Tender Is the Night

While a young woman, Nicole is a wealthy American receiving medical care in a Swiss hospital for symptoms of schizophrenia, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and paranoia. When she was a child she was sexually abused by her father and, from that experience, went on to mistrust all men to the point of delusional fixation. When Dick meets her, he believes the treatment she is getting at the clinic is potentially worsening, not improving, her condition. She falls in love with Dick and rises to a state of health that earns her release from the hospital.

Even after marriage, Nicole is prone to episodes of nervous behavior. She experiences one such episode early in the novel during the dinner party at the Villa Diana in Tarmes. Later, when she becomes witness in a single day to both a shooting at a train station and the appearance of a murdered corpse inside a hotel, she suffers another mental health crisis. Nicole’s flare-ups are hard to diagnose, and the reader is dissuaded from trying to act the psychiatrist toward her as Dick does. However, it is clear that for Nicole, trust and safety are very important. She mistrusts Dick the closer he gets to Rosemary and feels unsafe in the hostile climate of post-war Europe. Her symptoms are understandable under such strain, yet she finds ways to climb above their dominance over her life.

Later in the book, Nicole secures a measure of independence for herself by engaging in an affair with Tommy Barban and getting a divorce from Dick. Her own attempts at regaining agency are, however, left open-ended at the novel’s close. Despite her new marriage to Tommy, she still looks to Dick’s letters for a nostalgic glimmer of what she once had or thought she had.

Young, passionate, and glamorous, Rosemary Hoyt adds a fun and energetic new vibe to the Divers’ already-established dynamic of psychological tension. Newly introduced to celebrity as the lead star in the movie Daddy’s Girl, she exudes potential and youthful innocence, though she is not completely innocent, as she longs for passion and excitement and is not afraid to pursue it. It is not hard for Dick to fall in love with her, while she falls in love with him almost instantly. Her infatuation with Dick arises from his confidence, gentlemanliness, and nurturing demeanor as a therapist. Her mother, whom Rosemary adores and obeys, also encourages the affair.

For Dick, Rosemary represents a kind of idealism lost from a pre-war generation, still intact in a girl who has not aged yet into maturity. For Nicole, she represents a young, privileged, empty-headed girl who rivals her own claims to beauty and ideal womanhood. Rosemary herself seems content throughout the story to float along life, enjoying her success and independence; she loves Dick in a naively sentimental way but also never matures enough to make an adult commitment. When she does consummate her relationship with Dick, she quickly fades from the narrative, remaining unchanged and out of reach to the troubled Divers.

One of the American expats whom the Divers befriend in the Riviera, Abe North is a musician and married man whose loose attitude fuels his eventual alcoholism. As an artist, Abe struggles to create satisfying works that adequately express his talents and abilities. In the story, he represents one extreme to which Dick might tilt if he were to let himself go: the extreme of alcohol addiction. Abe uses drinking to mitigate the unrest in his own soul; while this at first makes for a more vibrant personality at parties, it also lands him in trouble. When he binges one night in Paris, he is targeted by a group of Senegalese men who seek him out for vengeance after he hurls false accusations at one of their members at a bar. The resulting conflict mixes Dick and Rosemary up in a murder.

The consequences Abe pays for his alcoholism showcase the dangers of escapism for the American ex-pats. The novel places Abe North’s suffering alongside Dick’s vacation to France to display the pitfalls facing even those individuals who have fled the Roaring Twenties-noise of American cultural prosperity. The world is a brutal place all over, Abe’s fate dramatically signals, and not even drunkenness can offer true relief or escape.