• • 109. Fitzgerald had an acute sense that the 
    permanent metamorphosis from a Victorian ideology to modernity had 
    begun to solidify in America in May 1919
    110. Added to the chaos that this title suggests 
    in referencing political and physical disaster is the irony that May Day 
    is also traditionally a celebration of new life in the spring season
    111. Sklar identi-
    fi es the soldiers Carrol Key and Gus Rose as Fitzgerald’s “second major 
    aspect of . . . borrowed naturalism . . . drawn not so much from life as 
    in naturalistic physical terms taken from Frank Norris’ McTeague” (76). 
    While Gordon Sterrett is taken from Norris’s Vandover and the Brute 
    (1914) and “represents the degeneration of one pseudo-artist, Key and 
    Rose represent ‘generations of degeneration’” (76)
    James H. Meredith asserts, “Fitzgerald used World War I 
    to leverage realism against his instinctual Romanticism and to articulate 
    the tragic role of the Romantic in the modern world” (165)
    112. Bruccoli- “things were not fully experienced until he had written about 
    them” (33)
    115. The altered reality that alcohol 
    induces creates an emotionally exaggerated perspective that results in its 
    own mythology, both in the stories the drinker tells others and that the 
    drinker believes to be reality
    117. 'Not yet disillusioned, 
    the nation welcomes its heroes'- Frederirck Lewis Allen Only Yesterday 8
    118. “May Day” shows the tainting of these romantic kinds of dreams 
    following the characters’ initial captivation by the city’s brilliance
    119. Signifi cantly, each character’s story 
    connects to the backdrop of postwar New York and its chaotic struggle 
    to cope with the loss the war produced
    120. Upon returning to New York after 
    Scottie’s birth, his sense of reclaiming that happiness is confi rmed as he 
    and Zelda “began doing the same things over again and not liking them 
    so much” (My Lost City 111
    121. The death of the affair during the war serves as a 
    metaphor for the confi rmed death of romanticism in the face of a quickly 
    rising modernism
    122. Since Gordon is unable 
    to cope with the disillusionment that the war brought by reclaiming his 
    old ideals, he soon self-destructs, “drowned in the turmoil of the war” 
    (33)––as evidenced by his affair with Edith
    ese tainted dreams of New York mingle in a “haze of anxiety 
    and unhappiness” for Fitzgerald in early 1919
    124. Edith’s desire to see Gordon is also fueled by a longing 
    to fi nd fulfi llment in turning back the clock to just before the war and 
    by indulging in fantasy
    125. New York is almost like a siren for Fitzgerald and, 
    later, for him and Zelda, calling them back with her sweet song only to 
    wreak destruction and dissipation upon them, derailing Fitzgerald from 
    his quest for serious writing and an orderly life so that he only fi nds 
    both in small pieces.
    n “May Day,” even those who do not end up dead 
    or injured, like Philip Dean and Peter Himmel, show a desperation to 
    avoid the pain of the aftermath of the Great War. Their drunken journey heavenward in the elevator of the Biltmore Hotel is significantly juxtaposed with Gordon's suicide.
     126. My Lost City 1927 New York's 'restlessness . . . [that] approached hysteria'
    127. Fitzgerald 
    points out that the war’s devastation economically was as signifi cant as 
    the loss of life and psychological devastation.
    In the end, each becomes a kind of casualty of the war.
    
    
    

• • 162. Writers were “supposed 
    to drink,” observes Matthew J. Bruccoli, but Fitzgerald’s “diffi culty in 
    controlling it—which in his case meant staying on the wagon” made him 
    particularly vulnerable, a problem “compounded by the circumstance 
    that his society ran on alcohol. His friends were drinkers, and the social 
    gatherings he attended were drinking occasions” (217)
    163. Perhaps 
    taking their cue from Wilson, reviewers, critics, and scholars have, ever 
    since, felt free to move back and forth between the work and its author, 
    a transition made possible by one of the richest biographical records in 
    American literary history
    . Bruccoli argues that by 
    1923–24 “Fitzgerald had progressed from a party drinker to a steady 
    drinker with increasingly erratic behavior” (215)
    164. John W. Crowley argues that “despite what he learned about the ‘disease’ 
    of alcoholism from Zelda’s psychiatrists,” Fitzgerald “never completely 
    cast off the Victorian infl uences of his youth,” when “intemperance” 
    was considered a sign of weak character (68–69).
