoned) strapped uniforms. In the
same letter, she asks Dick to come back to Zurich, “for I will be here always on this green hill.”
She seems locked away forever; that is, “[u]nless they will let me write my father, whom I loved
dearly” (122). Revealing how little her psychologists have helped her to understand what has
happened to her, not only does Nicole not show any negative feelings for her father, whom she
“loved dearly,” but she sees their lack of communication as a result of the clinic’s refusal to
allow it. She wants to be “let” to write her dearly loved father; it is the clinic that is enforcing
the silence between them.
In her next letter, she tells Dick that she knows “introspection is not good for a highly
nervous state like mine, but I would like you to know where I stand.” Instead of encouraging
self-examination, her psychologists insist that she not thoughtfully engage with herself. Yet,
Nicole’s integrity leads to her honest forthrightness with Dick. She tells him that when in
Chicago, she “couldn’t speak to servants or walk in the street”–that is, verbally or physically
interact with the world; she “kept waiting for some one to tell me. It was the duty of some one
who understood.” As an adolescent who has undergone tremendous traumatic injury to herself
26
and person to the extent that she is committed to psychiatric care, Nicole needs someone to
explain to her what had happened and talk to her about it; indeed, she feels as though “[i]t was
the duty of some one who understood.” Instead, she receives platitudes and redirection, the
opposite of the insights that are supposed to be achieved through the “talking cure.” She writes
that “no one would tell me everything” and “there was no one to explain to me”; she wants
honesty and disclosure but realizes that she will not receive any (122). Self-identifying as strong
and able to address and deal with her traumatic past, she is met with only evasions. Frustrated by
this deflection of honestly addressing her malady and its cause, she writes Dick:
Here I am in what appears to be a semi-insane-asylum, all because nobody saw fit to tell
me the truth about anything. If I had only known what was going on like I know now I
could have stood it I guess for I am pretty strong, but those who should have, did not see
fit to enlighten me. (123)
She then again offers her services as an interpreter. She wants to be away from the sanitarium
and its enforcement of dehumanizing silence, wishing to actively contribute through language to
the world instead.
Returning from France to Zurich, Dick learns from Franz why Nicole has been
institutionalized; her father, Devereux Warren, has raped her. Warren, a self-confessed
“Goddamned degenerate” (129) is “chiefly concerned as to whether the story would ever leak
back to America” (130). Having protected his reputation by, with Dr. Dohmler’s help, hiding the
now-diagnosed-as-schizophrenic Nicole in Switzerland, he escapes any sort of legal, or even
moral, reprisals and returns to Chicago. Far from alerting the authorities and holding Warren
legally responsible for his horrific act, Dohmler and his associate Franz even come to the
conclusion that “from sheer self-protection” Nicole has “developed the idea that she had had no
complicity” (130), a disgusting and horrifyingly unprofessional instance of victim-shaming.
27
With this damaging psychological assertion made by the very doctors with whom Warren has
hidden her away, Nicole’s betrayal by male authority and their words is replete. The falsity is
continued by Dick, who cannot speak of her rape directly, even to Franz, his fellow doctor.
Following Franz’s reductive proclamation of Nicole as the clinic’s “pet” (131), Dick insistently
figures their romance in prewar terms. But unlike Dick, Nicole knows only too well that a
romanticized past is not an authentic representation of truth.
Dick’s willingness to being shrouded in a nostalgic 1914 haze is a further attempt at
control; for this psychologist, ignorance is bliss. By discounting contemporary and more
progressive attitudes about sexuality and who may and who may not engage in discourse, Dick
attempts to marginalize the threat of women being agents of their own decisions. Women
actively making choices or being sexual terrifies him because they are out of Dick’s control; as
Warren, Dohmler, and Franz have all learned, silence is control. Dick’s willful choice to ignore
the harsh lessons of a post-Great War world and his refusal to listen to or address the sexual
betrayals of “this scarcely saved waif of disaster,” either as a doctor or a lover, are rooted in his
romantic ideal, the chaste kisses with New Haven “maidens” in 1914, which led to neither
physical nor emotional consummation. Dick is just one more man who refuses to dialogue with
Nicole, telling her, “Honestly, you don’t understand–I haven’t heard a thing” (136). She tries to
forthrightly discuss her past–“things couldn’t be worse than they have been,” she summarily
states (141)–and cut through Dick’s antiquated courtship of misdirection with her “succient
Chicagoese: ‘Bull!’”, but his refusal to address either her illness or its cause sidelines her goals
of understanding and discussion.
When Dick contemplates marrying her, he thinks, “there would be so much she would
have to be told” (153-54)–not discussed–“told.” Dick has no intention of entering into a
28
dialogue with Nicole; instead, she will be one more project for him, one more beautiful addition
to his curated collection of charming amusements. Nicole attempts to break through his walls of
evasion and male authority with her pithy insight: “[D]on’t pretend I don’t know–I know
everything about you and me” (154). Even while going through the incredibly intrusive and
threatening experience of living under a cloud of Freudians in a Swiss house of the mad, far from
being Dick’s offhand diagnosis as “a schizoid–a permanent eccentric” (151), she inherently
understands of the value of common sense, a trait which is the provenance of women throughout
the novel (154, 179). Rather than being subsumed under Dick’s sentimental and romantic vision
of how the world should be (and its shades of the 1914 Yale prom), she internally prioritizes
common sense, forthrightness, and honesty–all of which dangerously lead to a sense of agency
and thus Dick’s loss of control.
Nicole has a heightened awareness of the dangers implicit in womanhood and seeks to
temper these when she can. She has a psychotic break while traveling after giving birth to their
second child, daughter Topsy; importantly, this does not happen after their son Lanier’s birth.
Having a girl reminds her of their shared vulnerability to the fathers of the world. Watching for
signs of further transgressions, she instinctively reacts when her father/daughter-trigger is
alarmed. She decides that instead of returning to the threatening and silencing hierarchy in
Zurich, the Divers should “live near a warm beach where we can be brown and young together”
(161). She wants to spend her money in order to build a home on the fluid space of the coast,
where she can seek knowledge for herself and become part of the environment–“warm” and
“brown”–so that she and Dick may grow “together.” Nicole knows this integration of the self
with the environment and each other is not possible in the controlled spaces of Switzerland or
Paris; they must seek these at a “warm beach” instead. She hopes that in the Riviera, Dick, who
29
has “taught [Nicole] that work is everything” (161), may begin writing again, something he has
put off since the war. Questioning his need to direct their lives, she asks, “[M]ust your Nicole
follow you walking on her hands, darling?” (162). She recognizes Dick’s loss of work ethic
means a loss of self and questions the necessity of her subservience–importantly linking
creativity and production with agency.
But Dick does not embrace growing “brown and young together.” He continues to feel a
need for control (the raking of the beach, the organizing and curating of other people and their
talents, the rituals and shows he put on both publicly and for himself) to give his own life
meaning, a trait he learned in boyhood from his Southern father. He knows that these oldfashioned Southern manners value the appearance of honor over actual substance. They are
beautiful but superficial, which he bittersweetly acknowledges:
“My politeness is a trick of the heart.”
This was partly true. From his father Dick had learned the somewhat conscious good
manners of the young Southerner coming north after the Civil War. Often he used them
and just as often he despised them because they were not a protest against how
unpleasant selfishness was but against how unpleasant it looked. (164)
This “giving the lie” was a long-held Southern masculine tradition (Greenberg 7, 9). In the
antebellum period, this focus of appearance over substance of integrity created a culture where
graciousness and courtesy became almost hollow acts as empirical facts were ignored in the face
of what slave-holding males wished to be considered the greater “truth” in an effort for the white
patriarchy to maintain authority and control. The vestiges of this valuing of appearance over
substance compose Dick’s morality. But now, in a Modern world, Dick’s values of appearance
over substance are best represented–much to his horror–through popular culture and film, not as
master of his own mini-kingdom (the plantation, or, in Dick’s case, the social milieu of the
Divers’ inner circle). Dick’s antiquated system of morality has merely lead to his role as the
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director of good times, the actor Rosemary naively arranges a screen test for in Book I. This
stress on the appearance of control over the substance of actively developing himself and his
relationships lead to him not only being a poor marital partner but also a rather bad psychologist.
Whatever their hopes for the revitalization of Dick’s productivity, he finds himself unable
to work on the Riviera (Fitzgerald 165), using his one room work house rather as a place of
nonproductive time filling, drinking, and avoidance of Nicole, whom he knows is becoming
stronger, thus making him loathe to even “encounter her” in her garden (166). Nicole guards her
newfound agency from him: “He found Nicole in the garden with her arms folded high on her
shoulders” in a defensive pose, holding her sense of self intact instead of allowing herself to be
translated by him (169). She is coming to recognize herself as independent from Dick and
worthy of evolution as an individual, not just as his wife. And as her sense of self expands,
Dick’s hold over their villa–and their world–decreases. He is now the authority over his one
room shack only, and even there, he is no longer productive or creative; thus, he is no longer
even in control of himself.
Book II’s flashback has now met up with the end of Book I: The Divers have returned to
Tarmes after their disastrous trip to Paris. We now know that what Mrs. McKisco has seen in the
bathroom–“[Nicole] dissolved in crazy laughter telling Mrs. McKisco she could not go in the
bathroom because the key was thrown down the well” (168)–is a psychotic break triggered by
Dick’s pursuit of the “Daddy’s Girl.” Indeed, all of Nicole’s slips into psychosis seem to be
triggered by either Warren (father) or Dick (husband/father/doctor) and the looming threat of
sexual assault against an underage girl. This pattern of “Daddy’s Girl”-triggering happens again
and again, leading not so much to a “cycle” of illness, as Dick chooses to believe, but a cause
and effect, a triggered flashback resulting in psychosis. Dick sees Nicole’s break in Paris as
31
“prophesi[zing] possibly a new cycle, a new pousse of the malady” (168). 5 Conveniently for
Dick, this diagnosis of her illness as inevitably repetitive absolves him of any responsibility for
its renewals. By dismissing it as indicative of her sick nature, he excuses himself of any liability
when he (re)introduces the trigger of sexual predatoriness.
The Divers return to Zurich to give Dick’s practice one more try, but this time in a clinic
headed by Dick and Franz themselves–and bank-rolled by Nicole. Nicole, struggling for any
outlet of creativity and agency in a place far removed from her gardens in the Riviera–the
sanitariums of Switzerland–must cruelly settle for designing the very institutions that imprison
her as dependent wife/patient, the Eglantine and the Beeches, “houses for those sunk into eternal
darkness” (181). 6 The nature-inspired names pervert the freedom and beauty of their sources
5
Interestingly, Dick uses the French term for a shoot or a sprout, “pousse,” to describe what he
sees as her cyclical returns to psychosis. His descriptions of her as having horticultural diseases,
“Powdery Mildew or Fly Speck, or Late Blight” (28), have already forged what Dick sees as
links between Nicole, gardening, and disease; he now stresses the point by not only using
gardening terminology to diagnosis Nicole’s illness, but using French terminology, as though to
reify how foreign and other she is from him, the only American man with repose (51-52).
6
Just like its namesake in Tender, the Eglantine at Prangins, the sanitarium in which Zelda was
placed in 1930, was “reserved for the most difficult patients” (Bruccoli, Grandeur 308). Sadly,
Zelda suffered from a horrible case of eczema while at the Eglantine, which became the
inspiration for Fitzgerald’s “Iron Maiden,” who, just like Zelda, is seen as exhibiting the painful
and disfiguring disease as the outward sign of an inward struggle to create. Zelda exposes the
horrors of this experience in her artwork as well: “in the midst of psychiatric and eczema
treatment, where she must have felt that protective layers of identity, represented by clothing
indicative of personae, were being peeled away, exposing her marred body (as she perceived it)
and making her feel vulnerable and trapped”–a peeling away that she records in many of her
paintings (Tatum 145). Caught in the terrible cycle of having a distorted body image and the
psychological trauma that comes with it, Zelda developed the horribly painful sores and wounds
of eczema–the very concrete representation, and result of, (and, cyclically, the cause of further)
mental anguish stemming from body issues. Building off of the ideas of Kristeva, Tatum finds,
“[Zelda’s] distorted figures [in her artwork] represent the eczematic body that provokes
abjection–which re-enforces the self-perceptions that created them in the first place” (147).
32
through their application to the clinic’s most well-secured structures. As though to reify her
psychological subordinance to Dick, Nicole:
…designed the decoration and the furniture on a necessary base of concealed grills and
bars and immovable furniture. She had worked with so much imagination–the inventive
quality, which she lacked, being supplied by the problem itself–that no instructed visitor
would have dreamed that the light, graceful filigree work at a window was a strong,
unyielding end of a tether, that the pieces reflecting modern tubular tendencies were
stauncher than the massive creations of the Edwardians–even the flowers lay in iron
fingers and every casual ornament and fixture was as necessary as a girder in a
skyscraper. (183)
The housing of psychological control is “necessary” and “immovable.” Just like Dick, whose is
legendarily charismatic, this “light” and “graceful” house of authority uses beauty to keep
“concealed” the “unyielding” and “stauncher” insidiousness of condemnation and control. This
hierarchal mania of containment and condemnation reaches it nadir in the person of the “Iron
Maiden,” “an American painter who had lived long in Paris” (183) and is “‘sharing the fate of
the women of [her] time who challenged men to battle’” (184). She is made to suffer, her
outward sores negating her femininity and sexual attractiveness, for daring to transgress into the
patriarchal domain of creation and production, a horrific reminder that one must remain an
appealing “Daddy’s Girl” and not progress too far or else risk becoming the living decayed.
Dick is reductive and predatory toward her, as he “went out to her unreservedly, almost
sexually,” gazing at “[t]he orange light through the drawn blind, the sarcophagus of her figure on
the bed, the spot of face, the voice searching the vacuity of her illness and finding only remote
abstractions” (185). He kisses her on the forehead and tells her, “‘We must all try to be good,’”
thus reducing her struggle for insight and knowledge (and, as a human and a physician, his own)
to yet another ineffectual pre-1914 flirtation, one in which he holds all the sexual power, with
women–here, very literally–trapped at his mercy. With his patronizing words and his uninvited,
33
transgressive kiss, he demeans the artist’s intellectual and philosophical search for
understanding. The instinctive verbal and physical assertion of dominance over any woman who
risks to think and create for herself, and the fear, frustration, and sense of betrayal the “Iron
Maiden” undergoes as a result of this demeaning reduction of her life, leads to her physical
ailment and attendant psychological damage for both her and society at large. Because she has
dared to create, she must be reduced to a nameless “Iron Maiden,” locked into the sole role she is
allowed to play, that of virginal girlhood, and to suffer horribly, imprisoning her within her own
transgressive skin, her only escape, death.
Dick’s transgressive and predatory behavior with other women continues, leading to
Nicole’s most dramatic episode of psychosis, triggered by her receipt of a letter informing her of
Dick’s seduction of a patient’s daughter. Dick tries to redirect the accusation, saying the letter
has come from a mental patient. Nicole responds, ‘“I was a mental patient’” (187). Again,
Nicole can unflinchingly call life as it is; she does not resort to subterfuge and evasion to avoid
uncomfortable truths. Dick tries to deflect the accusation by taking the family to a carnival–a
site rich with meaning for Dick and his epic shows of charm. While there, Nicole runs away
from him and the children; Dick finds her on a ferris wheel “laughing hilariously” as she
revolves “against the sky”–a revolution echoing her own life’s pivot around a father’s interest in
young girls. Nicole explains her bolt as being triggered by Dick looking at “a child, not more
than fifteen” (190). Back in the car, Nicole grabs the wheel and purposely crashes it after Dick
makes “a short cut to the clinic, …stepp[ing] on the accelerator” (192). She frantically attempts
to steer them away from the clinic and what she knows will only be more patronizing
misdirections and denials of her search for understanding.
34
Dick reacts to this traumatic episode by leaving for Munich, ostensibly to go to a
conference, although he has no intention of attending; curiously, the great psychologist who
seemingly devotes all his care and attention to his one main patient, Nicole, abandons her when
she needs him the most. Instead, Dick takes what Franz (Freudianly) refers to as “‘a real leave of
abstinence’” (194). But rather than an escape from his present into his idealized, pre-marriage
past, Dick is continuously confronted with the death of the prewar world. As much as Dick
would like suavely pretend that he can still maintain control over a world respectful of the
hierarchy in which he has such a privileged part, he is forced to awaken to “a slow mournful
march…going to lay wreaths on the tombs of the dead. The column marched slowly with a sort
of swagger for a lost magnificence, a past effort, a forgotten sorrow….Dick’s lungs burst with
regret for…his own youth of ten years ago” (200).
Dick must continue to confront the death of a past in which he held both greater promise
and authority when he learns that his Virginian father, his “moral guide,” has died: “[A]gain and
again [Dick] referred judgments to what his father would probably have thought or done” (203);
Dick has consciously used the antiquated masculine culture of the Old South and its manners as
his moral compass. Dick recognizes the dying of Old Southern paternalism as he lays his father
to rest “with all his relatives around.” He knows the society which unquestionably imbues his
words as a white male of good family with ultimate authority and power, no matter his actions or
words, is dying:
Dick had no more ties here now and did not believe he would come back. 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.” (204-05)
35
With this comes the painful self-knowledge that he will not emerge from the modern space of
shifting values and power dynamics with his patriarchal authority unquestionably intact. Dick’s
sainted fathers–wealthy white males in an American South whose authority was founded on fear,
rape, and sexual slavery–were, just like Warren, destructive abusers of power. These are the
men who served as Dick’s fathers, his moral guides; it is they, and the authority and control that
they represent, that he mourns.
On his return to Europe, Dick disembarks in Rome, where he unexpectedly meets with
Rosemary again, five years after their intense flirtation in Paris. They now consummate their
relationship (213), and the treachery that has lurked over the Divers’ marriage is finally
irredeemably committed. Nicole’s father’s violent betrayal is now agonizingly reenacted by
Dick–her husband and transferred father-figure–and his obvious desire to sexually and
emotionally betray her as well. Instead of utilizing his hyperawareness and sensitivity as both a
man of charm and a psychologist to understand how this transgression with a young blonde girl
must invoke disturbing associations for Nicole, the incest survivor, Dick chooses to allow his
base, primal urges freedom, a choice with devastating consequences on the Divers’ marriage.
Dick’s betrayal of Nicole’s faith sets off a destructive chain of events, irrevocably
shattering the carefully constructed performance that is the Divers. After drinking and brawling
in Rome, Dick is arrested and released only through the intercessions of Baby Warren (226-35).
He returns to Zurich only to begin drinking throughout the day, even while treating patients there
for alcoholism (255). Franz terminates their professional relationship, assuring him that Nicole
will get her monetary investment back, thus showing the obsolescence of Dick as psychologist
and head of household all at once. No longer having to keep up the sham of being productive,
“he was relieved. Not without desperation he had long felt the ethics of his profession dissolving
36
into a lifeless mass” (256). The Divers return to the Villa Diana on “the Riviera, which was
home” (256), but after the turmoil of an increasingly difficult marriage, their power structure is
undergoing a reversal. Dick has become weak and incapable; he is afraid of their temperamental
cook, whereas Nicole cooly and efficiently fires her (265). Nicole sees that Dick’s vitality is
dying out: “[Y]ou used to want to create things–now you seem to want to smash them up” (267).
Nicole is coming into her own, not only as cultivator of the garden but through her adaption to
the environment as a whole, and with it, the growth of her own agency.
The final break in Divers’ marriage comes on a yacht, when Dick, drunk and combative,
considers killing them both by flinging them overboard. Dick, who had always been so warm
and effusive, now looks at Nicole with a face that “was even detached; his eyes focussed upon
her gradually as upon a chessman to be moved” (273). Nicole, “in one moment of complete
response and abnegation,” is willing to die with him, but at the last Dick turns away. The crisis
forces the moment; instead of irrevocably ending their relationship and themselves together, they
are now a couple rent in two. Tommy approaches on the deck out of the night, bringing life with
him, and the only death is of the Divers as a unit. Back on land, the contrast between Dick’s
downward spiral and Nicole’s thoughtful growth becomes increasingly evident.
