Tender is the Night

See no evil; hear no evil; speak no evil

We found this little passage to be confusing: "Dick Diver came and brought with him a fine glowing surface on which the three women sprang like monkeys with cries of relief, perching on his shoulders, on the beautiful crown of his hat or the gold head of his cane. Now, for a moment, they could disregard the spectacle of Abe’s gigantic obscenity."

To begin to understand the passage, we need to try to picture it. As we already know, Dick is like a blank "surface" on which people can project their fantasies. In this case, Rosemary, Nicole, and Mary want to feel safe. Abe is falling apart before their eyes, becoming a "gigantic obscenity." They are threatened by this, and don’t know what to do.

Part of the difficulty in picturing the image is that we have to shrink the women so that they are transformed into ornaments for Dick’s cane, shoulder, and hat brim. But once we do that, the image is clear: The three monkeys. See no evil; hear no evil; speak no evil. You’ve seen this image. One monkey has its eyes covered, one its mouth, and one its ears. It’s not too nice a way to live if you have a friend who needs your help because she or he is totally losing it like Abe is here. It’s not a moment that necessarily speaks well of the women. They come to represent apathy. If they can’t see, hear, or even speak the "evil" of Abe, it is no longer a threat to them, and they no longer have to try to help him. When Dick comes, they use him as a shield against the "evil" of Abe. Together, Dick and the three women transform themselves into the figure of apathy. Perhaps this is why Abe’s violent death hits him so hard later.

A version of the image turns up again later in this passage: "The proprietor of the hotel, Mr. McBeth, was to be the three Chinese monkeys."

As you remember, Nicole has a breakdown at the hotel in Paris, and Dick has to take her home, leaving Mr. McBeth to see Rosemary off. The image has been somewhat transformed. Rosemary doesn’t really need help, so the monkeys become a symbol of comfort, helping to ease her into traveling shielded from any discomfort she might encounter. And Dick is not being apathetic here at all. He’s trying to save Nicole. You could though argue that he’s being the three monkeys for Nicole by not telling her the truth about Rosemary. In trying to shield her from "evil," he is making her feel like she’s crazy in a way that she really isn’t.

All The Blooming Ladies

One can’t help but notice the importance of nature to this story. Nicole’s garden becomes a seat of change and rebirth, and nature is presented as a possible means of healing a war torn world. The idea of blooming takes on a special significance when we talk about Dick, Nicole and Rosemary. Look at this passage: "You’re the only girl I’ve seen for a long time that actually did look like something blooming."

Of course, the other girl was Nicole. We learn later that Nicole was blooming for him before. Things went bad for Dick and Nicole, but he wants to recapture the wonder he felt in the first "bloom" of their relationship. Blooming is a symbol of both newness and possibility, and of newness and possibility withered and dead. Here’s another one: "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."

This one becomes really weird when we find out that just before this moment, Nicole had a breakdown in the bathroom. The passage is from Rosemary’s point of view. We already know she isn’t necessarily very aware of what’s going on with the people around her. Is she an unreliable witness of Nicole? Or is Nicole feeling better now. Or, has she transformed herself, externally, into what she thinks people want to see. Again, blooming is an ambivalent symbol in the novel.

This next one is a little different because it refers to the literal blooming of a literal flower: "…Dress stay crisp for him, button stay put, bloom narcissus – air stay still and sweet."

What’s so interesting about this passage? Well, it’s probably not the third person narrator talking here. When Nicole is trying to get Dick to take a chance on her, it looks an awful lot like a shift to Nicole as narrator. As we discuss in her "Character Analysis," she’s probably the only character this happens to. As we’ve seen, blooming is important to Dick and here Nicole appears to pick up on this. The passage also speaks to her feelings of unworthiness. She considers herself spoiled, deflowered as they say, and thinks she must rely on the narcissus to bloom for her.

There are many passages that explore the idea of blooming in the novel. We’ll just give you one more. This is Nicole in her garden, just before she decides to take Tommy as her lover, and writes him a letter asking him to come see her: "[S]he had a sense of being cured and in a new way. Her ego began blooming like a great rich rose as she scrambled back along the labyrinths in which she had wandered for years."