    . In The Beautiful and Damned, Fitzgerald calls alcohol 
    a “gay and delicate poison,” which would “restore [Gloria and Anthony] 
    momentarily to the pleasurable excitement of childhood, when every 
    face in the crowd had carried its suggestion of splendid and signifi cant 
    transactions taking place somewhere to some magnifi cent and illimitable 
    purpose” (213–14).
    166. This attitude helps explains the melancholy 
    romanticism of his style that makes it possible for critics like Barbara 
    Sylvester to call him “the poet of regret for opportunities lost and of 
    remorse for action wrongly or unheedingly taken” (184)
    and the fact that I have abused liquor 
    is something to be paid for with suffering and death perhaps 
    but not with renunciation
    168. It is the poetic voice for which Fitzgerald is famous—the voice 
    of longing in his young characters. It is also the voice of self-conscious 
    nostalgia in his middle-aged characters, the escapist fantasies of his jaded 
    adults. And alcohol was now bound up in this look backward to the past. 
    171. The note of loss and regret at the end 
    of the story, familiar to readers of Fitzgerald, is here less dependent on 
    its own rhetoric as in so many other stories because it has to overcome 
    less of the inexplicable passivity and fewer contradictions in motive that 
    attend so many other of Fitzgerald’s protagonists. 
    (BR)
    172. The answer I want to advance is that Charlie feels justifi ed in his 
    past, mistakes notwithstanding, and is not wholly a penitent or reformed 
    man, however much his success depends on his appearing so. He is so 
    because Fitzgerald himself, at some fundamental level, was unwilling 
    to denounce the spirit of the pursuit that made him nostalgic for those 
    times, even though the story punishes Charlie for precisely that indulgence. Symbolically bound up in the allegiance to the past by both author and his character in Fitzgerald's unwillingness to give up drink.
    Sometime soon after The Beautiful and Damned (1922), Thomas 
    Gilmore contends, “Fitzgerald found it too painful to write a full and 
    honest portrait of a heavy or alcoholic drinker
    174. Comparing Zelda’s nervous state to the state of an alcoholic, he writes: 
    “[T]he mind of the confi rmed alcoholic accepts a certain poisoned 
    condition of the nerves as the one to which he is most at home and in 
    which, therefore, he is the most comfortable” (qtd. in Bruccoli 365)
    . The note of tragic superiority 
    jibes with Fitzgerald’s lifelong concern with the romance of the drunken 
    visionaries and the lost cause
    177. Their brash, drunken 
    behavior makes Marion physically ill, and her old distrust of Charlie 
    fl oods back. Charlie loses his bid for his daughter—at least for now. 
    But Fitzgerald carefully controls the defeat and its aftermath
    178. Kenneth E. Eble 'directly confront[ing] alcoholism by name and an alcoholic's unsuccessful attempt to reform or be cured' (A New Leaf)

• • 247. Zelda Fitzgerald's Save Me the Waltz challenges and rewrites the 
    expected descriptions, diagnoses, and definitions of the mentally ill woman
    248. zelda ballerina painting
    She had begun to break down emotionally in 1929 and had spent time in institutions in Europe before returning to the United 
    States for treatment at the Phipps Clinic. 
    he writes this novel against the expectations for asylum autobiography, expectations that 
    would shape and constrict her narrative. 
    Mary Gordon points out, "real labor is required to read her without prejudice 
    of one sort or another, to read her not as a symbol of something but as the 
    creator of works of art."
    249. not only did she refer to this autobiography as a "fairy tale," but she left five blank lines for her psychiatrists to fill in
    The canonical 
    success of Tender Is the Night has helped obscure Zelda Fitzgerald's telling of 
    her own story and contributed to her popular image as a strange, mentally 
    disturbed character. 