The next day, Nicole goes to her garden to reflect on how she wants her life to be, not as
Dick’s wife, but as an individual evolving and creating borders for herself. Knowing Tommy
loves her, she feels the joy of being wanted for herself, an autonomous adult. No longer the girl
hidden away in shame or married off as a permanent patient, she enjoys the sense of being
desirable: “Later in the garden she was happy; she did not want anything to happen, but only for
the situation to remain in suspense as the two men tossed her from one mind to another; she had
not existed for along time, even as a ball.” “She reasoned as gaily as a flower” (276) and sees
37
that she can be wholly herself alone, not merely an appendage to a man: “If she need not, in her
spirit, be forever one with Dick as he had appeared last night, she must be something in addition,
not just an image on his mind, condemned to endless parades around the circumference of a
medal” (277).
Overhearing the gardeners speaking candidly about sex, Nicole realizes that she too can
have an affair, and that it can all be very natural, not freighted with issues of transference,
obligation, shame, or being a “Daddy’s Girl"; it can merely be her own adult decision and
something enjoyable. She thinks, “it seemed all right what they were saying–one thing was good
for one person, another for another” (277). Emboldened by her thoughts of individuality in the
garden and the gardeners’ frank discussion of the naturalness of sex and relationships, she
returns to the villa and signifies her agency through both her creative act of sketching Tommy–
literally drawing her preference into being–and then openly defying Dick by bestowing her
soothing balm (and affection) on Tommy (277-78). The freedom from sexual guilt and shame
liberates her to actively draw into being her own life, a freedom that has, importantly, blossomed
for her in the garden.
Her active regard of herself as capable and worthy of evolution frees her from the spiral
of illness that Dick’s betrayals have triggered in the past. Inevitably, Rosemary soon reappears
in Tarmes, where she and Dick tiredly put on the same old performance for one another on a raft,
refusing to mature but instead put on a show, prioritizing appearance over authenticity (281-82).
But, no longer prey to the triggers of seeing her husband/father sexually advance on a younger
woman, Nicole remains in the water, swimming “around in little rings,” diving “under water,”
and “swimming away,” while Dick and Rosemary sit on the raft, going through their “old game
of flattery” (282). Nicole chooses to opt out of the destructive situation and situate her own
38
purpose and joy within herself and the sea. Her healing and growth reflected and supported by
her immersion into her environment, she is empowered to not be pulled into the crazy-making
“old game” by her physical contact with the water. Studies researching the effects of the
proximity of bodies of water on mental health have been conducted for decades, and researchers
have found that just the act of floating in water can alleviate symptoms of a plethora of ailments,
helping us to better understand Nicole’s increased self-value (Kjellgren et al, “Preventing” 297306; Kjellgren et al, “Quality” 134-38; Bood et al; Edebol et al). Her daily contact with the sea
is literally changing her life. By altering her neurotransmitters, she’s changing and shaping her
own world for the better. Staying in the water–immersing herself in the sea–is so much mentally
healthier for her than sitting out, especially given that those who are sitting out, Dick and
Rosemary and their “Daddy’s Girl” relationship, have triggered psychotic breaks in the past.
The mental alleviation she achieves through her interaction with her environment enables her to
make the healthy decision to keep on floating, rather than react to the trigger of Dick seeking out
the “Daddy’s Girl.”
No longer prey to Dick’s betrayals, here on the Riviera Nicole is “relaxed and felt new
and happy; her thoughts were clear as good bells–she had a sense of being cured and in a new
way…. ‘Why I’m almost complete,’ she thought. ‘I’m practically standing alone, without
him.’” (Fitzgerald 288-89). This shift in their relationship and her conception of self happens on
the sea, a place where “soft fascination”–nature’s ability to focus the mind on calming,
repetitious stimuli, like watching waves crashing on a beach, allowing the mind to essentially
zone out and renew itself–is possible (Kaplan). The brain is less active when viewing images of
the sea, even in comparison to the well-known soothing benefits of green spaces, which “tells us
that [the sea] is possibly less stressful and more familiar to the core human being” (Stewart).
39
The force created when waves crash onto a beach and the high air ion levels this creates can lead
to a significant drop in people’s depression (Perez et al, 17). Residents of “blue spaces” selfreport as being in greater overall health and specifically mental health. Scientifically speaking,
hanging out at the beach is good for Nicole. The stress-reducing qualities of the sea allow Nicole
to find balance, renewing her feelings of agency as she reestablishes her trust in her authentic
self. The blue space of the Riviera is where she is able to access her own voice and thus stabilize
her life and vision for it as well.
She is now ready to intentionally determine her own course of her life, and she actively
chooses to be with Tommy, who loves her as an autonomous adult, and to break with Dick.
While preparing for what she knows will be the beginning of her affair with Tommy, she
“beg[ins] blooming like a great rich rose” (Fitzgerald 289). Realizing she must henceforth be the
agent of her own life:
…[S]he knew that for her the greatest sin now and in the future was to delude herself. It
had been a long lesson but she had learned it. Either you think–or else others have to
think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize
and sterilize you. (289-90)
With the power of agency comes the strength to no longer live under the oppression of others’
language; indeed, she reclaims the power of the word which has violated and betrayed her the
most: “‘Am I going through the rest of life flinching at the word ‘father’?’” (290). With this
triumphant assertion of courage and strength of the self, she anoints herself and prepares for life
as a mature adult with her own agency, “reverently…cross[ing] herself…with Chanel Sixteen”
(290-91). Choice becomes a religious act. Transforming herself “into the trimmest of gardens”
(291), she has cultivated her self in the environment that it is most authentically enriching of her.
40
She now joins Tommy, “walking ahead of him instead of beside him as they crossed the
garden” (291), confident that she will lead herself to her desired outcomes and that Tommy will
keep in step with her–no more “walking on her hands,” crawling after Dick (162). Assured of
herself, she has a “breezy confidence” like a “fighter strutting after combat.” Recognizing
herself as a grown woman, a tragic “Daddy’s Girl” no longer, she is elegant, choosey, and
poised: “But whereas a girl of nineteen draws confidence from a surfeit of attention, a woman of
twenty-nine is nourished on subtler stuff. Desirous, she chooses her aperitifs, wisely, or, content,
she enjoys the caviare of potential power” (291). She recognizes her inherent power when, in
response to Tommy telling her that she has “white crook’s eyes,” she says, “I have no mirror
here…but if my eyes have changed it’s because I’m well again. And being well perhaps I’ve
gone back to my true self–I suppose my grandfather was a crook and I’m a crook by heritage, so
there we are. Does that satisfy your logical mind?” (292). Her assertions of independence–her
ability to “stand[] alone” and return to her “true self”–are explicitly linked to her recognition of
her “heritage.” It is when she is able to reclaim this heritage, no longer subservient to Dick and
his fathers’ prioritizing of appearance over substance, that she verbally and substantively asserts
her independence and agency for herself here in her blue space of the Riviera.
Once she reclaims her agency and this connection to her heritage, she thinks, emotes, and
acts for herself, not through the filtered analysis of Dick. Tommy sees this and tells her, “You
are all new like a baby,” and proposes to instruct her in “all the old Languedoc peasant
remedies”(295), thus aiding her fluency in this new place, outside of Dick’s control. Tommy
does “not try to understand her” (296). Rather, he respects her as a mature adult thinking,
emoting, and acting for herself. After initiating her first sexual experience with him, an adult of
her own choosing and a man who is not her father (figure), Nicole returns home changed, glad,
41
and with “the night noises of the garden” in the past. The song of the nightingale with its shades
of death and mortality are for Dick now, for the “Queen-Moon” is happily making her own
choices now, celebrating her assertive independence and sexual choices by diving and swimming
in the moonlight with Tommy, merging with the power and vitality of the sea, and reasserting
her innate potential (298).
As she returns to her original self, no longer filtered and suppressed by the father, she
celebrates in the freedom of being authentic:
Moment by moment all that Dick had taught her fell away and she was ever nearer to
what she had been in the beginning, prototype of that obscure yielding up of swords that
was going on in the world around her. (298)
This experiencing of life firsthand is a welcome change for Nicole, somewhat intimidating in its
newness, but pleasurable nonetheless:
Still attuned to Dick, she waited for interpretation or qualification; but none was
forthcoming. Reassured sleepily and happily that none would be, …[t]he sound of her
feet on the walk was changed, the night noises of the garden were suddenly in the past
but she was glad, none the less, to be back. (298)
With the realization that she can live without Dick, that she need not be under his “old
hypnotisms” any longer, indeed, to even feel pity for him, Nicole finally breaks free, to live life
on her own terms (301). It is then that “the household…was hers at last” (301-02). With her
acknowledgment of original agency, she is able to claim both the natural (garden) and civilized
(house) spaces as her own.
With this final transference, not from one father to another, but from living under Dick’s
agency to under her own, Nicole evolves to the point that she can think generously and
compassionately about Dick, “[p]erhaps,…his career was biding its time, again, like Grant’s in
Salena” (315). Dick, who had once seemed so “kind and charming” (16), now fades into
42
obscurity. As he leaves the Riviera for the last time, he acknowledges that it is now fully
Nicole’s home, one he cannot adapt to, returning instead to the old ways of small town America.
He “embrace[s] the old gardeners who had made the first garden at Villa Diana six years ago”
(311). Dick sees how in her gardens, Nicole has been able to thrive as an individualized self.
Here in this nurturing place, Nicole, choosing her own thoughtful and mature life, will make her
home with Tommy and the children. Dick, emotionally stunted by his inability to readjust to the
postwar Rivieran world, is exiled to a colder and more regressive environment. His retreat into
upstate New York dooms him to a narrower and more limited existence (315). Nicole, however,
makes a new life, and a new marriage, speaking and creating it into being through her
reclamation of selfhood and agency.
Nicole is able to establish a home here because, even through a life of travel and difficult
circumstances, she has always been able to find her own home with herself. She can be at home
within these liminal spaces because the necessary elements to the creation of a home–nurturing,
thoughtfulness, balance, and joy–are all a part of her already. Indeed, contrary to what Dick,
Franz, and the entire establishment of hierarchal psychological control had enacted and believed,
the continuity of routine that has been engrained into the Divers lives has never been truly
necessary–or even necessarily for Nicole. Rather, she is able to adapt and change, thriving in the
home she creates outside of the world of falseness and fragmentation. She can do this not
because she’s less romantic than Dick (although she is) nor because the contrast to prewar life is
too much for her to bear, but because she discovers how liberating and powerful it is to process,
think, and act for herself. She is able to transcend the boundaries of sanitarium life and to create
her own vital one in the Riviera, shaping her life’s experiences to create meaning and enrichment
for herself.
43
By understanding Nicole as something other than vampiric or opportunistic, we finally
appreciate not only her struggle against institutionalized and personal silence and transgression,
but her triumph as an individual cultivating her own life of grace as well. Nicole’s assertion of
agency and reclamation of self revitalizes the text, making it one of joy and hope, not merely
condemnation and tragedy. By widening our perspective to appreciate Nicole’s story, not just
Dick’s, we come to a richer, more nuanced, insight of this, Fitzgerald’s greatest work, Tender Is
the Night.
44
CHAPTER TWO
Alabama’s “Equivocal Universe”
in Zelda Fitzgerald’s Save Me the Waltz
In 1932, Zelda Fitzgerald published her autobiographically-inspired novel Save Me the
Waltz, using much of the same source material as her husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald, did in his
work, Tender Is the Night. In both, the main characters, fashionable, modern couples blazing
new ways of being for the youth culture of the Jazz Age, live in Paris and the Riviera, and
struggle with the fallout of marital affairs, drinking problems, artistic creation, mental illness,
and issues of identity. But whereas Fitzgerald’s character, Nicole Diver, comes to find peace and
productive creativity through a balanced life on the Riviera, Zelda’s protagonist, Alabama
Knight, has a much more demoralizing ending. Her attempts at self-realization, family
dynamics, and even her philosophical approach all suffer throughout the course of the novel, and
Alabama subsequently concludes that her only recourse from the damaging effects of life is to
deny consciousness to the self. She ultimately comes to see the dismally unfair reality that
artistic creation is the privilege of men, and she must continue to swing within man’s orbit. The
once vibrant Alabama now recognizes the severe limitations of her existence; patriarchal
dominance, coupled with her unbalanced, and ultimately, futile, approach to agency, reassert her
equivocal role within the universe.
Alabama, named after her and Zelda’s shared home state, is unable to harmonize with her
environment, to strike a balance within her world. Her failure to accept the responsibility of the
repercussions of her actions lead to a suppressed existence. Her insistence on being the center,
the pivot of her own universe, without the acknowledgement that she must then swing the rest of
the universe along with her, reenforces her role as muse, not artist. Alabama’s conclusion in the
novel is strikingly different from Nicole’s in Tender. The novels’ authors, using the same source
45
material–their lives–afford the women protagonists different outcomes in what is perhaps more
wish fulfillment and acknowledgement of their own complicity in their difficulties than faithful
renditions of them. Tender was written in the course of nine years with various work stoppages
due to Fitzgerald’s drinking and Zelda’s institutionalization and the churning out of cashproducing short stories for The Saturday Evening Post that these setbacks necessitated; whereas,
Zelda’s Save Me the Waltz was mostly written during her stay at the Phipps Clinic outside of
Baltimore in 1932 after her stateside relapse. 7 Schizophrenia and alcoholism took an enormous
toil on them both, emotionally and financially, and their letters to each other reveal the guilt they
both felt over hurting themselves and each other (Milford 183, 294). Bearing these
autobiographical elements in mind, the hopeful triumph of Nicole’s reclamation of her life from
the torments of mental illness and Alabama’s depressing self-abdegnation as artist and agent of
self in her return to her role as her husband’s muse become both generous acts of recognition of
their individual guilt and poignant affirmations of the sacrifices they made for one another.
Nicole’s reclamation of self is, therefore, both Fitzgerald’s fictional wish fulfillment of Zelda
somehow defying her schizophrenia and gaining control over herself and life, and also a bitter
transference of his own loss of professional promise and personal vitality through his years of
supporting her–just as Dick feels about Nicole. Similarly, Zelda reasserts Alabama’s subjection
to her husband, David–like Fitzgerald, David is also male as creator/artist, except that he is a
painter–as wife and muse. Zelda reveals both her recognition of the emotional, financial, and
even lop-sided parenting, toil she levied on the marriage through her protagonist, Alabama–
7
Zelda had previously been diagnosed as schizophrenic while being treated at Prangins in
Switzerland after her breakdown in Paris 1930. And although she was warned against writing
about insanity by both her doctors and her husband, who feared a relapse if she directly
addressed her malady, Zelda chose to bravely explore the subject nevertheless.
46
David, like Fitzgerald, not only pays for Alabama’s illness and actions monetarily and
emotionally, but also takes on the brunt of parenting their daughter, Bonnie, just as Scott did
with Scottie–and her poignant realization that the world will see her not as artist, but only as
muse.
It is Alabama’s inability to balance the various components of her life along with her
reluctance to share her time, love, interest–to share herself–that reinscribes her suppression by
the fathers in her life. Instead of seeking selfhood by defining herself through her connection
with others, either as family member, wife, dancer, or friend, Alabama attempts to define her
individualization at the expense of all other relationships, human and non-human. She sacrifices
her relationships with her family, friends, her connection with place, material items, even her
dog, in the complete isolation of expressing herself through her body.
But this isolation is untenable as a very real and important part of life is connection; selfdefinition is not possible without recognizing and valuing this. Alabama’s obsessive focus of her
body to the exclusion of all else annihilates her ties with the world and nearly kills her. Without
the acceptance and appreciation of connection, self-articulation is not possible, and the
regression into existence within another’s orbit becomes inevitable.
Previous critiques of Save Me have focused on specific failures within Alabama’s life
that lead to her ultimate inability to find success in life, either as dancer or wife, but they don’t
take into consideration Alabama’s underlying problem, that her foundational beliefs, those which
she has been brought up and indoctrinated with, are rooted in a systematic devaluation of her as
both a dependent woman and a pleasure seeker without a strong sense of consequences. Critics
blame Alabama’s woes on everything from her materialism, to her failure to escape the male
47
gaze as a ballerina, to her slippage into anorexia. 8 Save Me, written while Zelda was in
treatment, is seen as subverting “the illusion of realism in autobiography” (Wood 261). 9 And
although issues of materialism, anorexia, and the culture of the ballet and sanitariums are
important as they broaden the cultural context in which to read the novel, they don’t illuminate
how Alabama’s problems stem from the major issue of her life: Alabama is unable to overcome
these obstacles (and others) because she has never had the autonomy to do so.
This lack of agency is rooted in Alabama’s childhood in the pre-Great War South, under
her father’s, Judge Beggs, rule. His totality as the authority within his children’s (all daughters–
Dixie, Joan, and Alabama) lives “absolved” them “from the early social efforts necessary in life
to construct strongholds for themselves.” Alabama will not become a “living fortress” like her
father (Z. Fitzgerald 1); to do so would be to deny the Judge’s ruling power, an option so remote
to Alabama as to never be considered. The Beggs daughters are in no way equipped to become
autonomous individuals: “By the time the Beggs children had learned to meet the changing
exigencies of their times, the devil was already upon their necks. Crippled, they clung long to
the feudal donjons of their fathers, hoarding their spiritual inheritances–which might have been
8
Sarah Wood Anderson’s Readings of Trauma, Madness, and the Body finds that Alabama
suffers bodily deterioration due to her material desires, making her reunion, and return to
subjugation under, her husband both necessary and complete. Courtney Salvey posits in “‘A
Backseat Driver about Life’: Technology, Gender, and Subjectivity in Zelda Fitzgerald's Save
Me the Waltz” that Alabama attempts to subvert technology-based male power structures by
using her body as a ballerina as a form of technology, an undertaking which ultimately fails as
she is still being feminized under the male gaze. Michelle Payne sees Alabama using anorexia as
a tool to create her own identity as separate from that prescribed to her by the patriarchy, and
further argues that Zelda was misdiagnosed as schizophrenic but was, in reality, anorexic in
“5’4” x 2”: Zelda Fitzgerald, Anorexia Nervosa, and Save Me the Waltz.”
9
Mary E. Wood’s “A Wizard Cultivator: Zelda Fitzgerald’s Save Me the Waltz as Asylum
Autobiography.”
48
more had they prepared a fitting repository” (1-2). The Judge is “a retributory organ, an
inexorable fate, the force of law, order, and established discipline” (3). Her mother, Millie, “had
never had a very strong sense of reality” (2), and by the time Alabama, who is quite a bit
younger than her sisters, was born, neither of her parents felt a need to actively raise her, leaving
her to try to form a sense of self without anything other than her father’s remote and immutable
authority and her mother’s vague “saintlike harmony” (2):
The girl had been filled with no interpretation of herself, having been born so late in the
life of her parents that humanity had already disassociated itself from their intimate
consciousness and childhood become more of a concept than the child. She wants to be
told what she is like, being too young to know that she is like nothing at all and will fill
out her skeleton with that she give off…. She does not know that what effort she makes
will become herself. It was much later that the child, Alabama, came to realize that the
bones of her father could indicate only her limitations. (3-4)
Alabama is a willful child, primarily doing as she chooses, never facing more than being
gossiped about, as her father’s name shields her from scandal. She takes this same recklessness
with her into the romance of the Great War, when she dates several young recruits who are
training in her hometown. She falls in love with and marries Lieutenant David Knight, a
beautiful young painter, and they begin their married life in New York, taking the city by storm.
After the birth of their child, Bonnie, the Knights move to the Riviera in hopes of David finding
peace and inspiration to paint his critically acclaimed frescos. While here, a bored Alabama falls
for a young French aviator, Lieutenant Jacques Chevre-Feuille, much to David’s horror. The
affair terminated, the Knights move to Paris, where Alabama decides, rather late for a dancer’s
life, that she will define herself, and her creativity, by becoming a ballerina. Although she does
succeed to the point that she is invited to solo with a company in Naples, she does so through the
sacrifice of her relationships–to her husband, daughter, friends, parents, even her dog–and her
own mental and physical health. She moves to Naples alone, while David and Bonnie remain in
49
Paris. But her attempts at self-definition are ended there when Alabama’s dirty ballet slippers
infect an open wound on her foot, leading to blood poisoning and an infection so great it nearly
kills her. A tendon must be cut in order for her to survive, thus severing any hope of her
becoming a ballerina or living outside of the reign a father’s–the Judge’s or David’s–control.