This one kind of speaks for itself, doesn’t it? She know longer relies on flowers to bloom for her. Her ego becomes the flower itself. When she is 17 and preparing to meet Dick, she makes herself into "a basket of flowers." The flowers in a basket are cut and are no longer alive or blooming. Is Nicole, though her affair with Tommy trying to regain the youth she lost and hadn’t quite regained when she met Dick? Is the novel equating (at least in this passage) "blooming" with healthy sexuality, and perhaps suggesting that this has less to do with age, and more to do with state of mind?

Daddy’s Girl?

The film Daddy’s Girl symbolizes the falsity of appearances. Rosemary is supposed to publicly live up to the image of the perfect daughter to the perfect father. That’s why Dick can’t let a dead black man be found in her Paris hotel bed. But, Rosemary is actually "Momma’s little girl" and her father is dead, and we hear little, if anything about her relationship with him. The irony turns ugly when we think of Nicole. She is also supposed to be the perfect Daddy’s girl. As we well know, that went terribly wrong. Being Daddy’s girl to Nicole means rape and insanity.

In the end, the whole Daddy’s girl thing turns out to be a farce, and perhaps a comment on how Hollywood can perpetuate unrealistic, even destructive ideals. How do you think Nicole felt having to sit through the movie?

We aren’t just making this up; critic Ruth Prigozy is, in her essay titled "From Griffith’s Girls to Daddy’s Girls: Masks of Innocence in Tender is the Night." It’s about the whole "Daddy’s Girl" phenomenon in early 20th century film, and how it plays out in the novel.

Is everybody in the novel wearing "a mask of innocence"? Are there moments when the masks are dropped? For example, there are at least two different meanings of the term "Daddy’s girl." One is the innocent pairing of daughter and father that the film idealizes, which Nicole and her father had before he raped her. Another is the deviant sexual relationship between Nicole and her father and (depending on how you look at it) between Dick and Rosemary. Rosemary is supposed live up to her image of perfect Daddy’s girl. Is her mask dropped when she goes after Dick? Through most of the novel we view Nicole as an innocent victim. Is this mask dropped when she tries to kill herself and her family?

Pallas Athene

Remember these lines, from Nicole’s first-person section of the novel? "Sitting on the stanchion of this life-boat I look seaward and let my hair blow and shine. I am motionless against the sky and the boat is made to carry my form onward into the blue obscurity of the future, I am Pallas Athene carved reverently on the front of a galley."

This is interesting on a number of levels. First, Nicole is on a life-boat. In the next paragraph we learn that she was "gone again by that time." In this passage she’s trying to use her imagination to save her life. She transforms herself into a work of art. (This makes us wonder if F. Scott Fitzgerald was trying to save his life, when he wrote this, by transforming himself into a work of art.) But who is Pallas Athene? You probably have some idea. She’s a pretty famous figure in Greek mythology. And with her education Nicole probably knows more than a little about Pallas Athene. Her story is long, so we’ll just give you a few aspects, so we can try to figure out what’s going on:

1. She’s the goddess of wisdom.
   Nicole wants to be wise. If she’s wise, then she won’t be crazy. She also values learning and study, both for herself and for Dick.
2. She’s the goddess of weaving.
   If Nicole thinks she can imagine herself out of trouble by changing herself into a work of art, then of course she wants to be the goddess of Weaving. Weaving is a symbol of artistry. Novelists weave tales.
3. She’s the goddess of war.
   We know she’s in love with Tommy, the warrior; wouldn’t the goddess of war be his perfect mate?
4. She was born from the head of her father, Zeus, fully armed.
   This one is a little tricky. The part about being born from her father’s head seems like what she already is, not what she wants to be. When her father got it into his head that she was a lover, not a daughter, the current version of Nicole was born. But, unlike Athene, she wasn’t born with any weapons.
5. And what about the Pallus part? In some versions of the Athene myth, and there are many, Pallus is someone she knows, sometimes a friend or relative. Regardless of the exact relationship, Athene always kills Pallus in some kind of battle, thereby earning the person’s name. As you might guess, sometimes Pallus is her father, instead of Zeus. And killing her father just might have been on Nicole’s mind here. In the stories where Pallus is Athene’s father, her birth is always near a body of water. Since Nicole is literally on a body of water here, she might be imagining her birth or transformation.