    As the field of medicine?and 
    especially what was to become psychiatry?became increasingly profes? 
    sionalized, middle-class American women became more subject to the 
    advice of "experts," who saw the female body as both delicate and dangerous
    250. women's language often became one 
    more site of symptomology and thus less a manifestation of subjectivity than 
    an object, like the female body, to be analyzed and discussed. 
    As the story becomes less about Nicole's mental illness and more 
    about Doctor Diver's progressive alcoholism, the opening section title, 
    "Case History, 1917-1919," sounds more and more ironic: the "case" of 
    doctor-husband eclipses that of the disturbed young woman.
    251. Her own words become subsumed within the body they see 
    her as, the body that is understood to be the object of treatment despite any 
    discussion of her mental condition. 
    "scarcely saved waif of disaster" (p. 27)
    r, a narrative that has stirred Franz so much that he 
    must drop his professional papers and shape the story with his own words. 
    The molding of the incident gives him a power over the rape itself, a power 
    that places him in the position of both sympathetic doctor and rapist. With 
    this story, he offers Nicole up to Dick, hoping for a successful "transference," 
    for a replaying of the father-daughter relationship so that it will come out 
    right. It is this perception of another man's power over her and violation of 
    her that brings Dick to want to marry Nicole. 
    252. Elaine Showalter has traced the history of both the Crazy 
    Jane figure, who "was a touching image of feminine vulnerability and a 
    flattering reminder of female dependence upon male affection," and the 
    Lucy figure, who "represented female sexuality as insane violence against 
    men."14
    if you do cure me whats going to happen to all the bitterness and unhappiness 
    in my heart?It seems to me a sort of castration, but since I am powerless I 
    suppose I will have to submit, though I am neither young enough nor credulous 
    enough to think that you can manufacture out of nothing something to 
    replace the song I had.15 (Zelda letter to Forel)
    253. The agreement between Forel and 
    Scott Fitzgerald to discourage her from dancing is one example of this 
    collusion.19 The infantilization of a mentally ill woman that an astute reader 
    can see in the portrayal of Nicole Diver reverberates in Zelda Fitzgerald's 
    appeal to Scott to help her "not as you would a child but as an equal."20 
    For Linda Wagner, the pain 
    Alabama suffers is an unfortunate hindrance to her ballet career rather than 
    an expression of self-abuse. She sees Alabama as "defeated (in the fiction) by 
    the very body that was to be her means into the world of art.
    254. As Gordon points out, Alabama's flesh is marked as 
    female and thus must be brought under control.
    She is thus split from her own body?precisely one of 
    the conditions manifested in both hysteria and schizophrenia. In her history 
    of female insanity, Elaine Showalter claims that "the withness' of the flesh, 
    and its proper management, adornment, and disposition, are a crucial and 
    repeated motif in the schizophrenic women's sense of themselves as unoc? 
    cupied bodies."
    255. She said to herself, "My body and I," and took herself for an 
    awful beating: that was how it was done. (125)
    256. the mirror at the dance studio shows her a picture detached from her 
    lived bodily experience
    Physical and mental breakdown become indis? 
    tinguishable in the novel as she lies with her legs restrained in sliding 
    pulleys, listening to doctors, husband, ballet instructor conspire about her 
    condition. Sirgeva laments, "If she had only disinfected" (p. 192), voicing 
    Alabama's own disgust with the infected nature of her flesh. But her injury 
    brings her separation from her body to a crisis in which she is alone in her 
    pain, cut off from communication with those who have power over her. 
    257. Explo? 
    ration was for those with a measure of peasant blood, those with big thighs and 
    thick ankles who could take punishment as they took bread and salt, on every 
    inch of flesh and spirit, (p. 201) - TITN
    In this discourse, disease itself is represented as female. 