When she is well enough to travel again, the Knights return to Alabama, where, they have
learned, the Judge is dying. Alabama hopes that he may hold the answers to life that she needs,
but the living fortress is now a besieged shell, and with his death, Alabama realizes her life has
been, once again, unhappily reduced to being David’s muse. Alabama has irrevocably lost any
hopes of autonomy–her marriage is “saved” at the cost of her individualization.
This diminishing is partly due to the fact that Alabama’s life experiences are less about
adaptation and creation and more about doing as she pleases without thought to the
consequences. For Alabama, it has never been about shaping herself through adversity; rather,
she creates adversity and walks away from it without looking back. As long as she is mindful of
staying within the limitations of the power dynamics of the Judge’s universe, she is unmitigated
in whatever small, and reckless, freedoms she desires. Not only does individualization come
with a price, but it comes with a necessary construction of connection as well. Her denial of the
existence of either becomes her undoing.
Alabama’s conception of the universe is, quite normally, shaped by her childhood. Zelda
used her own childhood and heritage in crafting Alabama’s fictional one. 10 Like Zelda’s own
father, Anthony Dickinson Sayre, a Justice on the Alabama Supreme Court, Alabama’s father’s,
10
This is especially interesting upon consideration that while at Prangins, when asked by her
doctor “about her parents’ influence on her, Zelda insisted they had had absolutely none”
(Milford 174).
50
Judge Austin Beggs’s, authority within the patriarchal society of the American South is layered
and inviolate: A white, socially-economically privileged, heterosexual male, who is a Judge–the
literal embodiment of the law–he controls his household of women from a reserved distance. His
assertion of authority within the power structure is beyond reproof: “Judge Beggs entrenched
himself in his integrity when he was still a young man; his towers and chapels were builded of
intellectual conceptions” (1 sic); his “house is a vacuum for the culture of Austin Beggs’
integrity. Like a shining sword it sleeps at night in the sheath of his tired nobility” (5). The
Judge is continuously referenced as being like a castle; he is the stronghold of authority, the
living embodiment of the law in a Deep South entrenched in the paternalistic values of its slavery
past. To be the absolute authority in a society built on decided demarkations of hierarchy is to be
both inviolate and necessarily singular. The Judge is isolated by his intellectualism and his
position, but these very things further remove him from making viable connections with others,
like his family. Just as the language used to describe the Judge references that which is archaic
and obsolete–castles, fortresses, swords, and sheathes–everything that is the Judge will die with
him. His children will not become heirs to his kingdom as it is entirely, singularly, within
himself. His authority is such that it encompasses a void; those dependent on him, like his wife
and daughters, do not exist separately or even by him; rather, they live in the “vacuum” of his
“integrity,” which contains his house and all that’s in it. His is a noble authority, but an absolute
one. It cannot be passed on as whatever this sword–a phallic symbol in the vacuum of a house
full of women–is fighting for and upholding (the law, honor, paternalistic values) is sheathed in a
tired non-replicable solitude.
Yet, as long as the Judge’s daughters do not interrupt the intellectual and moral mental
processes he inhabits, they enjoy relative freedom. The insight that “‘Those girls,’ people said,
51
‘think they can do anything and get away with it,’” introduces us not only to the novel but to
Alabama’s fundamental crisis of personality (1). His daughters’ daring behavior is tolerated by
the Judge’s willful ignorance of it, not because he condones their somewhat lax social mores but
because of his extreme remoteness: “Isolated by his unique mind from the hope of any
communication with his peers, the Judge lived apart, seeking only a vague and gentle amusement
from his associates, asking only a fair respect for his reserve” (13). His authority is founded
entirely on absolute patriarchal privilege. As long as the Beggs women keep their social
indiscretions within the boundaries of his authority, they are, condescendingly enough, beneath
his notice and therefore beneath his overt interference in their choices. They may hold jobs he
does not entirely approve of (such as Dixie does as “society editor of the town paper” (9)) or date
men he does not like (as Joan does when she shows her obvious interest in the poor Harlan over
the wealthy Acton (20)), but as long as they make it to the supper table, or hang up the phone, or
go to bed in time–i.e. as long at they don’t push the outer limits of his disapproval–they can
arrange dates, dance, and gad about at will (9-24). As he tells Alabama when her name is
publicly bandied about for supplying her friends with gin, “‘You will have to find a way of
conducting yourself more circumspectly’” (30); he does not tell her, “Don’t drink,” or “Don’t get
your friends drunk,” rather, behave “more circumspectly.” That is, appear to act better than you
actually do. His power within the family is so great that he does not need to exert it any sort of
engaged way; he does not actively police her, rather, he passively prescribes what level of
falseness is acceptable.
The boundaries of his authority, though, must be respected. After Dixie’s beau,
Randolph, a still-married dance enthusiast, is mentioned in connection with her and Alabama in
the local newspaper, the Judge fumes, “‘If Dixie thinks that she can introduce the manners of a
52
prostitute into my family, she is no daughter of mine. Identified in print with a moral scapegoat!
My children have got to respect my name. It is all they will have in the world” (12-13). It is the
identification that the Judge reacts to the most. As long as Dixie and Randolph keep their
romance quiet, he begrudgingly tolerates it (7). But once the Beggs's name is linked publicly to
Randolph in the newspaper, “identified in print,” he becomes indignant. Economically, of
course, the Beggs daughters are only worth as much as the value of their father’s name. But
beyond that, the Judge’s integrity is built not through financial wealth, as he does not have a
great deal; rather, it is founded on his irreproachable judicial principles. If his daughters do not
respect his name as their shield, they will have nothing to protect them from, or offer to, the
world.
This declaration of the Judge’s that they must respect his name is “the most Alabama had
ever heard her father say about what he exacted of them” (13). As a child, her father’s authority
over their world does not bother the selfhood of Alabama. Indeed, “the little girl lies in the dark,
swelling virtuously submissive to the way of the clan” (5). She sees nothing inherently wrong
with the Judge’s absolute authority. But its example of building the self as an utterly separate
entity from any other source of emotional connection is damaging to her own construction of
self. Alabama sees him as the center of universe from which they all swing out in their own
orbits. And although the Judge does not emotionally connect with anyone, he is very concerned
with the material sustainability of his family. He incessantly worries about first financially
supporting them himself and then their marrying economically sound providers as well (25, 38).
After all, “Austin didn’t have race horses to pull her background for her like Millie’s father had
had” (19). He is a source of remote and unimpeachable strength for Alabama and the point of
stability from which she pivots.
53
In direct contrast to the Judge’s remoteness, Alabama’s mother, Millie, is “an emotional
anarchist” (9). The daughter of a wealthy Confederate, Millie has been indoctrinated in the
patriarchy of the Old South from infancy. As an adult who has come to the quieting knowledge
that she is eternally doomed to be a muse and not the artist in man’s creation, Alabama realizes
that Millie will not have recourse to self-generating strength when the Judge is dead:
“My poor mother,” said Alabama. “You have given your life for my father.”
…She saw her mother as she was, part of masculine tradition. Millie did not seem to
notice about her own life, that there would be nothing left when her husband died. He
was the father of her children, who were girls, and who had left her for the families of
other men. (208)
Millie will not only have limited finances once the Judge is gone, she will have lost all of her
“stock” as well–her daughters. Married off and now orbiting in their husbands’ universes,
Millie’s production, her family, will be gone–“there would be nothing left.” She does not even
have recourse to her own immediate family in Kentucky, telling Alabama, “‘When I came to live
with your father’s family I had so much to do I couldn’t keep track of my own’” (209). Totally
sublimated under the Judge’s rule, Millie loses contact with points of identity beyond those of
being a wife and mother. The remoteness of the Judge does not contribute toward a sustaining
relationship; the poverty of emotional support and connection within the marital relationship
makes Millie’s scanty communion with the world all the more desolate. As the Judge lays dying,
“[s]he waited constantly for some last illuminating words from the Judge, feeling that he must
have something to tell her before he left her alone at the last” (210). But these words are never
forthcoming. Millie, living under the oppression of the patriarchy her entire life, sees it as the
normal state; but this does not mean she does not yearn for a more meaningful interrelation. She
may be looking for “illuminating words,” but she also is desiring the more fulfilling connection
between partners–“he must have something to tell her.”
54
Her parents’ marriage structure and her mother’s example of womanhood affect Alabama
deeply. If Judge Beggs is the pivot from which the universe turns, Millie is the inspiration for
coping through an unfulfilling life by quietly revolting just enough to do what you want without
enduring the Judge’s condemnation. And she helps the girls do what they want too–go to
dances, date the “wrong men,” or even date several wrong men at a time (15, 24, 34). In a
successful effort to circumvent the Judge’s express desire for the scandalous Randolph to stay
away from Dixie and Alabama, Millie offers the only solution she has to living a life devoid of
marital emotional support:
“ Why do you bother your father? You could make your arrangements outside,” she said
placatingly. The wide and lawless generosity of their mother was nourished from many
years of living faced with the irrefutable logic of the Judge’s fine mind. An existence
where feminine tolerance plays no rôle being insupportable to her motherly temperament,
Millie Beggs, by the time she was forty-five, had become an emotional anarchist. It was
her way of proving to herself her individual necessity of survival. (9)
She has become able to passively accept the Judge’s dominance and neglect by actively
encouraging covert revolt. It is this covert revolt that allows her flicker of individuality to
survive. Her logic is founded in adaptation and secretiveness. Because the Judge’s logic of the
law is irrefutable, and in order to assert some kind of identity within his impersonal rule, Millie
becomes mutable and responsive. Words like “placatingly,” “generosity,” and “nourished” lead
to her being an “emotional anarchist.” Hers is not an absolute law; it a fluid and generous
misrule.
As a daughter of the Confederacy and an early-twentieth-century wife of a Southern
judge–and without the internal impetus to do so–Millie has very limited recourse to actual
assertive agency of her own. Instead, she advocates her quiet revolt of getting away with what
you can. As she tells Alabama’s daughter, Bonnie, “‘Children were not brought up so strictly
55
when mine were young,” and that “‘[w]hen your mother was young, she charged so much candy
at the corner store that I had an awful time hiding it from her father.’” Bonnie should do “‘[a]s
much as she can get by with…. Discipline used to be a matter of form and not a personal
responsibility’” (215). 11 This is much as Dick was taught by his Southern father(s) in Tender Is
the Night–the appearance of honor over the actual exercising of it. As long as the public facade
is maintained, what happens privately is unimportant; one must be circumspect, but that is all.
This Old Southern morality has the pretense of righteousness, not actual virtue. Millie’s own
code of honor seems to inhabit a space of acceptance; in order to keep her own sense of personal
validation intact, she does not allow the Judge’s (and all that he rules) disregard to negate her
existence and her adaptive approach to life. She tells Alabama, “…all people are [troublesome],
about one thing or another. We must not let it influence us’” (16, italics in original). She
imparts the lesson of detachment in order to survive the annihilation of emotional neglect to her
daughter and granddaughter. A woman mustn't allow other people’s troublesome (neglectful,
harmfully unsupportive) aspects to “influence us,” but should instead always strive to get away
with as “much as she can get by with.” It is a lesson Alabama in her own marriage takes to
heart.
When Alabama first meets her future husband, David Knight, the unreality of his beauty
enchants her. David is a “moon person” (86), with pale green gold hair like “eighteenth century
moonlight” (37); his face is full of “Cellinian frescos,” “fashionable porticoes,” “mysterious
bolts of fantasy,” “grottoes,” and “stalactites and malachites” combining toward the “inspiration”
11
While institutionalized at the Phipps Clinic in 1932, and during the same time period she was
writing Save Me, Zelda wrote strikingly similar advice in a letter to her daughter, Scottie, “And
profit by my absence to be as bad as you can get away with” (Milford 214).
56
of his “masculine beauty” (35, 37). He is less man and more romantic architecture. He
symbolizes a place of ethereal beauty and knowledge, outside of the Judge’s law-abiding
universe. He is figured in fantastical terms; the unreality of him is so great, he might even have
the power of flight: “There seemed to be some heavenly support beneath his shoulder blades that
lifted his feet from the ground in ecstatic suspension, as if he secretly enjoyed the ability to fly
but was walking as a compromise to convention” (35). David is a mythical moon presence, one
who can fly into the night.
But from early on we see that this ethereal flying man is also thoroughly grounded in
egoism. On a heartbreakingly beautiful night at a country club dance, David seems to
romantically be carving his and Alabama’s names into the door post in order to “‘lay a tablet to
the scene of our first meeting.’” But reality, he is carving, “‘David, David, Knight, Knight,
Knight, and Miss Alabama Nobody.’” He annoys Alabama by this act of egoism and by
repeatedly telling her how famous he is going to be, yet she still feels jealous when he dances
with other girls and “lead[s] others than herself into those cooler detached regions which he
inhabited alone” (36). Alabama may be bewitched by him, but David’s self-centeredness will
not allow him to see her as anything close to an equal. Rather, she is to be his muse, a source of
artistic inspiration–never flying, never creating herself. David writes Alabama letters utilizing
conventional romantic language, telling her, “and oh, my dear, you are my princess and I’d like
to keep you shut up forever in an ivory tower for my private delectation.” But Alabama has no
such desire to be kept on a pedestal, locked away from her own life: “The third time he wrote
that about the princess, Alabama asked him not to mention the tower again” (39). Her
forthrightness in claiming her individuality as separate from his foretells their future difficulty in
the artist/muse relationship.
57
After marrying and moving North, Alabama finds the excitement and acclaim the
Knights elicit in postwar New York to be thrilling, especially when compared to her more
reserved life of courting on the porch in Alabama. David’s newfound celebrity ushers them into
a world of seemingly non-stop parties and culturally-revolutionary decadent behaviors. Alabama
struggles with shaping a sense of purpose. Away from stabilizing influences of home, Alabama
realizes with fright that, “No power on earth could make her do anything…any more, except
herself” (42). This realization of the necessity for her own agency is not, however, entirely
congruent with David’s vision of their roles in life. The transitory space of New York, where a
phantasmagoria of personalities, ideas, art, and hedonism create an ever-shifting destabilized
environment, is frequently visited by the Knights, but they themselves make their new home in
the farmland of Connecticut where David can paint. David’s old-fashioned concern with
maintaining a respectable reputation (news reports of the Knights being placed in a “sanitarium
for wickedness” make him “almost cry[]”–“‘What’ll our parents think when they see that, I’d
like to know?’” (43)) 12 while also engaging in the alcohol-fueled hedonism of the city leaves
12
The Knights are an immediate splash on the social scene of New York, thanks to their wild
ways and David’s success as a painter. Soon after moving to New York, David reads in the
morning paper that they’re “famous.” He becomes increasingly alarmed as he reads on:
“‘Nice!’ he said–he was almost crying, ‘nice! But it says we’re in a sanitarium for wickedness.
What’ll our parents think when they see that, I’d like to know?’” Alabama responds that,
“‘They’ve thought we ought to be there for months,’” and then (in a demonstration of her
confused thinking and lack of logic) worries they might be in one now. The threat of the
sanitarium looms over the story, inserting itself into the outset of their marriage, serving as a
warning note almost from the narrator to the Knights. David’s parents are neither present nor
even mentioned again in the novel, so their views of their son’s marriage or of their daughter-inlaw, and their relationship with David, remains unknown. David’s worry about his parents
becoming aware of their being publicly outed as debauchees, and its implication of disappointing
what must be his more conservative parents, shows how frightening breaking from the norms of
traditional, puritanical American behavior, and the social and familial pressures attendant to that
break, could be for those forging a new path of social mores in the Jazz Age.
58
Alabama at a loss as to how conduct herself. The extremes between respectability and hedonism
exceed the limitations of her previous experience. Without the Judge’s immediacy shaping her
existence, “she hadn’t been absolutely sure about of how to go about anything since her marriage
had precluded the Judge’s resented direction” (50). But instead of helping her, David belittles
Alabama’s lack of direction, telling her, “[y]ou’ve become nothing but an aesthetic theory–a
chemistry formula for the decorative” (49).
When the Beggs come to visit, Alabama tries to live as she had been taught at home–
under the veil of the Judge’s respectability, yet still quietly having her own fun. But David’s
heedless joining of his self-invited friends’ bender leaves the illusion of their respectability
battered–literally; while taking away David’s bottle of gin, Alabama crashes into a door jamb,
bloodying her nose and leaving her with two black eyes. This descent into brutality shows how
far afield Alabama is now of the Judge’s fortress; no longer protected by his principled sword
and sheath in the vacuum of his integrity, the severe violence in this lawless and degenerate
universe has no principled source by which to pivot. Instead, Alabama is attacked and debased
by David’s intemperate upheaval. Knowing that they have let the Judge’s expectations down,
and that she has shown her decadent lifestyle outside of the tower for the scandalous debauch
that it is, Alabama worries that she has transgressed too far afield of her father’s limitations.
Seeing her black eyes in the morning, the Judge, who will not countenance such flagrant
contempt of his order, says the Beggs will now leave the Knights and go stay with Joan–who is
more respectably leading a traditional, conventional life of repression. With this loss of parental
sanction:
Alabama had known this would be their attitude but she couldn’t prevent a cataclysmic
chute of her insides. She had known that no individual can force other people forever to
59
sustain their own versions of that individual’s character–that sooner or later they will
stumble across the person’s own conception of themselves. (56)
This revelation of her own limited self-worth–the Judge’s conception of Alabama as being more
integrious than she herself feels she worthy of–is an incredibly sad one. The prescribed
boundaries of the Judge’s universe have inhibited Alabama’s trust in her own judgement, her
ability to enact her own agency, and her confidence in herself. Intolerant of the Knights’
hedonism–of their failure to privilege the appearance of honor–the Judge tells Alabama the harsh
moral of his law: “People who do not subscribe…have no rights” (56). Alabama’s black eyes
put a very visible face to her hedonist lifestyle. They are the palpable evocations of the violence
and turmoil that threaten her relationship with David; their life, outside of the prescribed bounds
of the Judge’s lawful orbit, is prey to brutality and assault. The overarching sense of chaos of
their world is translated into what should be the most tender of relationships, their marriage,
making it an anarchic place of violence and pain. No longer keeping up the appearance of living
under the Judge’s rules, and exceeding Millie’s recommended “much as she can get by with,”
Alabama has gone beyond the laws–both anarchic and rule-based–governing her universe. The
Judge revokes her right to agency–she has no rights; and his rulings are final. She has not stayed
within the his prescribed orbit, so she’s cast out of the lawful, sheltering (and inhibiting) tower.
After being cast out of the Judge’s good graces and his shielding orbit, Alabama finds
herself in a transitioning space. The opportunity to create agency for herself is one she
approaches with ambivalence. Not wanting her choices to be restricted, she feels equally unsure
about her ability to create life’s structure for herself. But the casting out is not only an
opportunity to fashion life for herself, but a loss of the boundaries in which she’s accustomed to
existing. As she tells David, “‘Yes–but David, it’s very difficult to be two simple people at once,
60
one who wants to have a law to itself and the other who wants to keep all the nice old things and
be loved and safe and protected’” (57). Alabama hesitates to attempt self-actualization. Without
the confidence inspired by authentic self-worth, she wants what she sees as the best of both
worlds–to rule her own world and to still be accepted into the fold–in essence, to be a man.
Alabama’s difficulty in enacting her own agency is further complicated by her
relationship with her husband. David, too, struggles with his desire to meet the expectations of
the old order–his worry about his parents’ disapproval in the newspaper episode is palpable–but
because he is a man, his choices and behaviors are less restricted, empowering him to be “a law
to itself.” And although he engages in the decadent behavior frowned upon by patriarchy’s
ruling representative, the Judge, the sanctions levied at him are less than Alabama’s. When you
belong, you have greater rights. David’s belonging to the masculine power structure is further
empowered by his own marital relationship. He is the creator in the relationship, the artist. He
may have wings, but he certainly doesn’t intend to teach Alabama how to fly.
Instead, the Knights sail to France, where David soars as an artist while Alabama
continues to search for something, or someone, to give her flight. After spending fifty thousand
dollars on “two years’ worth of polish for life’s baroque façade,” it has become obvious that the
Knights, who have recently become parents with the birth of their daughter Bonnie (57), aren’t
going to develop as individuals, parents, or artists without a serious change of scene, so they
leave the decadence of New York for what they hope will be a quiet and peaceful place in which
David can focus on his painting. After a rather appalling introduction to the Riviera, they settle
in St. Raphaël. Unlike the Riviera presented in Tender, the environment here is lurid, garish, and
broken. It is not a restful oasis where Alabama and David may restore their equilibrium after the
hedonism of New York and grow together as mature and productive adults. Instead, it is “where
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people do not need to see unless they are looking for the nightingale” (74)–but, just as in Keats,
“here there is no light” (38). The Knights are not going to find the inspiration they are looking
for in the Riviera, for in the harsh and extreme light of day, it does not come off as some
mystical space where one may commune with the ideas of transience through poesy. Instead, the
place they inhabit is a grotesque one, overwrought, garish, and threatening. Gone is the
nurturing embrace of the sea, enabling Nicole Diver to emerge as a creative self; now, the
narrator lets us know, the “deep Greek of the Mediterranean licked its chops over the edges of
our febrile civilization.” Keeps crumble, poppies bleed, and “the vibrancy of the sun” all lend to
a feeling of disorientation and confusion (Z. Fitzgerald 74). The impenetrable fortresses of the
Judge are here crumbling and uninhabitable, and the breakdown of the landscape invades and
pollutes their bodies. Bonnie becomes scratched and infected, and the cobbled roads make
Alabama “‘feel as if you had a peg leg’”–they are thrown off balance to the point of infection
and disease. Authentic immersions with the self are gone; rather, the Riviera disassembles and
contaminates both spaces and people. Untamed nature creeps back in and reclaims civilization’s
attempts at permanency, as do the grotesque influences of man:
They followed the pavings of the French Republic past the bamboo curtains of Hyères,
past strings of felt slippers and booths of women’s underwear, past gutters flush with the
lush wastage of the south, past the antics of exotic dummies inspiring brown Provençal
faces to dream of the freedom of the Foreign Legion, past scurvy-eaten beggars and
bloated clots of bougainvillea, dust and palms, a row of horse-cabs, the tooth-paste
display of the village coiffeur exuding the smell of Chypre, and past the caserne which
drew the town together like a family portrait will a vast disorganized living room. (75)
The nightmarish, cartoonish village, bloated and rotting, is not the equanimous middle landscape
in which the inspired applications of the cultivator results in bountiful and sustaining production.
This space is perverted, overripe, and debauched. The narrator’s insights into the nightmarish
environment the Knights have entered foreshadows the disintegration they will find here. The
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landscape is breaking down, rotting, as will the Knights’ marriage and Alabama’s own
perceptions of the world. The narrator, who seems to know better than to fully trust either
Alabama or David’s viewpoints, sees the destructive tendencies of them both, and frames the
corrosion of the characters within the crumbling Rivieran scenery.
David does not feel the initial repulsion and suspicion of condemnation that Alabama
does; he is, rather, enthusiastic about their new home. Tellingly, he expresses his excitement
over moving to France by saying, “‘It’s so magnificent! It’s glorious! We can have wine with
our lunch!’” (73)–a ridiculous reduction of its history and culture to hedonistic immaturity;
France is wonderful because here, you can drink wine with lunch. Yet, he is inspired in his work
here, and thriving in the moribund space, he paints all day, leaving Alabama alone in the hot,
squalid, and oppressive place. The sweat and fleas and lethargy of the Riviera stifle Alabama.
David sees a “Paradise” where they “are going to be so happy away from all the things that
almost got [them] but couldn’t quite because [they] were too smart for them,” but Alabama sees
painted cupids swelling with “goiters or some malignant disease” (81). Alabama is not inspired
in this space; instead, she is oppressed, repulsed, and disoriented. Worrying that they have
brought their restlessness with them, Alabama wonders, “‘What’ll we do, David, …with
ourselves?’” David passionately paints his frescoes and dismisses Alabama’s worries as
unimportant, telling her, “‘A woman’s place is with the wine…. There is art to be undone in the
world.’” Art, for David, is very much man’s provenance; it does not occur to him that Alabama
needs an outlet for her creativity and intellect as well. She is merely a muse, a prop, to his
genius, a reduction Alabama, long used to swinging in another man’s orbit, the Judge’s, silently
acquiesces to for as long as she can. As she poignantly notes, while David, the self-professed
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artistic genius, works, she’ll merely, “‘luxuriate in this voluptuous air and grow fat on bananas
and Chablis while David Knight grows clever’” (82).
Alabama is an outsider here in the Riviera, feeling neither a sense of belonging to the
environment nor supported by her marriage. Unlike Nicole in Tender, Alabama is unable to find
balance in the garden; torn between her obligations as wife and muse and her tendencies toward
obsession, lawlessness, and self-centered thinking, Alabama is unable to be a productive,
sustaining cultivator. Even her gardener, whose job it is to cultivate and sustain, has an
oppressive effect on Alabama; the garden will clearly not be a center of awakening selfhood and
agency for her. Instead, the dispiriting noises of the garden weigh troublesomely in the air:
“The sound of a Provençal gardener carrying on his passive resistance to effort woke them. The
rake trailed lazily over the gravel” (81). The gardener, instead of inspiring and aiding Alabama
toward growing her best self, has “passive resistance”–even his lack of effort and laziness are
indolently asserted. There is no metaphorical awakening here for Alabama, only a literal,
apathetic one. Here in Les Rossignols, their home, “The Nightingale’s,” has a drowsy,
dampening effect on Alabama, not unlike Keats’s “dull brain” (44).
The family is the most alert to the bonds of family when they swim together in the sea,
but even in this nurturing blue space, the rumbles of war can be heard. David proclaims that it
feels wonderful “to feel nothing could disturb us now and life can go on as it should,” but he and
Alabama quickly devolve into an argument over who will be Agamemnon in their frolic in the
sea. Any family togetherness is immediately tested by their mutual desire to each play act as the
supreme commander (showing shades of Dick Diver and his use of performance to assert
control, but without any of his guilty sense of responsibility). And just as in the Greek epic, their
daughter, Bonnie, is the one who will be sacrificed to their hubris. She pleads with them both to
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be merely fish with her as “‘[f]ishes are nicer.’” Alabama says she can be both Agamemnon and
a fish, “[b]ecause, my daughter, I am so outrageously clever that I believe I could be a whole
world to myself if I didn’t like living in Daddy’s better’” (Z. Fitzgerald 84). Although Alabama
boasts to the self-confidence to create her own world, she does not attempt it. Now in France
and away from the Judge, she spins from David’s pivot because she “like[s it] better.” She
wants to be both the supreme navigator of the seas and one fish among many, but settles on
neither, just as she does not make up her own “whole world” or wholly live in David’s. It is this
drift, much like the apathetic gardener’s “passive resistance to effort,” that leads to her muddled
and discontented existence. As they cannot both be Agamemnon, the Knights take a page from
their old playbook and escape the difficulties inherent in compromise and growth by going to a
bar instead. Here, “fresh and slick and salty” from the sea (84), the Knights meet the
consequence of their restless quest for stimulation through the figure of Lieutenant Jacques
Chevre-Feuille, or “honeysuckle,” who will expose the fragility of the Knights’ union when
Alabama hopes that maybe this man will teach her to fly.
The lack of balance exhibited by the Knights both at home and in the sea–and now in the
French bar as well–foretells the devastation that will come to themselves and their marriage.
They cannot find harmony and don’t even strive for it; rather, they both want to be Agamemnon
and take what they can from life. They are acting as emotional anarchists, but unlike Millie,
they’re ignoring the implied limitations set by the Judge. Without boundaries, they will only
swing themselves into dissolution and ruin. The ease with which Jacques is able to disrupt their
marriage–David is glad of the distraction Jacques provides for the bored Alabama who is now
off his hands so he can work (94); whereupon meeting Jacques, “Alabama experienced the
emotion of a burglar unexpectedly presented with the combination of a difficult safe by the
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master of the house” (85)–is only possible due to its lack of harmony. This absence of balance in
their union is exacerbated by their individual recklessness. While “David’s pictorial sense rose
in wild stimulation on the barbaric juxtapositions of the Mediterranean morning” (86, italics
mine), Alabama heedlessly ignores their English nanny’s advice to “always think of the future”
and not “spoil the skin” by too much tanning (87). She wants to have “all the nice old things”
like status, fashionable clothing, and the security of a family, while also being “a law to itself,”
vacillating between the outliers of experiences shaping her life. But because the nature of the
law itself is ground in a social contract, one may never truly be “a law to itself.” She still wants
both the freedom to be an anarchist and the protection of the law, but now the stakes are much
higher than during her schoolgirl days in Alabama. David is able to temper his hedonist,
anarchist bents through his productive contributions to art, but Alabama has no such outlet for
her creative energies; neither does she seem to really want them. When David, realizing that
Alabama is not an adept household manager, asks Nanny to help her with it, Alabama becomes
resentful–not because David is impugning her abilities, but because she wants to be left free “to
think about how brown her legs were going to be and how the wine would have tasted if it had
been cold” (88). The narrator exposes Alabama’s narcissism–she wants to be a law unto herself
without the responsibility of enacting her role in the maintenance of the “nice old things.”
Whereas Nicole chooses to actively engage with the environment of the Riviera in order
to enrich and develop herself, Alabama’s desires are limited to tanning, drinking, and having a
non-spiritually enhancing affair with a man with whom she can barely communicate. She sees
her inability to verbally connect with Jacques as being grounded in a lack of developed
understanding–“‘I can’t even speak intelligibly to him’” (italics mine). She cannot share
language with him logically or sensibly. Her materialism, instead, only enables her to find
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beauty in “the young Dionysus” (87), not a shared sense of purpose or ideas. David, who has
become increasingly protective of his work time, tells Alabama that they “mustn’t let externals
ruin [their] summer,” but by now, it is too late. Although the “externals” David is referring to
are Nanny’s incessant monologues during meals while he’s “‘thinking of composition,’” and he
hopes that, “[s]he’ll find somebody to unload herself on,’” he may as well be speaking of his
own marriage. Indeed, Alabama has found “somebody to unload herself on,” as Jacques, the
“bird of prey,” literally swoops into their garden (89). Jacques flies his aeroplane over the
Knights’ garden, dropping a note to Alabama, one she cannot read nor understand. He is thus
just one more man who doesn’t teach her how to fly nor with whom she shares a balanced
communication. Like the Judge and David, Jacques’s access to language (and law and logic)
remains unavailable to Alabama.
Obfuscation and overindulgence become pervasive in the Knights’ Riviera, and
Alabama’s sense of purpose becomes further muddied by the foreboding environment. Both
other people and the landscape weigh oppressively on her; it is as though she is in a nightmare,
one where everything is slowed down and frighteningly absurd: “[t]he Riviera is a seductive
place. The blare of the beaten blue and those white palaces shimmering under the heat
accentuates things…. A small horde of people wasted their time being happy and their happiness
being time…” (92). Even the pursuit of happiness becomes a “waste” here where there is no
progression, no logical development of that happiness to some greater understanding. Aware of
the approaching night, on both a literal and metaphorical level, Alabama is restless, wondering
what to do with herself; her attempts at traditional occupations of womanhood– reading, sewing,
actively mothering–prove to be frustratingly futile to her. David subverts her bid for agency as a
concerned, effective parent by telling her not to “interfere” with Nanny’s care of Bonnie, as the
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discord between the two women is disruptive to his work. Bored and purposeless, Alabama
becomes resentful of David, as she regressively looks to him as the father figure to supply
defining limitations for herself:
When she was a child and the days slipped lazily past in the same indolent fashion, she
had not thought of life as furnishing up the slow uneventful sequence, but of the Judge as
meting it out that way, curtailing the excitement she considered was her due. She began
to blame David for the monotony. (92-93)
Alabama cannot summon the initiative to assert her own agency. The narrator tells us she is
“desultor[y],” “restless[],” and her half-hearted attempts at being productive are “failure[s].”
Raised by the dichotomous examples of the Beggs, Alabama finds she cannot claim, even to
herself, to be the pivot from which the universe spins, nor can she be merely a passive receiver of
rules and laws. Instead, she finds herself purposeless in a grotesque world. Without authentic
connections or a sense of responsibility, the Riviera becomes a frightful place. Her yearning for
immediate satisfaction without accountability is in no way congruent with growth, stability, or
balance. The devolution of Alabama from a person with a sense of joyousness, curiosity, and
aspirations to an overwhelmed, frightened, and ineffectual member within her relationships is
mirrored by her experiences of the Riviera (importantly, not in the Riviera–as it remains separate
from herself).
Alabama and Jacques’s affair progresses as they spend the days sunbathing and
swimming together and the evenings drinking and dancing (92-94)–all active relations, not ones
based on language or the mind. David suggests to Alabama that she throw a party as a diversion
to her boredom (as being amusing is really the only quality David ascribes to his wife), but even
here she feels left out due to her non-comprehension: “The party soared on the babble of French
phrases senseless to Alabama; her mind drifted inconsequently” (94). Those who can engage
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with the language soar, whereas she, senseless and inconsequential, drifts. Her mind has nothing
to anchor and pivot from; adrift from the Judge’s axis, David selfishly mindful only of his own
spinning, and Jacques’s obscuring due to the language barrier, Alabama is pivotless and without
purpose or definition. David becomes increasingly jealous of the time and attention Alabama
gives to Jacques; the ethereal man of magic and moonlight flies no longer, but is now grounded
in anger, betrayal, and possessive abuse. He threatens to leave Alabama “‘and go back to
America alone’” (95). He tells her she is “sick” and “insane.” 13 Instead of seeking to
understand why the affair might have transpired or what role he may have had in it, David is
accusatory and threatening. Concurrently, Jacques is figured more and more as being Rivieran–
that is, separate and foreign, other, to her. He is, “[c]ourageous and proprietary,…part of the sun
and part of the French aviation and part of the blue and the white collar of the beach, part of
Provence and the brown people living by the rigid discipline of necessity, part of the pressure of
life itself…. His golden face and the white linen standing off from him exhaling the gold glow
of his body ran together in a golden blur” (97). In contrast to Alabama, drifting
inconsequentially, and David, angry and threatening, Jacques is ordered, controlled, correct. The
repetition of this sense of control–he is courageous, proprietary, rigid, discipline; he has
necessity and pressure–and the important reiteration of him being a French aviator (foreign and a
daring master of new and dangerous technology, one which through his own actions, he
harnesses the power to escape the bounds of the Earth), and even the colors he wears and exudes
are Provençal, further separating him from the American Knights. With the crisis of the affair
reaching its apex, the mistral arrives, turning the once hot, oppressive, and stifling environment
13
These are especially poignant insults given Zelda’s own recent diagnosis of, and current
institutionalization due to, schizophrenia.
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into a cold, stinging, unfriendly one. Any nurturing the Riviera may have held for the Knights
has now been blown away by the pervasive winds; even the environment seems to turn against
Alabama’s attempts at connection beyond those created for her by the Judge and David.
With the mistral, Jacques vanishes from their life as quickly as he had interloped into it:
“Jacques had passed over that much of their lives like a vacuum cleaner” (98). All that remains
of their Rivieran life is cheapness and dirtiness–“[t]hat was all there was left of July and August”
(99). Her teenage resolve at the outbreak of war has proved cataclysmically true:
…move brightly along high places and stop to trespass and admire, and if the fine was a
heavy one–well, there was no good in saving up beforehand to pay it. Full of these
presumptuous resolves, she promised herself that if, in the future, her soul should come
starving and crying for bread it should eat the stone she might have to offer without
complaint or remorse. Relentlessly she convinced herself that the only thing of any
significance was to take what she wanted when she could. She did her best. (28)
With Jacques’s leaving for a new post in Indo-Chine, she realizes that “[w]hatever is was that
she wanted from Jacques, Jacques took it with him to squander on the Chinese. You took what
you wanted from life, if you could get it, and you did without the rest” (101), now echoing her
emotionally anarchist mother. Failing to either take Nanny’s advice to prudently save her skin
(her body, her external shape of self) for the future or to become truly like (or even get to know)
“these beautiful brown people…[who] seem so free of secrets” (87), she has “trespasse[ed] and
admire[d]” and taken what she wanted and could from life. She must now eat stone “without
complaint or remorse.” This proves to be far more difficult than she could ever have anticipated.
With the flight of the warmth of the Rivieran sun, both figuratively through Jacques and
literally with the mistral, all the women of the Knight household–Alabama, Nanny, and Bonnie–
become increasingly alienated from and apprehensive of the environment. Although Nanny says
the mistral is “‘useful’” as the “‘atmosphere is so much clearer when they fall,’” she too is
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frightened by the cold winds threatening their previously sleepy and boring lives. When she and
Alabama take Bonnie for an afternoon walk, they find themselves in an apocalyptic atmosphere
with threatening men at all sides. No longer is the sky a blinding brightness of whites and blues;
it is now a place where “[t]he sun bled to death in a red and purple hemorrhage–dark arterial
blood dyeing the grape leaves. The clouds were black and twisted horizontally and the land
spread biblical in the prophetic light.” They meet no other women on their walk, only men, who
seem to close in on them in this savage landscape, threatening them for their transgressions into
their midst. “A peasant in the hot fields gestured lasciviously” at the women, and from the
Senegalese camp (outpost of the colonized other and representative of the white European and
American racial fears of Africa) comes sounds of the “rites they performed for the dead in their
monster-guarded burial ground.” Even the kindly shepherd cannot keep their fear at bay,
acknowledging “gently” as his flock surround the women that, “‘Oui,… vous avez peur!’” The
women are unprepared for the assaults from the mistral and the alarming men, and as David does
not recognize his responsibility as shepherd (as regressively sexist as this is to contemporary
readers), the women are left alone and unguarded, like a flock left untended, open to the attacks
of a predatory world. The kind and gentle French shepherd perceives the women’s fear, but
because he is tending his own flock, he can only acknowledge it as he passes by, guiding his
sheep as they “swept around Alabama and the nurse and child, whirling up the dust with their
pattering feet” (100).
The Knights soon leave the Riviera, and their dreams of unity and success, behind them,
bringing their “germs of bitterness” with them to Paris. Disillusioned by the harsh lessons they
have learned in St. Raphaël, they no longer have “much faith in travel nor a great belief in a
change of scene as a panacea for spiritual ills; they were simply glad to be going” (101).
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Movement has replaced intention and hope. Alabama now finds obligations as antagonistic
toward her; she thinks being a mother to Bonnie is “a plan and a trap laid by civilization to
ensnare and cripple her happiness and hobble the feet of time” (104). Feeling “excluded by her
lack of accomplishment” (109) and disfavorably (and sadly self-woundedly) comparing her body
to the dancer’s with whom David cheats on her in revenge for her affair with Jacques, Alabama
attempts to define herself as a ballerina. After her disastrous time as wife and muse in the
Riviera, she now laughs at the preposterous idea a drunken party-goer lobs at her: “‘You need
somebody to take care of you…. You’re a man’s woman and need to be bossed’” (118). She is
now openly contrary to Millie’s instincts, and men’s view of women’s purpose in general, as she
succinctly states, “‘there’s the baby–life goes on’” (119). But her decision to be a ballerina,
borne through her sense of betrayal by David’s affair and the validations of motherhood to be
inadequate in creating her self-worth, proves to be as difficult and divisive as anything she has
faced on the Riviera.
Unfortunately, Alabama brings her inability to strike a balance, that failing which has
haunted both Knights before, with her in her quest to become a ballerina, and she comes to
neglect all the other components that make up her life. Focusing on the training of her body to
the exclusion of all else, she no longer feels a connection to anything beyond it. She sees the star
of the ballet studio she has joined, Arienne, “winding the ends of space about the rigidity of her
extended thigh” (123). This conceptualization of the ballerina’s control is injudicious and selfdelusional, though; the dancers’, and, specifically, Alabama’s, attempts to subvert technologybased male power structures by using their bodies as ballerinas-as-technological-forms, meet
with failure as they are still feminized under the male gaze (Salvey). Forgetting that she once
told David that she “can’t fly, but love me anyway” (70), she wrongly thinks that with enough
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effort she will be able to fly. She feels once again like the child she was back in Alabama, secure
within the Judge’s universe, yet pushing boundaries as much as she dares:
She remembered unexpectedly the exaltation of swinging sideways down the pavements
as a child and clapping her heels in the air. This was close to that old forgotten feeling
that she couldn’t stay on the earth another minute. (Z. Fitzgerald 127)
In this way, she only momentarily experiences the flight that is always already available to
Jacques as aviator and David as a man who “secretly enjoyed the ability to fly” (35). She is
“consumed by a longing to succeed as a dancer,” to “drive the devils that had driven her–that, in
proving herself, she would achieve that peace which she imagined went only in surety of one’s
self” (128). She has “drugged herself with work” (139). Her attempt to live outside of “Daddy’s
world” is completely unbalanced. She is obsessed with the ballet to the exclusion of her family,
friends, clothing–even her dog. Striving to define a sense of purpose for herself, as “[s]ince StRaphaël she had had no uncontested pivot from which to swing her equivocal universe” (115)
due to the rupture in her and David’s marriage, she becomes heedless of her relationships outside
of the ballet. No longer is she able to be “two things at once,” as she was in the sea with David
and Bonnie when she is both Agamemnon and a fish (84); she now insists, “‘No, no!… I cannot
do two things at once’” (141). So focused is she on being a dancer, she has lost her ability to be
anything else.
She becomes unable to function in her life outside the ballet. Her clothes, always before
with her a point of distinction and pride, now lie in dirty piles, stinking up her bedroom. She is
rough and unkind to Bonnie, falsely accusing her of wrongdoing and then physically punishing
her (151). Her body has become “nothing but sinew. To succeed had become an obsession”
(159-60). No longer caring about the family and relationships that once defined her joy in life,
“[a]t home, the household fell into a mass of dissatisfaction without an authority to harmonize its
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elements…. The life at home was simply an existence of individuals in proximity; it had no
basis of common interest” (160), and she moves alone to Naples to dance in its ballet. After a
disturbing visit in which the filth of Alabama’s bathtub makes Bonnie sick, and in her obsession
with perfecting her solo, she forgets to buy her seven-year-old daughter’s medicine for a week;
she has become selfishly obsessed to the point of physically endangering her child. She is glad
when the short visit it over, and she sends Bonnie back to David with a sense of relief. As
Alabama’s obsession with the ballet grows, David becomes a more and more attentive toward
Bonnie and a better father; Bonnie’s preference for him, and his joy in being reunited with his
child, is marked when she returns to him from Naples (188). The only bit of wisdom Bonnie
gleans from her mother during their week together is to “‘not to be a back-seat driver about life’”
(197). By moving to Naples alone to be a soloist in the ballet, Alabama is attempting to take
control of her own trajectory, her own life, and she tells her daughter something she herself never
heard as a child–to be her own driver. 14 But Alabama’s attempts at control and self-definition
are fatally wounded when the glue from her Italian ballet slippers enters an open wound in her
toe, leading to blood poisoning and attendant hallucinations and enormous pain. Her leg tendon
cut and an artery scraped, she awakens from feverish nightmares to find David (who has
immediately joined her in Naples upon learning of her illness) weeping for joy that her illness
has at least had the positive impact of reuniting them as a couple. Alabama does not share his
sense of unity, nor his relief; instead, she only thinks of her body and how all her work has been
for nothing (202).
14
Alabama’s strivings here for control are like Dick Diver's in Tender. Dick controlled the
sand, his friends, his wife, his personal style and representation; Alabama controls her body, and
thus her involvement, interaction, and artistic expression into the world.
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As she lies in her hospital bed recuperating, bitterly thinking of the stone which she must
now eat, she reflects that her father, who, she learns, is now dying, must have had times when he
“hadn’t wanted any of them dragging about his thighs and drawing his soul off in lager….
Without her father the world would be without its last resource. ‘But,’ she remembered with a
sudden sobering shock, ‘it will be me who is the last resource when my father is dead’” (203).
Her attempts to define her own boundaries of self cut and ruined through her obsessive pursuit
and dangerous disregard for balance and the subsequential breakdown and betrayal of her body,
she knows that the limitations imposed on her by her father, the Judge, will soon be gone too.
But as she has not been able to clarify agency for herself, she is now doomed to living under the
oppressive dominance of her husband instead.
The Knights return to her hometown, where Alabama searches fruitlessly for a message
of meaning from the Judge. She comes to realize that all he has bequeathed her is “many
doubts” (212). She had strayed from the pivot’s orbit many years hence, but always, in the back
of her mind, it was still there, swinging the universe about it. The Judge had always stood for
law and order, moral certitude, in her consciousness, and even when she disregarded these
morals, as during her affair with Jacques or the neglect of her family, she retained the conception
of him as the ultimate embodiment of authority and security. Now she questions if he ever really
was; perhaps her father was never anything more than human. She sees that she and David must
fake being “two gods of the hearthstone” so that, if nothing else, Bonnie will have those false
memories to look back on in times of difficulty in order “to believe that her restlessness will
pass” (214), just as Alabama had always relied subconsciously on the Judge. No longer
believing in the sanctity of the Judge’s pivot, Alabama sees she must stay with David and live in
a false universe, a bitter acquiescence to her mother’s approach, if only for Bonnie’s sake.
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Alabama had once believed that “‘[c]onsciousness is the goal’” (68). To understand and
fully engage with life, to connect with loved ones in order to better define the self, had been her
aspiration. But she now sees “‘[c]onsciousness…is an ultimate betrayal’” (215). She knows that
she’ll never be able to fly, but is bound to the Earth to live through David’s work as his muse
once again. Still in a man’s world, she no longer tries to be the pivot or to even understand
anything, but only to live episodically and just go on so that Bonnie will have something to
sustain her when she needs resources in life. Her failure to acknowledge that a balance in the
world must be struck has lead to her now bearing up through Alabaman cocktail parties, silently
thinking of the “sweet and warm” wine of St-Raphaël clinging “like syrup to the roof of [her]
mouth and glu[ing] the world together against the pressure of the heat of the dissolution of the
sea” (217). Faced with her depressing betrayal of consciousness, she escapes in her mind to the
early days in Riviera, when she still had hopes that she may learn to fly. But here in Alabama,
David has completely co-opted her search for self, even being critically acclaimed for his new
paintings, inspired by the ballet. Alabama’s work and artistry has devolved from something she
created herself into merely David’s inspiration, interpretation, glory. They have indeed not
found “‘balance in Europe’” (219).
She has finally learned “that the bones of her father could indicate only her limitations”
(4). Instead of searching for an overarching meaning, as a woman who is part of a society where
her life is defined for her by men, with or without her consent, she is regulated to living
episodically, moving from one experience to the next, never enabled to construct a greater sense
of understanding. She cannot utilize her experiences for growth and change; instead, she must
“‘lump everything in a great heap which [she has] labelled ‘the past,’ and, having thus emptied
this deep reservoir that was once myself, I am ready to continued’” (220, sic).
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Because she is not able to find balance for herself, she is unable to assert agency. Now
fully dependent on David, she can no longer even attempt self-realization or individualization
through isolation. She is once again David’s muse, and he is once again her plagiarist. With
both her legs and beliefs in tatters, she no longer searches for meaning or actively creates for
herself; she is now simply inspiration for David’s art and acclaim. He freely draws from her
life’s experiences as her failure to establish individual boundaries pulls her remorselessly into his
orbit. Her lessons from her Old South parents–with its prioritizing of the appearance of honor
over actual substance, 15 and where she learns to get away with just enough–is also where she
learns to not have responsibility for the self, instead indoctrinating her to a repressive
dependence on men and a denial of selfhood. Alabama, who could never strike balance in her
life, must continue to live under the oppressive forces of the patriarchy. Sadly, its limitations
have become her rule.
15
Zelda’s own childhood in Montgomery, Alabama informed her use of the Old South morals in
her novel. Her rebelliousness as a teenager was marked by her flagrant violation of these morals:
“Confederacy codes meant no gossip. The sin lay in the saying. That was where Zelda differed
from the rest. None of them were ‘speeds’ but Zelda couldn’t resist the temptation to appear
one, to tell the tale” (Cline 38). Her personal insights into these repressive codes, and the
repercussions of not adhering to them, inform and underscore Alabama’s experiences throughout
the novel.
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CHAPTER THREE
Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden:
Incantations of Betrayal
Catherine Bourne in Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden has been read by critics as
many things: a vampiric, jealous wife, a bisexual, a madwoman, a transgender person, a
frustrated non-artist, a wife using her personal wealth to manipulate and control her husband–
either she’s questing to define her sexual identity, or she’s a shrew. What has not been
previously analyzed are the ways in which Catherine explores what it means to be re-Bourne,
pushing herself and her husband, David, toward becoming an evolving unit, not merely tragically
cyclical individuals mired in their own individual pasts. She is constructing her ideas about–and
an actual–family, a comforting, supportive bond she has never had before. As an orphaned only
child, she has not had a family to help give shape to her own identity; rather, she wants David, a
motherless son with only an abusive father as a role model, to move forward with her, creating
definition for themselves as individuals, and importantly, as a couple, by co-creating both a
family bond with each other and, literally and figuratively, their own narrative. In her movement
away from unknowing and loneliness and toward a supportive, creative unit, she goes so far as to
welcome a third member into their marriage, Marita, in order to bring more real comfort and
complexity to the Bournes as a whole. But things are ever only real to David once he writes
about them; unfortunately, his obsessive reiteration of his own past means the present, and a
more evolved future, are not available to him.
The fallout from his rejection of their marriage’s shared growth and maturity has
devastating consequences. A compassionate reading illuminates the ways in which the power of
language are used to diminish and manipulate those who push the boundaries of hierarchal
control, as Catherine does, and how David and Marita (and even the narrator) use this damaging
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language in their dismissive efforts to try to convince Catherine she’s crazy. But Catherine is not
crazy; in fact, a careful reading reveals the violence and condemnation–words long used by
critics to attack her and her motivations–levied against her by the others. It is Catherine, in point
of fact, who is attacked and controlled, and David, an author well-versed in familial betrayal,
who executes his most damaging act of treachery against her.
Published posthumously in 1986, The Garden of Eden was fashioned from an unfinished
draft Hemingway had worked on, on and off, for decades. The published version was not edited
by a noted Hemingway scholar but, rather, by Tom Jenks, then a young editor at Scribner’s. 16
The resulting edited novel is the tale of a new marriage between a young writer and his even
younger wife, settling into their new life in a (as it is the summer) deserted Rivieran hotel. David
begins writing a narrative based on their short life together so far. In this time of newness and
exploration, Catherine transforms into a “boy,” first in the bedroom and then sometimes in
public, with David becoming a “girl” in private only. But David soon works less on both the
narrative and the active development of their marriage, becoming more absorbed by his writing
of a series of short stories about his youth in Africa. In a bid to both reignite David’s
involvement in the co-created narrative (the literal and figurative) of their marriage, and in a
push toward the growth of the family unit, Catherine invites Marita, a young bisexual, into their
lives. The resulting love triangle centers around sexual and relational boundary shifting as well
as David-as-Writer. As David becomes more enamored of his work (and his own press
16
It should be noted that Scribner’s, the venerable publishing house, published all three of the
novels discussed in this dissertation: Tender Is the Night, Save Me the Waltz, and The Garden of
Eden. Scribner editor Maxwell Perkins first signed Fitzgerald in 1919, and then, at Fitzgerald’s
prompting, Hemingway in 1926, followed by (to Hemingway’s great and everlasting
consternation) Zelda in 1932.
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clippings), Catherine grows increasingly disenchanted with the structure of their relationship.
While Marita takes on the role of traditional, supportive wife, loving David and David-as-Writer
with equal gusto, Catherine is saddened to learn David has totally set aside the marriage
narrative, which she had felt to be a co-creator in, as it is an exploration of their shared life
together. David shelves it, and thus any serious investment in co-creating life for them as a
couple, in favor of regressively and obsessively writing only about his childhood instead. As he
and Marita increasingly turn on Catherine with accusations of mental instability, she distances
herself from the romance. In a final attempt at agency and a push toward the evolution of them
all, as people and creators, she burns David’s short stories, saving the co-narrative only. Still
trying to bring a new story to the world, not just a recapitulation of the past, Catherine leaves for
Paris to arrange for the narrative’s publication. David, at first distraught at the loss of both his
work and their relationship (but mostly his work), finds that he can replace not only his stories
but his wife with newer, better versions. And while David and Marita casually, and chillingly,
make inferences to what they hope will be Catherine’s imminent death, “accidental” or
otherwise, they remain happily in their hotel by sea with David obsessively rewriting his
childhood’s betrayals into being.
The conceptualizing of Catherine through the lens of David’s approval has historically
troubling precedence by critics who see her as less “mad but interesting” and more “jealous and
destructive.” Nancy R. Comley and Robert Scholes find Catherine’s “thwarted creativity–
thwarted because, in the Hemingway Text, this is a boundary no woman can cross–turns her into
the puritanical castrating mother who destroys her boy-man’s connection to the primitive” (6263). Catherine is not only destructive, but “puritanical” (which seems quite a stretch adjectively
when used to describe someone of non-binary gender, strong, and creative); she is“castrating”
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her poor “boy-man” (again, she invites and welcomes a second wife into their marriage–she is
hardly limiting the sexual experiences of her husband, who is clearly not an infant). This idea of
Catherine as destructive vampire and David as poor little manipulated boy-artist is critically
orthodox and, frankly, boring, revealing more about Hemingway critics than the actual content of
the novel itself. The Garden of Eden was worked over by Hemingway for decades and finally
published posthumously perhaps because it is such a departure from the typical Hemingway
canon. Hemingway was doing something different in Garden, and the same old cut-and-paste
critiques of “Man/artist is good! Assertive wife is bad!” no longer apply. 17
Feminist critics read Catherine and her actions in a far more positive light. In
“Hemingway, Literalism, and Transgender Reading,” Valerie Rohy finds Catherine’s “ability to
imagine non-normative gendering in terms of plenitude rather than lack yields a better
understanding of female masculinity and male femininity, enabling the translation of those
agnostic pairs–surface and depth, literal and figural, masculinity and femininity–into something
17
The following analyses of Garden all take this same tiredly misogynistic approach: Daniel
Kempton celebrates David’s masculine ability to carry on writing, “recuperating all losses
inflicted by time or, in a different sense, by the transgressive feminine, specifically Catherine”
(141). David, in his view, is artistic despite Catherine’s urging of sexual and gender exploration:
“It would now seem that sexual transgression is related to artistic creativity not as cause but as
antithesis” (140). Robert Gajdusek sadly finds the novel to be “a study in male relinguishment
of power” (15, sic), as a “wilful and rebellious” Catherine “attempt[s] to seize the attributes and
authority of the male” (sic). She is destructive, using her “given power” to “unnaturally
manipulat[e] life into fictive postures, creating drama” (16). Gajudusek’s reductive view of
Catherine as manipulative destroyer who is “given” power by a man is complemented by Carl
Eby’s assertion that Catherine is merely a phallic symbol in David’s “‘psychotic flash’” of
sodomitic fetishism (79). Richard Fantina agrees with this regulation of Catherine as sodomite
symbol–she is “a dominant, phallic woman”–who, once the inconvenience of her existence
becomes greater than the excitement of her phallic symbolism, Hemingway kindly “intervenes
on David’s behalf to destroy” (60). To these critics, Catherine’s importance only extends as far
as her phallic symbolism does; otherwise, she is seen by them, tiresomely, as destructive,
manipulative, and mad.
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more than either/or” (172-73). Kathy Willingham reassesses the traditional view of Hemingway
as woman-hater as, “[h]is treatment of Catherine challenges numerous critical charges of
misogynistic insensitivity, for in Garden he provides a sympathetic portrait of a creative woman
who, contrary to critical assumptions, does not victimize the male protagonist; rather, she enables
him to see beyond restrictive binaries: male/female, homosexuality/heterosexuality,
passive/active. Catherine enriches David’s life; she does not destroy it” (308). This generous
reading is complicated by Amy Lovell Strong’s findings in “‘Go to Sleep, Devil’: The
Awakening of Catherine’s Feminism in The Garden of Eden” that, “Catherine is not at all mad;
rather, she is a woman who feels trapped within the limitations of her gender and commits
seemingly destructive acts as an act of re-vision” (191). She seeks to “circumvent” these
limitations, “embark[ing] on a series of gender transformations with the hope of liberating
herself from the codes of female behavior” (194). Unfortunately, David chooses the more
heteronormative relationship with the submissive Marita, as “Catherine’s refusal to embrace a
unified and coherent form of female sexuality has now become intolerable to her husband, the
ultimate arbiter of her success or failure as a woman and a wife” (199). Samantha Long further
explores the destabilizing notions of gender, recognizing Catherine as not merely androgynous
but transgender in the fullest, most contemporary sense. Long argues that this “allows for
empathy and gives her the humanity she has been long denied, especially among critics who
paint her as solely villainous” (47).
This idea of support is fundamental to Garden. Just as first Nicole does in Tender Is the
Night, and then Alabama also in Save Me the Waltz, Catherine too searches for a protective, safe
environment in which she may nurture her own sense of self. Ultimately, Nicole and Alabama
articulate different levels of success in their endeavors for agency. Nicole uses the support of the
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environment, the green and blue spaces of the Riviera, as well her interactions and experiences in
her successful assertion of self; whereas, Alabama, who struggles with grounding herself
through either the various physical spaces she inhabits, or her role within her family and social
environments, does not. As wealthy white women of privilege attempting to create homes as
expatriates, Nicole, Alabama, and Catherine have much in common. They share the freedom to
explore alternate versions of themselves, a freedom they would not have if not coming from
great socio-economic privilege, as they do. They also are trying to make a home for themselves
in environments in which they are outsiders in places that are vacation destinations in the offseason. Coupling this homing as outsider with issues of mental illness or questions of gender
identification, and the complexities of fashioning a home for oneself in a state of perpetuate
transition, either physically through Europe or internally through the self, become far more
fraught with difficulty. “Home” for them is not a static location but, instead, a state of being one
must take with oneself and continually re-fashion again and again against the repressive norms of
society. The recognition of this reveals the sheer weight of the dramatic and desperate battles
these women fight in order to create and shape their own identities and lives, attempts at agency
which are both honorable and brave.
From the very outset of Garden, Catherine’s risky fashioning of a new self and the desire
to grow together with David as a family unit are valiant and progressive undertakings. The
impetus to change as well as David’s resistance to it, are indicative of how Catherine likes
everything to happen more quickly in life than he does; she likes the authentic, non-filtered
flavor of things. While on their honeymoon in le Grau du Roi, even their choices at breakfast
reveal their differing approaches: David’s “learning to remember” that Catherine “took her
coffee without sugar” and her eggs “were not cooked quite as long” as his (4). She doesn’t mind
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experiencing life a little gritty or raw. While David prepares for a mundane day of fishing and
napping, Catherine hints at the radical change she wants to introduce to his controlled life: “‘I’m
the destructive type,’ she said. ‘And I’m going to destroy you’” (5). This is not so much a threat
but a declaration of intent. She is telling him that she wants to break down the controlled
boundaries of themselves as individuals in order to create a more fluid, collaborative team.
Catherine wants to change and grow not only as a couple but as individuals as well, helping
David to let go of the limitations inherent in his need for outside validation. She wants to find
themselves re-Bourne, as a couple tied through marriage and friendship, and their creative
purpose in life. Together, she hopes, they will co-create a new narrative, their own, both
figuratively and literally.
When David, who very much keeps his interior monologue interior (we later learn his
childhood promise to himself was to, “Never tell anyone anything ever. Never tell anyone
anything again” (181)), resumes writing after a brief break for their honeymoon, he regrets that it
will take him away from their “very simple world” together. He thinks, “It would be good to
work again but that would come soon enough as he well knew and he must remember to be
unselfish about it and make it as clear as he could the enforced loneliness was regrettable and
that he was not proud of it.” The ideas of simplicity, selfishness, loneliness, regret, and shame,
compacted so tightly here, are key throughout the text. Again and again, David seeks to keep his
experiences simple, whether it be in his relationships, writing, or the routines lending form to his
day. But this simplicity is really a self-justification of his avoidance of showing compassion or
having to compromise in any way; thus, simplicity becomes a selfish act. It’s his forced
inhibition of growth for everyone. An unnatural impulse for him, David must remind himself to
be “unselfish.” To him, not devoting one hundred percent to whatever only he wants to do
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(write, sex, fish) is not just an inherent part of being an adult, but, rather, an altruistic and stoic
act of unselfishness on his part. It does not occur to David that his working need not be selfish
or lead to loneliness; he does not think of a new way to approach his work, one in which
Catherine may also have a role and a sense of purpose. Instead, he worries that she is “dr[iving]
beyond what they had for something new that nothing could break.” This nagging sense that
Catherine is actively leading them into a new, unbreakable bond, hence away from his past (and,
he hopes, future) solitary existence as a writer, troubles a David who insists on thinking of life in
simplistic (reductive, growth-inhibiting) terms. He wonders what Catherine may be driving at:
But what could it be? They could not be held tighter together than they were now and
there was no badness afterwards. There was only happiness and loving each other and
then hunger and replenishing and starting over. (14)
David is not describing a mature relationship; he is describing an infant. They are “held tighter
together” through “happiness,” “loving,” “hunger,” and “replenishing.” They’re just big bouncy
babies who love to be held and fed, and then it all “start[s] over” again. This extremely
reductive approach to life is “good” to David; there’s “no badness” here–very childish
terminology from a former Great War pilot and professional wordsmith. The Bournes, according
to David, are incredibly simple–a deceptive and dangerous term. Indeed, a simple focus on
eating and the banality of day to day life takes up much of the novel, as it does David’s
attention. 18 David’s insistence on devaluing the complexities of their life seriously undermines
Catherine’s efforts toward the expansion of their horizons.
18
In this way, the novel shares much in common with Hemingway’s posthumously published
memoir of his and his first wife, Hadley’s, early Paris years, A Moveable Feast. In many
respects, Garden and Feast are very similar, yet other than the autobiographical connections of
the characters drawn between the two works (David and Hemingway’s work patterns; Catherine
as Hemingway’s first two wives, Hadley and Pauline, as well as his mother, Grace, and Zelda;
and Marita (“little Mary”) as his fourth wife, Mary) and the loss of the husband/author’s work at
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Catherine tries to make her desire to change as obvious to David as she can. After getting
“a true boy’s haircut,” Catherine asks him to “see” and “feel” her hair; she begins her change at
the tactile level. She explains to him what the new haircut is leading to: “‘You see,’ she said.
‘That’s the surprise. I’m a girl. But I’m a boy too and I can do anything and anything and
anything.’” David responds to this by calling her his “brother” for the first time. Encouraged by
his seeming to understand what she is driving at, a non-binary gendered life, she admits her
haircut is “dangerous,” as it is an external revelation of an interior sense of difference; in a
“simple” sense, getting her hair cut as short as a man’s is a very bold statement for woman at that
time in provincial France as, more figuratively, it is a bold outward acknowledgment of the
gendering shift they’re now both undergoing. The twinning haircut further blurs the lines
between herself and David, and thus between the traditional and sexist hierarchy of man and
wife, and, even, the boundary between artist and patron/muse. If David is truly the artist, why is
Catherine the one who’s taking the risks, questioning societal norms, using herself as a canvas to
bring new representations and ways of identifying into the world? She is not content to simply
be the background to David/Writer/Man, and she encourages him to break free from traditional
(and limiting) roles of self-conceptualization as well. She tells him, “‘I thought about it. I’ve
thought all about it. Why do we have to go by everyone else’s rules? We’re us.’” With great
forethought and intention, she no longer wants to live “by everyone else’s rules”–the rules of the
hierarchal normative society. “‘We’re us,’” she tells him; not “I’m me” or “you’re you,” but
the hands of his wife (Hadley’s accidental loss of Hemingway’s stories in the train station
serving as the inspiration for Catherine’s burning of David’s work), surprisingly little has been
done in analyzing the ways in which Hemingway is, like David, continuously revisiting episodes
from his youth in order to achieve a sense of understanding for his life as a whole in both works;
a discussion, sadly, which goes beyond the scope of this dissertation’s focus.
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“us.” She is explicitly linking them as a forged unit intentionally altering their lives’ paths
together.
She recognizes that this change is “dangerous,” but is revitalized by it as well–“‘I can do
anything and anything and anything.’” She is exuberantly charged by her haircut; the act
empowers her, giving her great confidence. Instead of allowing her presentation of self to be
prescribed by society’s standards, she’s actively shaping her own identity, and she now feels as
though she can do “anything.” She wants David to understand the gravity of the change; she
tells him, “‘It isn’t faked or phony’” (15). It isn’t just a haircut; it isn’t some faux masquerading
of androgyny. She is exteriorly manifesting the interior shift she wants them to make together–
together because Catherine is trying to forge a togetherness, an unbreakable familial bond,
between the two. As an only child and orphan, she craves the structure, support, and love of a
family, and she wants David, the motherless son of a drunken and abusive father, to co-create
this with her.
Although David refers to her as his “brother,” they are already heading in different
directions–their ending is in their beginning. Catherine’s haircut reveals more than “the beautiful
shape of a head.” She no longer looks like the girl he married; her interior changes are becoming
outwardly apparent, and, for him, this shift toward maturity is tinged with sadness. He is not
upset only because Catherine is maturing, but because this very maturity signals a loss of control
for him. It is much easier for a husband to control his wife, to keep things selfishly revolving
around him–that is, for things to be simple–when the wife is very young (and naive):
She had always looked, he thought, exactly her age which was now twenty-one. He had
been proud of her for that. But tonight she did not look it. The lines of cheekbones
showed clear as he had never seen them before and she smiled and her face was
heartbreaking. (16)
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Sense his sadness over her development, Catherine reiterates her plea for love and
understanding: “‘Please love me David the way I am. Please understand and love me.’” She is
asking for unconditional love and support from him, the only other member of their created
family, pleading with him to love her, “the way I am.” What is heartbreaking is not the
maturation of Catherine, but her still unmet and basic need, rooted in a girlhood of loneliness and
absence, to be loved for who she is. She is, after all, only looking for a sense of belonging and
love, something, sadly, she has never had before.
Catherine is hopeful that this acceptance may be forthcoming when David willingly
switches gender identities with her in bed. Catherine renames herself Peter and calls David her
“‘beautiful lovely Catherine’” (17). She is excited and grateful for David-as-Catherine’s
participation, but David, who is ever-reluctant to vocally give full expression of himself:
…held her close and hard and inside himself he said goodbye and then goodbye and
goodbye.
“Let’s lie very still and quiet and hold each other and not think at all,” he said and his
heart said goodbye Catherine goodbye my lovely girl goodbye and good luck and
goodbye. (18)
After her initial “boy’s” haircut, and immediately following their first non-gender normative
sexual encounter, their respective reactions reveal their personalities and development as a
couple. Catherine is excited, happy, and grateful, verbally expressing her joy at the change;
whereas, the heartbreak David feels at her haircut has now already become a “goodbye.” His
silent repetition of “goodbye” at the conclusion of what is only Chapter One shows how resistant
David truly is to growth and change from the outset. David’s insistence that they “‘lie very still
and quiet’” is the antithesis of action and change; his “‘let’s…not think at all’” is indicative of is
his approach to anything that threatens the simple and “good” in his life.
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Upon waking, David chastises himself for resenting the newness she has brought to them.
He silently tells her, “‘I’m with you. No matter what else you have in your head I’m with you
and I love you’” (20), and then asks himself, “who are you to judge and who participated and
who accepted the change and lived it? If that is what she wants who are you not to wish her to
have it? You’re lucky to have a wife like her and a sin is what you feel bad after and you don’t
feel bad” (21). But David’s insistence to himself that he’s unashamed of the changes Catherine
has introduced to them both rings hollow. He is talking himself into accepting her, using words
like “judge,” “sin,” and “feel bad.” The necessity of his assuring himself shows how inauthentic
his acceptance of Catherine’s maturation really is. He may promise to be “with her,” but his
heart has already said “goodbye.” Contrary to existing free from shame and the perception of
others’, as Catherine wants for them both, David remains very concerned with outsiders’
conceptions of him.
David shows how much he isn’t “with her” when he pores over the press clippings of his
first book, sent to him by his publisher. He’s so taken with drinking in others’ perception of his
work that he’s not even really “with” himself, emptying several glasses of vermouth without
even noticing (23). While reading his own reviews, he takes himself out of the sharing space of
his and Catherine’s relationship; he is wholly taken up with how he is perceived by the
reviewers. His sense of self, and self-worth, are created by their words, not his actual life with
Catherine. She sees how dangerous the clippings are; she is “frightened by them,” as they reveal
their inherent separation in favor of portraying only David-as-Writer. When their waiter asks if
she is also a writer, she responds flatly, “‘No,’ the girl said not looking up from the clippings.
“‘Madame is a housewife.’” She does not have a profession, and as they do not yet have a home,
but travel from hotel to hotel, being a housewife does not carry a great deal of satisfaction with
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it. The clippings reify their normative roles of Writer and Housewife, reducing and negating her
attempts at co-creation.
Catherine wants David to understand the risk the clippings hold for them as well. She
warns that if he believes them, they will “destroy” him, and hopes he doesn’t think she has
married him because of what the reviews might say–she has married the person, not the writer
(24). Their differing opinions are starkly shown, as she tries to make him understand the danger
of valuing them too much:
“But we know [the book’s] good. If the reviews had said it was worthless and it never
made a cent I would have been just as proud and just as happy.”
I wouldn’t, the young man thought. But he did not say it. He went on reading the
reviews, unfolding them and folding them up again and putting them back in the
envelope. (25)
The contrast between Catherine’s attempt to verbally strengthen their understanding of each
other and their unit by acknowledging that the only important opinions worth having are those
that they have of each other, and David’s silence in response, internally disagreeing with her and
repeatedly handling the clippings, the physical manifestation of others’ perceptions of him as an
individual, over and over again, demonstrate how little change David is actually willing to make.
He may want to think he’s “with her,” but his tangible and mental caressing of his clippings
shows otherwise.
This resistance of David’s to engage with Catherine in a dialogue becomes a pattern with
them and hints toward a larger, underlying problem: Her attempts at co-fashioning an
understanding of who they are are continually met by him with stonewalling. This happens
when she tells him, “‘we’re us against all the others’” and that she hasn’t “‘done anything bad to
us. I had to do it. You know that.’” She has “had” to transition, to outwardly align her physical
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appearance with her inward perception of self, to erase gender difference in their bedroom, even
to ask him to try to change, to grow more similar, and thus more closely bonded, together. But,
typically, David ignores her pleas for reassurance and does not respond, instead “listen[ing] to
the weight of the surf falling on the hard wet sand in the night” (37). The inevitably of the surf
breaking up on the shore echoes David’s internal feeling of goodbye. Nature cannot be stopped;
the calm sea will inevitably change into waves trying to break down the sand, and although the
relationship between water and land is necessary for the surf to exist, they will always remain
separate and distinct. It is Catherine’s nature to change. She tries to reassure him that, “‘Truly I
don’t want to do anything to you or have any bad effect on you’” (50), but David still takes every
opportunity he has to contain her, from chastising her for how quickly she’s preparing her
absinthe–“‘It breaks up and goes to pieces if the water pours in too fast…. Then it’s flat and
worthless’” (39)–to saying she needs him to chaperone her at the barber’s to “‘keep her from
doing anything crazy’” (44). He tells himself to begin writing in earnest again “because
everything’s going too fast and you’re going with it” (45). His preoccupation with how “fast”
Catherine is underscores a general lack of control David feels throughout his life. David resists
change as he wants everything to be a reiteration of that which has gone on before. He cannot
come to peace with the consequences of change, as he never allows himself to fully understand
them. Whereas Catherine spends time studying Spanish and laments her inability to paint or
write–trying in various ways to increase her fluency with the world–David’s answer to
complexity is, “‘It’s more complicated than that. Just drink it’” (52). This reduction of
questioning and discovery into drinking and oblivion makes his injunction to “‘[s]tay the way
you are’” (55) in response to her repeated pleas to “‘say it’”–to tell the changes he’s physically
enacting as he becomes the “girl Catherine” at night–even more difficult for her to bear.
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Catherine’s goal is not only to become something new as a couple, but to create understanding
about this change through a shared dialogue. David agrees to engage in the physical aspects of
their development, but stonewalls any discussion, and thus, any real interpretive learning, about
it.
Some interpretative light may be shed for the reader, however, when we hear from a rare
outsider’s point of view. David runs into an old acquaintance of his, Colonel Boyle, while in
Spain. After hints toward the Colonel’s sexual interest in David (David’s “suddenly happy”
when he sees the Colonel’s tanned and chiseled face; the Colonel drinks out of David’s wine
glass and “lead[s] him to the table in the corner of the room” (60), subsequently dismissing
David as “worthless” once he learns that he’s married), it’s revealed that the Colonel, unlike
David, knew Catherine’s parents. The image he paints of them shows that although Catherine
may come from vast wealth, as models of how to live in the world, the adults in her family were
no great resource. The Colonel tells David that her father was a “‘[v]ery odd type. Killed
himself in a car. His wife too…. Stupid way for grown up people to be killed.’” The mother,
according to the Colonel, was “‘very lonely.’” The only living relative Catherine has is her
uncle in Paris, who is “‘silly’” and “‘really worthless.’” The Colonel then shifts the
conversation, telling David how much he enjoyed his book:
“It moved me very deeply, the Colonel said. “You’re a deceptive son of a bitch.”
“So are you, John.”
“I hope so,” the Colonel said. (61)
The juxtaposition of Catherine’s “odd” father with David and the Colonel both being “deceptive”
circles back to the unspoken attraction between them. David prioritizes expression through
writing over verbal dialogue, and it’s through this medium that he has moved the Colonel deeply.
The linkage of the Colonel’s emotional response to David’s writing to their referring to each
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other as “deceptive” calls into question just what it is that is being concealed. The loneliness and
isolation of Catherine’s mother, coupled with her father’s “odd” behavior, and David’s and the
Colonel’s pride in deception, reveal what an uphill battle Catherine has in her striving toward
growth. She has neither the past nor, apparently, any present support in her creation of a familial
bond.
When Catherine joins them, she eagerly questions the Colonel about her parents,
conveying a paucity of knowledge regarding them. The Colonel, who has just highlighted the
importance of concealment and deception for himself and David, now tells Catherine he saw her
in the Prado, looking “‘as though you were the young chief of a warrior tribe’” (62). He informs
Catherine, who spends a great deal of time and intentional energy on being dark–wanting both
herself and David to be very tan, thus reinstating their brotherhood and bringing forth any dark
complexities they may have inside–that her “‘father was very dark.’” Although he claims to
have not known her mother, he knew her father, “‘a difficult and charming man…[q]uite well.’”
Seeing Catherine’s shyness, he tells her that her father “was the shyest man I ever knew and he
could be the most charming.’” Catherine, who now drinks in order to avoid be “selfish” and
alienating David by enacting change too quickly, asks if her father had “‘to use Pernod too?’”
“‘He used everything,’” the Colonel replies, again hinting at a more complex meaning. The
Colonel, who is sexually attracted to David and has an intimate knowledge of Catherine’s father,
implies that her father, like Catherine herself, identified in a fluid, non-binary gender way, thus
validating her own impulses and inspiring a sense of familial connection for her. Sadly, this
sense of belonging comes secondhand from a stranger and not her husband.
But as Catherine’s fluid gender identity now seems to come from a patrimonial source, it
both legitimizes itself to Catherine (giving her a link to the familial connection and an
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understanding of self that she has so desperately craved) while, ironically, reinscribing
masculinity (she is this way because her father was as well) and, thus, asserts authority for the
fitness of the change itself. Catherine’s shyness, like her father’s, is a hiding instinct, a
protective reflex agains the judgment levied against those who display non-heteronormative
behaviors. When she is living as a “boy,” her non-biologically assigned gender, and she thinks
she’s somewhere safe, hidden away from the prying eyes of the public (like the Prado), she
exudes the confidence of a young warrior chief. But once she is under the lens of the hierarchy
again, her shyness as a boy reasserts itself. Her “difficult” but “charming” father who “used
everything” could very well have exhibited shyness for the same reason, but he seems to have
revealed his true self to the Colonel, who knew him “quite well” and thought him “the most
charming.”
The Colonel understands Catherine and her desires far more than David does. He asks
her pointed questions about her darkness, which she happily answers; they seem to share a
knowledge of what she is really driving at with her tanning and how she isn’t simply wearing the
tan. “‘It’s me,’” she tells him. “‘I really am this dark’” (64). Her tan is not just an avant-garde
stylistic choice, it is a conscious merging with the Other, racially and gender-wise. Her skin’s
darkness reflects not only her inner complexities, but also her willingness to erase racial borders
of separateness and hierarchy and the privilege of white womanhood as well. The Colonel
encourages her to dive deeper, to go through her shyness, and become ever more comfortable
revealing her true skin: “‘you must try to get darker.’” But his encouragement rings false when
he privately tells David, “‘The get’s no good,’” and that it’s “‘kinder’” and “‘better’” to just
“‘shoot the get.’” The deceptive nature that he is so proud of is revealed in his lauding of
Catherine and her efforts to change to her face, and his suggestion once she’s gone that the
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offspring of a non-normative person–or, Catherine–should be shot. This fatal dismissal of
Catherine’s very life by the Colonel, who had seemed to understand what Catherine is attempting
better than anyone, introduces the extreme condemnation and violence Catherine will be met by
as she continues to change; but now, chillingly, the violent condemnations will come from much
closer to home.
But this co-creation of self and bonding that Catherine is trying to forge together with
David as they create a new life is not one she’s willing to let die so easily. The Bournes return
from Spain to the Riviera, and move into a hotel in which, excepting the proprietors of the hotel,
Monsieur and Madame Aurol, they are the sole occupants, as it is the summer season. 19 Here,
with David’s willing acquiescence, they purposefully become more and more outwardly alike,
not only dressing similarly and having the same haircut, but now strikingly setting off their deep
tans by bleaching their hair as well. Catherine is encouraged by David’s involvement in their
maturation, and she speeds along in her plans to develop it. Although David has feared that his
“enforced loneliness” (14) would seem selfish to Catherine, she is delighted to learn that he’s
writing a narrative of them and their life together as a married couple. Catherine lacks
confidence in her own ability to write, so she is overjoyed to find that David is writing a new
story about them together. Catherine prioritizes speaking and dialoguing, as by their nature they
inherently necessitate a relationship, whereas David values writing, a solo act in which his ideas
alone are expressed. Catherine hopes their differing abilities will lead to a creative extension of
19
Garden is set in an unspecified year, but it’s most likely in the early 1920s; David has had
enough time to write and publish a war memoir, but the Riviera has not yet caught on as a
summer vacation destination. Indeed, when Hemingway and Hadley themselves first stayed in
Antibes in the summer of 1926 as guests of Gerald and Sara Murphy, it was still “undiscovered”
by the larger social set.
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them both; as a couple, they are creating the narrative that David then records. She asks him to
“‘write for me too,’” and “‘[n]o matter if it’s where I’ve been bad put in how much I love you’”
(77). Fearing the damage outside reviewers may inflict on what she thinks of as their coconstruction, and wanting to protect it from the unnecessary opinions and influence that they
may have, she tells David, “‘I’m so proud of it already and we won’t have any copies for sale
and none for reviewers and then there’ll never be clippings and you’ll never be self conscious
and we’ll always have it just for us’” (77-78). This protective instinct of Catherine’s, to shield
their new self, the Bournes, shows how importantly she takes this work of creation. To her,
everything that goes into the development of them as an unbreakable family unit is important–the
tanning, hair cuts and coloring, clothes, eating, drinking, and especially the narrative, the literal
story of themselves.
The actual development of this construction elicits varying reactions from Catherine and
David. The changes are happening too fast for him; he alludes to as much in the narrative:
He was writing about the road from Madrid to Saragossa and the rising and falling of the
road as they came at speed into the country of the red buttes and the little car on the then
dusty road picked up the Express train and Catherine passed it gently car by car, the
tender, and then the engineer and fireman, and finally the nose of the engine, and then she
shifted as the road switched left and the train disappeared into a tunnel. (78)
They traverse the road, up and down, “at speed.” Catherine, of course, is the driver, the one
responsible for them moving so fast. (Indeed, Catherine does most of the driving throughout the
novel. It seems David, the World War I pilot, has left his days at the controls behind him in
more ways than one. This new, postwar world is no longer bound by traditional conceptions of
authority, and David, as a white male, mourns this disruption of the hierarchy, as he no longer
has implicit, unquestioned control over it. Catherine, figuratively and technologically, seizes the
chance to steer them in a new direction, one of her own volition and choosing.) She passes the
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men operating the train, the engineer and fireman, first, and then the train entirely, the whole
phallic contraption, as it, she says, “‘went to ground.’” Catherine’s quicker with her physical
changes as well, and she makes them more often. When they go to the local coiffeur’s, Monsieur
Jean’s, David realizes, “‘I don’t think I’ve had a haircut in a month’” (81). At first, in a failed
attempt to reassert his masculinity, he wants his hair cut shorter than Catherine’s and not dyed as
light, but she is easily able to coax him into getting the identical style as her. Even Monsieur
Jean realizes who is the driver here: “The coiffeur looked at Catherine. ‘Go ahead and do it,’
she said’” (82). He looks to Catherine for the approval and impetus to change.
Although Catherine is the assertive force behind their shift into outward mirroring, David
admits to himself that he likes it. Back at the hotel, he looks at himself in the mirror and thinks:
“So that’s how it is…. You’ve done that to your hair and had it cut the same as your
girl’s and how do you feel?… How do you feel? Say it. You like it…. All right. You
like it…. Now go through with the rest of it whatever it is and don’t ever say anyone
tempted you or that anyone bitched you…. You like it. Remember that. Keep that
straight. You know exactly how you look now and how you are.” Of course he did not
know exactly how he was. But he made an effort aided by what he had seen in the
mirror. (84-85)
David has passively allowed himself to be swept along by Catherine’s energetic rush to change.
He acknowledges that he hasn’t been forced into anything; he has acquiesced to her desires for
togetherness, and he even likes it. He does not understand (a reoccurring problem for him)
exactly who he is, but he is at least honest with himself by admitting that he likes it so far.
Things are about to take a radical shift, though, as someone new is introduced into their
relationship. No longer will the Bournes be a couple; with the addition of Marita, a beautiful
young woman who presents as far more simple and normative than she actually is, the Bournes
go from two to three. They meet the “handsome girl,” Marita, in a café in Cannes. Marita
blushes easily and is flustered by her obvious attraction to the Bournes (89). Catherine links
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Marita’s shyness–and thus, an inner complexity–with her father’s and her own, reminding David
that, “‘People that can’t blush are worthless’” (91). Blushing is a sign of innocence, and
although Catherine is not repressed, she is innocent in that her intentions are pure for they are
based on her own truth. This, it seems, is also true of Marita; they are innocent in that they are
doing what they think to be right (importantly, neither David nor the Colonel are blushers). By
the next day, Marita has, with Catherine’s help, moved into the hotel. Catherine can see that,
“‘She’s in love with us both unless I’m crazy,’” to which David responds, “‘You’re not crazy’”
(100). The groundwork has been laid for both a ménage à trois and the dismissive labeling of
Catherine as “crazy.”
Marita is Catherine’s “present” to David, a more submissive and seemingly traditional
“wife” for him. Catherine knows that David is unsettled by the evolving nature of their
marriage, so she gives to him the gift his reductive and resistant nature desires the most–a nonchallenging wife. The contrast between the two women, the light-haired Catherine and the darkhaired Marita, and their eventual role in the increasingly complex relationship is hinted to by
Marita’s saying, “‘I’d rather be a dark present than a dark future’” (103). Marita not only has a
more typically feminine interaction with David, but she tells Catherine “‘it was better if
[Catherine] was her girl’” (113). Marita’s shyness does not inhibit her from desiring a quiet
form of control. She neatly affirms her immediate and, seemingly, everlasting place in the
relationship by reasserting David and Catherine’s traditional marital roles. She is the traditional
wife to David–subservient, supportive, self-effacing–while also assuming a more masculine role
with Catherine–assertive, instructive, authoritarian. The inclusion of a third member into their
marriage, oddly enough, reifies the conventional gender roles of Catherine and David through
their respective relationships with Marita, although it does not shift those roles back between
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themselves. Marita is comfortable with herself, in any expression of gender; she is truly her self,
not an expression of a binary. She shifts back and forth between identifying as a “girl” or a
“boy” (the narrator rarely uses gender nouns signifying “adult” in relation to the three
protagonists), but the shift does not cause the emotional toll on her that it does on Catherine.
As they grapple with striking a balance in this new form of marriage, jealousies and
questions of motivation arise. Marita makes snide comments about Catherine behind her back
(she rejoices in pointing out their physical differences and her more feminine shape to David;
she’s “smaller” than Catherine and David must like having “‘someone of my size’”), insinuating
her traditional, feminine beauty–hence, superiority and worth–over Catherine and, thus,
cementing her importance to him (98). Catherine, in the meanwhile, openly wonders if Marita
really loves David for himself or because of his public acclaim as a writer. She draws the
correlation between Marita’s perception of David and his need for accolades, when she says, “‘I
was afraid it was going to be like the clippings.’” She once again makes it clear that she loves
David as a person and not a profession: “‘Don’t ever think I don’t know about his books just
because I don’t think he’s a writer when I kiss him’” (112). Just as the clippings pose a threat to
the Bournes, Catherine sees the importance Marita places on David-as-Writer, and the personal
validation David takes from this, as degrading toward their interconnected purpose.
The greatest test of the new(est) Bournes comes about, though, when David stops writing
their autobiographical narrative. By doing so, he also takes himself out of the creation of the
active, living narrative, becoming increasingly passive and noncontributory. David, already
nonverbal and inwardly resentful of the rapidity and volume of their changes, has abandoned the
narrative of the Bournes in favor of a tragic and depressing story about his boyhood in Africa.
He makes this shift in creative focus at the same time Catherine and Marita attempt to determine
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how each member’s role may best benefit the entire relationship. In response to David’s
rejection of their co-creation, a hurt Catherine vividly calls attention to David’s increasingly
emasculated status as an economically dependent pawn to be traded between the women. These
economics are important; indeed, Marita’s nickname in the group is “Heiress,” as she is not only
personally wealthy (as is Catherine also), but she stands to inherit both David as husband and
Catherine’s role of solitary wife as well. In language figuring him as at once a child and a kept
plaything, Catherine reminds them all, “‘Isn’t it lucky Heiress and I are rich so you’ll never have
anything to worry about? We’ll take good care of him won’t we Heiress?’” (122). Although
Catherine’s ultimate goal is the development of them all, the unstable atmosphere of resentment,
jealousy, resistance, and change leads her to making damaging statements and actions (as it does
to all of them). Catherine’s reminding him of his dependence on her and Marita both may be a
cruel reminder on her part, but it is borne as a retaliation against what she sees as David’s
betrayal of their marriage; she is reacting from a place of pain. Her desire to create bonds of
mutual support and love have become increasingly unimportant to the self-centered David, and
she reacts by verbally striking back. It is not kind, but it is understandable. But it is also, of
course, only more damaging to her cause, as David now only pulls further away.
David’s increasing focus on his boyhood, father, and an ill-fated elephant changes and
mirrors the course of their marriage(s), and is demonstrated in the unfolding of the African story
itself. Telling himself that “[t]he work is what you have left,” David escapes their shared real
life into a literary recreation of his past, specifically as experienced through the lens of himself as
a boy and his relation to his father:
All your father found he found for you too, he thought, the good, the wonderful, the bad,
the very bad, the really very bad, the truly bad and then the much worse. It was a shame
a man with such a talent for disaster and for delight should have gone the way he went,
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he thought. It always made him happy to remember his father and he knew his father
would have liked this story. (129)
These warm sentiments seem at best misapplied, and at worst, completely damaging and
disillusioned, once we learn that David’s father was an elephant poacher and abuser of both
women and children. What David’s father found for him was a not only a loss of innocence, but
of trust and connection. It is indeed shocking to read the story as told through the narrator of
David as a young boy and to find anything to be “happy to remember his father” by, nor how his
father could have read this story and liked it. He is such a thoroughly despicable human being
that the idea that anyone could have warm feelings or memories of him seems completely selfdelusional and harmful.
This self-delusion and harm is carried over from the David’s memory and his writing to
the group’s everyday life. As David seeks to avoid directly confronting their increasingly messy
reality, he tries to drown into oblivion his confusion and pain, to no longer feel or think: “He
dove deep down into the clear cold water where he missed no one and then came up and shook
his head and swam out further and then turned to swim back to the beach” (132). David, who
has always wanted life to be simple–that is, revolving around his needs and desires–tries to
drown out the complexities of their situation, wishing for the sea to simply wash it all away. He
wishes to dive into emptiness, ignoring Catherine’s struggles with connection and a sense of self
(as a “girl,” “boy,” heterosexual, bisexual, transgender, painter, reader, translator, learner).
Isolated and increasingly abandoned, she questions whether these struggles are eroding any sense
of stability she may have: “‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if I wasn’t crazy?’” she asks (137). Her
“craziness” is her refusal to be limited to one role, to be the quiet “housewife” to David’s
clippings. Instead of supporting her refusal and quest for agency, David just substitutes another
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warm body into the sublimated role–if Catherine won’t be his compliant housewife, then Marita
can.
In contrast to Catherine’s refusal to be defined by one role, David increasingly embraces
his role of “boy,” not in the sense of assuming a more masculine adult presence, but in the sense
of regression into his childhood self, a literal “boy.” Catherine and Marita both recognize
David’s devolution; in fact, they work out a system of care for him, almost a shared custody
situation. Catherine outlines how they’ll go about this: “‘I’m still your wife,’ Catherine said.
‘We’ll start with that. I want Marita to be your wife too to help me out and then she inherits
from me’” (144). As David has asserted, “‘Names go to the bone’” (141), and now Marita is
truly becoming the Heiress to Catherine as “wife.” David’s increasing infantilization of himself
through his selfish narrowing of focus onto himself and the stories he tells himself about himself
and his father, necessitate the other, maturing and functional, members of the relationship to
coordinate care of him. Catherine and Marita pledge their ongoing support to David
emotionally, sexually, and financially as well.
Catherine not only asserts agency for herself but also shows her love and concern for
David through this coordination. She may be the person who is being gaslighted by her
partner(s) (she is increasingly called “crazy” from here on in the novel, and as David continues
to pull away from her and toward Marita, he insists that Catherine has lost her reason and
control), but her speech and actions reveal the person who is actually emotionally and mentally
shutting down and limiting himself to an incredibly narrow and repetitive conceptualization of
his life: David. Catherine tells him, “‘You see I’m going to have you ruined if I’m crazy and I
won’t be able to decide. I’m not going to be shut up either. I decided that too. She loves you
and you love her a little. I can tell. You’d never find anybody else like her and I don’t want you
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to go to some damn bitch or be lonely’” (145). While recognizing that she’s being labelled as
crazy by him, Catherine still wants to ensure that David has a supportive and loving bond to help
him in life.
But she also shows a vivid awareness of what may happen to her if she allows her future
to be determined by her self-obsessed husband. Catherine, frightened of what David may do
now that he’s tired of their shared evolution, wisely predicts that he’ll “‘have me shut up or put
away.’” David manipulates her fear, telling her, “‘No. That isn’t true,’” but, as she points out,
he had previously, “‘suggested we go to Switzerland.’” He tells her its just the “‘same way we’d
go to the dentist’” (158). He is gaslighting her by making her feel out of control, telling her
she’s crazy, and threatening to put her away in a Swiss sanitarium. He further destabilizes her
trust by first denying this threat, and then passively acknowledging that he has made it by
belittling what must be a terrifying fate for anyone–commitment to a Swiss sanitarium–and
reductively equating it to a trip to the dentist’s. He is manipulating, lying, threatening, and
diminishing her; she is right to become angry and fearful of his intentions. More horrifyingly, in
what seems to be a totally unnecessary and deeply cruel step, Catherine’s inevitable
institutionalization has secretly been planned by David and Marita. Marita tells David that
Catherine, disappointingly, “‘won’t go to Switzerland’”–that is, self-commit–and then uses
language to once again solidify the link between herself and David while casting Catherine as the
discordant element in their relationship that must be locked away: “‘I feel as though we’d been
married all our lives and never had anything but problems’” (161). David and Marita have
undertaken the expulsion of Catherine together, and Catherine, seeing that they mean to get rid
of her even if it means having her locked up in a madhouse, rightly reacts with fear and
desperation. Knowing that David’s preoccupation with his own story, and his more traditional
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relationship with Marita, may lead to him cruelly (and selfishly and self-justifyingly) putting
away, what is to him, an inconvenient and unnecessary co-creator–herself–she figuratively
wrests their narrative back from his neglect. Even here, in what becomes a desperate act, she
ignites for him a more generous future than he could have envisioned.
But the future is something David is less and less concerned about as he dives deeper into
his recital of his past. Writing the story of his ivory-hunting poacher father, David comes to
emulate him, without and within the story and in disappointing ways. Just as “[h]is father was
not vulnerable he knew and, unlike most people he had known, only death could kill him” (146),
David’s own sense of sympathy erodes. Like his father during the hunt, David becomes less
vulnerable–because he is less caring–as he writes. David identifies with his father during the
writing: “He only wrote what his father did and how he felt and in all this he became his father
and what his said…was what he said” (147). Marita’s immediate reaction when she reads this
story about his father is, “‘Was this when you stopped loving him?’” (154). She can read the
depravity and betrayal of the son by the father readily and in a way that David seemingly cannot.
Catherine is even more viscerally revolted by the portrayal of his father in his work:
Catherine read on and said nothing now. She was halfway through the second part. Then
she tore the cahier in two and threw it on the floor.
“It’s horrible,” she said. “It’s bestial. So that was what your father was like.”
“No,” said David. “But that was one way he was. You didn’t finish it.”
“Nothing would make me finish it.” (157)
The man David loves and becomes in his writing is instinctively sickening to Marita and
Catherine. Yet, it is not only the father they are reacting to; it is David’s portrayal. The only
love and sympathy he shows to someone other than himself is to that of his image of his father,
but it is this very rendition that so disgusts the women. Catherine notes the horrific juxtaposition
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of the revolting story to the way in which David, as both writer of and the child in the story,
chooses to physically deliver it:
“It’s even more horrible written in that child’s notebook,” Catherine said. “You’re a
monster.”
“It was a very odd rebellion,” David said.
“You’re a very odd person to write about it,” she said.
“I asked you not to read the story.”
She was crying now. “I hate you,” she said. (158)
Catherine understands that David is revealing himself and not just his father in this “child’s
notebook.” David’s blasé response to his wives’ visceral reactions to both what he’s saying and
how he’s saying it, and the fact that his sympathy lies with his nightmarish father and not his
partners, shows that Catherine’s assessment of his being a “monster” is not hyperbolic. Indeed,
this scene is immediately followed by Catherine privately telling David, “‘She’ll go away and
you’ll have me shut up or put away’” (158), to which David attempts to coax her into
committing herself to a Swiss sanitarium. David, “the monster,” is trying to alienate and lock up
any discordant voices within what he sees as his narrative. Catherine sees that this monstrous
turn of David’s is only a further indication of his preoccupation with his corrosive past and its
degradation of his present.
David’s reduction of perspective is countered by Catherine’s generosity of concern. As
she feels their life shifting away from togetherness, rapidity, which she previously had luxuriated
in, now frightens her, as it seems to reflect her declining grasp on her world: “‘It’s just speeded
up so much lately…. I worried and wanted to get you taken care of’” (162). Speed, which used
to be so exhilarating to her in its lack of restraint, has now become frightening, as events spin out
of control. She becomes increasingly disoriented by the changes in her life–changes her husband
once willing participated in but now tries to convince her are worthy of her institutionalization–
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yet, her main concern is who will take care of David. Her sense of responsibility toward him
comes from her love and commitment to him as her family. As her sympathy and concern widen
to even David’s dog, Kibo, in his latest story of his boyhood in Africa (he continues drafting the
African stories even after Marita and Catherine’s revulsion to the first), David echoes it in his
story’s depiction of an elephant. He thinks he can “make the elephant come alive again,” but
immediately a sense of fatalism, connected to his father, sets in. The moment of optimism that
maybe he could make things right–maybe he could show sympathy and connection to something
noble outside of himself–is swiftly terminated through the private incantations of his writings:
“The writing is the only progress you make” (166). David’s fatalist view of the elephant, that no
matter what he writes, he cannot make it live again, and his belief that his own progress as a
human is only attainable through his writing, not through actual living beings and relationships,
makes his observation to Catherine, “‘You’re just like ivory. That’s how I always think. You’re
smooth as ivory too,’” especially chilling (169). Catherine is the elephant, the noble and
committed friend, who is betrayed by simple and selfish man. David knows he cannot make the
elephant in his story live, thus dooming the elephant in his life, Catherine, as well. He has
prioritized his writing over connections or friendships; he will betray Catherine just as he had the
elephant when he was a boy.
David validates his selfish viewpoint by looking through the lens of his father, a truly
selfish and disgusting character. David retreats into his boyhood story, describing the long,
forced march he makes with his father and his poaching companion, Juma. The poachers
quickly come to regret their inclusion of David, who had put them on the track of the huge bull
elephant with enormous tusks–thus, putting them on the literal path to killing him. A rare
moment of approval comes from the poachers when David uses his child’s weapon of a slingshot
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to stun two birds before finishing them off with the (phallic) “handle of his hunting knife.”
David’s father notes, “‘I’ve never seen that type of Francolin quite so high. You did very well to
get a double on them.’” David, who has passively allowed his time and relationships to be
divvied up by Catherine and Marita, drafts for himself the affirmation of his active masculinity
that he so desires as coming from his father. David has slain not one, but two rare birds (slang
for sexually adventurous women); he’s got “a double on them.” His need to imaginatively assert
some sort of dominance over his “double” grows more troubling as he and his father eat “each a
breast with the heart in it.” He celebrates in destroying and consuming the very life-force of his
“double”–their hearts. His father then tells him what seems to be an overstatement–after all, how
much difference can two birds really make?–in both David’s gross need for masculine approval
and his own selfish valuation of his wives: “‘It makes a great difference, Davey,’ his father said.
‘We’re very well off on rations now’” (172). Considering the repeated references to both
Catherine and Marita’s personal wealth and their verbal commitments to financially supporting
him, he’s very well off on rations indeed.
As the boy David in the story becomes more regretful of putting Juma and his father on
the elephant’s trail, he sense of betraying the bull–who is returning to where the skeleton of his
dead friend, killed years earlier by Juma, now tuskless, lies–grows. The boy vacillates between
his guilt and his enjoyment in being included in the slaughter: “Many times during the day he
had wished that he had never betrayed the elephant and in the afternoon he remembered wishing
that he had never seen him. Awake in the moonlight he knew that was not true” (174). Just like
in his romantic relationships, the shame David feels in the light of day over his actions subsides
when his true desires come out at night.
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David’s inability to differentiate between the story and his real, present life is becoming
progressively fraught. Although it is always Catherine he points to as losing control, it is David
who has difficulty shifting back into real life once he concludes writing for the day–“still feeling
Africa to be completely real and all of this where he was to be unreal and false” (174)–and he
continues to mentally make Catherine and elephant one and the same. When he and Catherine
return to the coiffure to get their hair dyed the same “ivory” shade, “he began to realize what a
completely stupid thing he had permitted” in now allowing himself to become the elephant too
(178). He has allowed the elephant (the ivory-haired Catherine) to become physically twinned
with himself, permitting an equalization in their relationship. He feels this to be stupid because,
as a poacher’s son, he should dominate all others. He wants to be valued by his imaginatively
remembered father, yet memory is a tricky thing. For when he begins to write again, his memory
reminds him of what a filthy person his father, the man he looks up to, really was, and how his
selfish choices led to death and destruction.
As David descends into his story, the perverted glee his father and Juma take in tracking
and slaughtering the elephant is matched by the sense of guilt and shame that David carries with
him on the hunt. This is not a noble hunt, where the hunter and prey are mutually able and
respectful of each other. Instead, this is a brutal and degrading slaughter. The hunters are never
described as anything approaching heroic; they are shameful perverts slaughtering the symbol of
friendship, the elephant, with pleasure. When they find the bull’s trail, “[t]hey looked as though
they had a dirty secret, just as they had looked when he had found them that night at the shamba”
(180). The poachers “dirty secret” is a hidden, nighttime one, in which they take great
excitement. Now they are carrying over this dirtiness into the light of day, finding great pleasure
in the brutal killing of something beautiful. The bull is returning to the death spot of his old
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friend, who had been killed by Juma years before. Seeing the bullet-riddled skull with its tusks
chopped off, David asks how long the elephant friends “‘had been together?’” (180). The men
laugh and say they don’t “‘know or care really.’” The heartless butchers don’t care about
friendship, only the merciless harvesting of ivory. The boy feels enormously guilty for his roll in
initializing the hunt, and thinks:
I care, David thought. I saw him in the moonlight and he was alone but I had Kibo. Kibo
has me too. The bull wasn’t doing anyone any harm and now we’ve tracked him to
where he came to see his dead friend and now we’re going to kill him. It’s my fault. I
betrayed him.
David never gets over this guilt, instead, reenacting the betrayal over and over throughout
his life, both by continually writing of it and how he conducts his relationships with others,
especially Catherine. The parallels between his African boyhood and his Rivieran marriage,
where he now puts an end to his ivory-headed wife, who was, after all, only taking her own path
to friendship and togetherness as well, grow even stronger when he writes of the selfish
motivations of his father and Juma:
My father doesn’t need to kill elephants to live, David thought…. Kibo and I found him
and I never should have told them and I should have kept him secret and had him always
and let them stay drunk with their bibis at the beer shamba. Juma was so drunk we could
not wake him. I’m going to keep everything a secret always. I’ll never tell them
anything again. If they kill him Juma will drink his share of the ivory or just buy himself
another god damn wife. Why didn’t you help the elephant when you could?… You
never should have told them. Never, never tell them. Try and remember that. Never tell
anyone anything ever. Never tell anyone anything again. (181)
David’s guilt over betraying the elephant is something he reenacts for himself time and again.
And although he does keep his promise to “never tell,” as he is painfully uncommunicative, he
sadly does take on the traits of his father and Juma as well. He drinks often, throughout the day,
every day. And just like Juma, the prizes he collects for the destruction of others–as first a war
memoirist and now as a recorder of both Catherine’s descent into “craziness” and the poachings
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of his youth–are used not to fund something worthy, but only to acquire “himself another god
damn wife.” David the boy may have intended to be a mighty hunter, but he was really just a
pawn in the senseless destruction of something good. His writing is the same; he may have
meant to reveal truth and to get his stories right, but he just revisits the same issues of senseless
killing again and again, never coming to greater sense of understanding through them. David’s
confusion of values, his “good” gift of writing being used for exploitive and cheapening ends,
coupled with his vow to “never tell anyone anything” (an odd goal for a writer) makes David,
who always wants everything to be simple, distorted and contradictory. As Marita says after
reading his war book, “‘…I don't understand about you. You never made clear what you
believed’” (184). Marita is right; the lack of clarity in what David believes is confusing, and,
ultimately, incredibly damaging.
His abandonment of their narrative reveals his prioritizing of expressing only himself,
thus, ignoring the lesson of the very story he’s written, that of the elephant. David tells Marita
that, “‘nobody knows about himself when he is really involved. Yourself isn’t worth
considering. It would be shameful at the time’” (184). David values unthoughtful action; he
thinks self-reflection is selfish and shameful. Yet, he abandons his marriages’ narrative so that
he may obsessively circle back over his individual story of private shame. When faced with his
desertion of their narrative, Catherine echoes the boy David’s language regarding the perverted
joy the poachers take in senseless destruction: “‘That’s dirty…. That was my present and our
project.’” Both poaching and David’s abandonment are dirty because both betray innocence.
David has traded in their co-creation for a masturbatory reiteration of his life only; nobody gets
any pleasure from his vile stories but him. There’s no chance of any new life coming from these
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stories. David does not come to a greater understanding through them; he is not re-Bourne into
something more truthful and evolved.
Catherine sees that to save their narrative from utter annihilation, she must revitalize it
herself, and she makes plans to prepare it for publishing. As she says, “‘[S]omeone has to get
started on something practical’” (188). She wants to refocus him on their project as, “‘It’s
certainly much more interesting and instructive than…your drunken father staggering around
smelling of sour beer and not knowing which ones of the little horrors he had fathered’” (189);
one of the “little horrors” is most certainly him, echoing her earlier perceptions of him as “an
odd person” and a “monster.” She tells him that his “‘[j]umping back and forth trying to write
stories when all you had to do was keep on with the narrative’” is his way of “‘escaping your
duty’” (190)–the duty of developing as a family. Catherine, while certainly not perfect, has done
what she can for them; she’s supported them financially, inspired his writing of the narrative,
even found a new wife for him when she realized he wanted someone more traditional than she
could be. Her reactions are at times somewhat extreme, but she has steadfastly remained true to
the vision of co-creation and the support and growth of them all through their familial bond.
Escaping the overwhelming and confusing relationships of his current life, David enfolds
himself back into his elephant story. He meditates on his loneliness; how he longs for the
friendship of his dog Kibo, who is back at the village. The boy David feels isolated and afraid.
His father and Juma are pleased at the revolting symmetry, the “big joke,” of killing the bull in
the same place as his friend lies, “[t]he god damned friend killers.” The actual killing of the
elephant is horrific. The bull fights back, angering his father who apparently believed the
elephant should take his murder passively (198). Instead of killing him swiftly, they lung and
gut shoot him, leaving him “anchored, in such suffering and despair that he could no longer
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move.” The enormity of the wrong they have done comes to the boy when the elephant looks
straight at him: “…his eye was alive and looked at David….his eye was the most alive thing
David had ever seen” (199). Juma angrily shoots the elephant again, and “[n]ow all the dignity
and majesty and all the beauty was gone from the elephant and he was a huge wrinkled pile.”
The violent betrayal is laid directly at David’s feet: “‘Well we got him, Davey, thanks to you,’
his father said.” Rather than feel any remorse at what they’ve done, “Juma had come up to [his
father] grinning bringing the tail of the elephant that had no hairs on it at all. They had made a
dirty joke.” After the slow, senseless, and agonizing gut-shot death of the elephant, the father
and Juma further desecrate him by hacking off his tail and making a penis joke. Sensing David’s
revulsion, his father tries to include him in taking pleasure in the kill. But in a move that will
becomes David’s reflex when confronted by anything confusing or complex, good or bad, he
quietly rejects this: “The added responsibility David was given and the trust that was offered
him and not accepted he had put in the story without pointing their significance” (200). He
rejects and resists analyzing complexity. The boy recognizes that the bull’s values of friendship
are much more worthy than those of his depraved father: “The elephant was his hero now as his
father had been for a long time…he did not look at me as though he wanted to kill me. He only
looked sad the same way I felt. He visited his old friend on the day he died” (201).
As an adult, David grapples with his childhood guilt; it holds him back from engaging in
the relationships he has now. Catherine resents his obsession and his inability to evolve past it;
she calls his African tales, “‘[t]he dreary dismal little stories about your adolescence with your
bogus drunken father’” who “‘defraud[ed] his wife and all his friends.’” David seems incapable
of seeing past the events of his childhood and applying those lessons to his current-day life. He
is stuck in a maelstrom of his own boyish confusion and shame, and Catherine and Marita
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increasingly take up the work of “taking care” of him (210-11). Catherine mourns the brief time
that David had shown interest in developing a new story, one centered on them together, before
“‘[h]e traded everything he had in on those stories’” (214). David has become self-obsessed and
dirty, like his father: “‘He used to do so many things too and he did them all so beautifully. He
had a wonderful life and all he thinks about now is Africa and his drunken father and his press
cuttings. His clippings…. I think he reads them by himself and is unfaithful to me with them.
In a wastebasket probably.’” Truly upset by his betrayal(s), she points to his refusal to evolve;
he “‘writes in those ridiculous child’s notebooks and he doesn’t throw anything away.’” She
calls him “illiterate” and not a “gentleman,” and reminds Marita that she’ll have to translate his
French for him; again, David is seen as a child by the women, one without fully mature access to
language. In response to each of Catherine’s accusations, Marita repeats, “‘Poor David’” (21516). “Poor David” because Catherine is verbally tearing him down and because he is so
linguistically incompetent (a sad reality for a writer, indeed). Economically, he is also poor
without the financial support of his “double.”
The most divisive act in the novel is now ignited by Catherine. After being repeatedly
told that she is crazy and should be institutionalized in Switzerland, Catherine makes one final
act in hopes that it will unavoidably lead to evolution and change. She burns David’s African
stories and his press clippings, a violation that David has a difficult time accepting as even true at
first because it is so terrible. Catherine explains to him that she had to because they were
“‘worthless’” (219). She’s destroyed them in the burning barrel used to dispose of trash; unlike
David’s use of the wastebasket as an enclosed circuit, her use of the burning barrel makes the act
final and complete–reuse is not an option. She has clearly gone about it in the wrong way, but
after being diminished, threatened, and having her bids for change and agency thwarted, her now
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confused thinking leads her to truly believe she, “‘did it for you, David, and for all of us’” (221).
David and Marita are in shock; everything is slowed down, as though they’re swimming through
water. Their plans to sideline Catherine as crazy have seemed to come true. Catherine happily
confides, “‘It probably would have been enough to burn the clippings…. But I really thought I
ought to make a clean sweep’” (221-22). She’s burned them so he may start in on the narrative
again, free of interruptions. She’s done it, not as a harmful act, but in order to help him; after all,
“‘You couldn’t know how worthless they were, David. I had to show you.’” She says she
cannot write, but would be happy to tell the elephant story back to him “‘word for
word…anytime you want.’” She suggests he write about Africa again “‘when your viewpoint is
more mature’” (222). As she had warned him earlier, she’s the “destructive type,” but she really
is trying to help him. She wants him to mature as a person and a writer, and to explore
contemporary growth instead of the reductive rehashing his damaging youth. She’s hoping for a
phoenix-like emergence for David and feels like she’s really contributing to both him as a person
and their project together by giving him this very real and symbolic fresh start. She has clearly
gone about this in a very extreme way, but her intentions–to create something new, to forge a
family of love and support, to use their individual agencies to build something greater–remain
true. Critics have continually hailed Catherine’s burning of the stories as an unforgivable act,
but the destruction of a story, one which has been so oft-repeated as to become an incantation in
the author’s mind and, therefore, available to him again, is so much less horrifying than the
diminishing and ultimate dismissal of a loved one’s life.
Catherine and David’s responses to the burning reveal their fundamentally different
personalities and the inevitableness of their split. Unlike David, who repeatedly tells Catherine
to “‘write it out,’” she wants to verbally share their understandings of what is going on.
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Catherine likes to talk about writing “‘[w]hen it’s constructive and has some valid purpose’”
(222). David’s childhood stories, because they are regressive and obsess over the same issues of
dirtiness and betrayal without leading to a greater understanding, do not have a “valid purpose"
to Catherine. She reveals what she sees to be the crux of David’s problem:
“You always wrote so well until you started those stories. The worst thing was the dirt
and the flies and the cruelty and the bestiality. You seemed almost to grovel in it. The
horrible one about the massacre in the crater and the heartlessness of your own
father.” (222-23)
Although David is writing about the stark and brutal realities of his childhood–important events
from his past–Catherine is concerned with David’s groveling in it. Her desire to help him mature
has lead to her radical act. She wants to make sure he understands why she’s done it, that it was
‘“necessary to burn them.’” David does not see the burning as a helpful restart, but instead tells
Catherine he wants to kill her and that she’s crazy (223). Catherine, in her destructive, but
insightful, clarity of purpose, tells him that, “‘[y]ou’re just really sorry for yourself.’” Resigned
to David’s inability to see this as an opportunity to begin anew, Catherine succinctly summarizes
their relationship instead: “‘I had to, David,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry if you don’t understand’”
(224).
Their relationship as a united couple is now irrevocably at an end. Instead of spreading
his newly-freed wings, as Catherine had hoped, David “tighten[s] his discipline so that he would
have it in case he began to lose control.” For David, control is “comforting” (224). He is
“ashamed of the speech” he’s made to her. Speech and shame are inherently linked for him, and
to escape this risk, he curtails his thoughts and words into being hyper-controlled again.
Catherine carries on with what she sees as their more creative and worthy work, the narrative.
She tells David she’s leaving for Paris on the morrow to arrange for its publication and for
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financial compensation from herself to him for the burned stories. Catherine feels as though her
work for the narrative is a “‘reasoned and coordinated project. These things aren’t just tossed
off–,’” to which David makes a dirty joke about a wastebasket. It is disappointingly immature.
David’s instinct is to make a dirty joke; he’s become no better than his father and Juma.
Catherine, in contrast, speaks of her “responsibility.” Their contrasting senses of duty and
responsibility are shown when Catherine departs for Paris to publish their work. Although David
has serious reservations about her safely doing so as the car’s brakes and Catherine’s decision
making abilities both seem seriously compromised, he does not stop her or think of an alternative
way for her to travel (227). It is as though Catherine herself is finally providing David and
Marita with her absence, perhaps permanent, that they’ve so long wanted. The casual acceptance
of her very real danger highlights David’s lack of emotional development, care, or concern. He
has been held back in his maturation by thoughts of shame and concealment, keeping new,
potentially transformative ideas in the dark while only ritualizing the past in the light. It is
Catherine who has developed and matured in their marriage; David has remained the little boy
who would “never tell,” and thus, as a writer and a human, never grow.
David’s life and work are both fear-based, and he repeats his limitations to Marita as an
incantation against his own ability to progress:
“When it’s right you can’t remember. Every time you read it again it comes as a great
and unbelievable surprise. You can’t believe you did it. When it’s once right you never
can do it again. You only do it once for each thing. And you’re only allowed so many in
your life.”
David does not have faith in his abilities to generate new ideas as a writer. Although he writes
only of his memories, when his work is good, it surprises even him as he reads it. David’s work
is completed in a circle; he remembers previous experiences, writes about them, reads his own
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work, and then the circle begins again. Instead of constantly adding to his wellspring of
experience and ways in which to understand the world, his viewpoint gradually diminishes. And
once he’s used them up, they’re gone–“‘you’re only allowed so many in your life.’”
Catherine and Marita both realize this great weakness of David’s and do their best to care
for him as they can. Catherine leaves him a letter when she departs for Paris, in which she
equates her burning his stories with hitting a child with a car. She understands the gravity and
violence of her act, but maintains that she had to do it, as well as her love for him too. David
remembers his father’s advice to “[n]ever bet on anything that can talk…except yourself” (238),
so he sets out to begin writing again. But his sentences are “increasingly simple and completely
dull” (239). He transfers his love, and even the structure of the traditional marriage, to Marita,
while flirting with the beginnings of the another love triangle, this time with Madame Aurol as
the third (243). He’s just recreating his same experiences over again. He tells Marita they two
now comprise the new Bournes, that he can “write” them into being. Nothing really exists for
David until he writes it. This filtering act removes him from actively engaging with life; it
causes a remoteness from experience that is damaging to him as a person and, ironically, a
writer, as without this engagement with the present he proves to be statically incapable of
pushing himself to write new and uncharted works. When Marita tells him she doesn’t need him
to write their relationship for it to be real, he responds that he’ll “‘write it in the sand’” (244).
He knows it will only be swept away, but his compulsion to write in order to make whatever it is
real for himself overrides his reasoning or her protests. Marita grows worried that David is
oversimplifying again; she sees what he cannot–they are caught in a cycle that without
thoughtful understanding to lift them up, will only pull them under again.
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David has no such qualms, and waking and “remember[ing] everything,” he rises and
begins the rehearsal of his African boyhood once again (246). David cannot let go of the
monster of his childhood, his father. He feels “fortunate…that his father was not a simple man.”
Despite David’s earlier concerns that “‘[y]ou only do it once for each thing,’” he is happy to find
that he can recreate the stories. Apparently, his incantations have burned the words into his
memory:
David wrote steadily and well and the sentences that he had made before came to him
complete and entire and he put them down, corrected them, and cut them as if he were
going over proof. Not a sentence was missing and there were many that he put down as
they were returned to him without changing them. By two o’clock he had recovered,
corrected and improved what it had taken him five days to write originally. He wrote on
a while longer now and there was no sign that any of it would ever cease returning to him
intact. (247)
The sentences come back to him “complete and entire.” He’s not creating anything new; in fact,
it’s as though he’s “going over proof.” There is “no sign” that it will “ever cease returning to
him intact.” The recitations of his past can be easily made by rote now; he can thoughtlessly
recall them while writing at will. He is relieved to find that he does not have to think deeply of
them, so he’ll never have to truly learn or understand anything. His repetition had eliminated the
need for really living in the present; he can operate remotely now. In his fear of the change, he
oversimplifies, and thus, sadly cheapens his life. Catherine’s “craziness” is not the piteous cycle
of damnation here; David’s is.
The strain of keeping up with Catherine as she speeds toward change is too much for
David. Catherine is the only one creating something entirely new, but she wants to do so as cocreators. Seeing that David is pulling away from their narrative and toward the reiteration of
only himself, she too prepares to disengage from the relationship. David’s story is about his
betrayal of someone noble and good–the elephant. But it is also about the betrayal of the boy
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David by his father. His need to circularly obsess over his boyhood inhibits his growth away
from it. When challenged by Catherine to change and grow as a person, husband, and writer, he
pulls back and chooses to form a marital bond with the more maternal “Mary” figure instead–
Marita. But for all her support (financial, emotional, and otherwise), Marita is enabling David’s
resistance to growth. David shows so little growth that indeed he retains the sense of betrayal
that guided his decision-making as a child. Although he has serious concerns about both
Catherine’s state of mind and the car, he is relieved when she leaves for Paris, an almost callous
acceptance, or even active encouragement, of her death. To see the danger and to do nothing
about it is a chilling rejection of not only their importance to each other as husband and wife, but
of Catherine’s actual life. Catherine’s burning of David’s stories is not only the catalyst for her
to move away from them and him, but also the final affirmation that David is not, and will not,
move beyond his obsessive rewriting of his boyhood.
Catherine attempts to create a shelter for herself in which she can participate in
supportive reciprocal relationships where first David and then Marita will “‘love me just the way
I am.’” Catherine is not attempting to become a mother figure to her partners, and neither is she
trying to castrate men or vampirically drain talent or end writing careers. What she is trying to
do is sustain and enrich meaningful connection with her chosen partner in life, David. This
doesn’t work, not because she’s mad or David comes to dislike being her girl, but rather because
in her quest for personal growth and freedom, she is inhibited by a partner who remains stuck in
his own story, ever-repeating his boyhood and role as Child. Far from choosing Marita because
she represents a more normative woman partner, David chooses to not be with Catherine because
to do so would mean he must grow too. Catherine may feel at times to be a girl and at other
times a boy, but most of all she wants to feel part of a family bonded through the creation of their
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own personal narrative together. Instead, she finds herself wed to an increasingly self-obsessed
“boy,” who refuses to stop regressing into the betrayals of his childhood, or to experience and
write a new story–a story of the new Bournes coming into being together.
The joyful description of the stories as now always coming back to him is actually the
seal on David’s creative coffin. He is doomed now to only exist and work in a cycle of
repetition. The reiteration of these same stories coming back is not a blessing and a gift; it is a
sad inscribing of his limitations as an author and a human being. Catherine, who is written off as
crazy by David and Marita, and may or may not drive to her death (they don’t really care; they’re
both very c’est la vie about it), is the only one actively striving for creation and change. While
her original goal is to do this as co-creators with her partner(s), she recognizes that David must
now be left in the more traditional (yet manipulative) guiding hands of Marita while she forges
on alone. David could not keep up, and Marita chooses not to. Catherine both wants to and can;
Garden’s message of hope is not in David’s renewal of letters, but in Catherine’s continuous
renewal of creating the self.
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