    A man can not even exchange his roundabout and boots for a dressing-gown 
    and slippers without being made, in feeling, at least, somewhat effeminate by 
    the act, and what an abatement in his manliness is there when he is reduced? 
    a single garment only excepted?to the original suit in which he made his 
    mundane debut.27
    258. hallucination of lake- medical imagery 194-5
    The linguistic signifier that emerges from this bodily landscape is the word 
    "sick," the one-word diagnostic sentence that defines her physical being and 
    violates her own seeing, her own subjectivity
    259. Indeed, when she is released from the hospital, the metaphorical prison of 
    medical, judicial, and paternal authority, Alabama returns to her place of 
    birth and presumably begins the third-person narrative that we have before 
    us. The novel ends not with Alabama's celebration of the cure of her illness? 
    the standard closing of the asylum autobiography?but with her meditation 
    on the power of form and its relation to her own self-expression
    260. Several reviewers criticized the language for getting in the way of 
    the story, which thus loses the realism it needs to make it a good novel. For 
    one critic, the book was marred by "an extremely involved prose style which 
    fails to do anything but clog both the action of the plot and the reader's 
    understanding of the characters.... none of its people is more than a pivot 
    about which the author weaves words, words, words."30 For yet another 
    critic, "no phenomenon is too simple for her to obfuscate with the complex? 
    ities of figure of speech." 
    Even as her narrative chronicles Alabama's enactment of pa? 
    triarchal regulation of the female body, her writing brings the body into 
    language. 
    261. In her pain and defeat, 
    she begins to recognize the constructedness of her body and of the medical 
    and marital narratives of her experience. 
    

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• • 1. 1896, Sigmund Freud presented a new theory concerning the cause of hysteria in 
    his female patients.
    "seduction theory" 
    3. "The conflict 
    between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central 
    dialectic of psychological trauma" (Herman 1)
    (Showalter 154). She describes another doctor who emphasized the 
    physician's role of power and the patient's role as silent recipient
    
• • 4. Modernist trauma fiction quite often portrays the manifestation of trauma as madness
    Often the cause is dissatisfaction with their station in life and their drive to be successful professionally or creatively. Battling against a successful partner
    9. the male representation of female trauma 
    which diminishes her true suffering by masking it as a destructive and belligerent madness
    10. Farrell argues that trauma is a type of 
    history that interprets the past. "Like other histories, it attempts to square the present with its 
    origins. The past can be personal or collective, recent or remote: an artifact of psychoanalysis 
    or an act of witness; a primordial myth or a use of ancestral spirits to account for misfortune 
    or violation" (14
    Horvitz, Anne Whitehead and Vickroy
    Horvitz in Literary Trauma: Sadism, Memory, and 
    Sexual Violence in American Women's Fiction (2000)
    n "Invalid Masculinity: Silence, Hospitals, and Anesthesia in A Farewell to Arms," Herndl
    16. F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel Tender is the Night also has not been explored as an illness 
    narrative although it makes significant judgments about female trauma
    Her marriage represents yet another traumatizing patriarchal situation for her 
    because her husband is also her medical doctor; his personal infidelities function to create a 
    tension between them in which he allows her neither credibility nor respect
    80. The lens of gender provides a 
    perspective on reading madness that reveals fundamental understandings of masculinity and 
    femininity
    83. suffers from her inability to create and shape her own 
    destiny, and the burden of vulnerability causes varying levels of insanity
    She is quite smart but is 
    denied her husband's respect because of her illness
    84 she is a patient first and a woman second
    Janet 
    Wolff discusses in her book Feminine Sentences
    Phyllis 
    Chesler wrote in Women and Madness (1972
    87. Psychology remained heavily male-dominated, both in its underlying assumptions 
    about the female psyche and in the methods of diagnosis and treatment.5
    The mad woman is a unique character—a marginalized figure within an already 
    marginalized group.
    Literally "split mind," schizophrenia, in literature, was a 
    convenient diagnosis both structurally and symbolically because it could be applied to almost any character suffering an emotional crisis.
    "Modernist literary 
    movements have appropriated the schizophrenic woman as the symbol of linguistic, 
    religious, and sexual breakdown and rebellion" (Showalter 204)
    89. Showalter "doctors had noticed that hysteria was apt to appear in young women who were especially rebellious" and intelligent (145)
    90 Caminero-Santangelo's The Madwoman Can't Speak or Why Insanity is not 
    Subversive confronts such arguments.7
     Madness, she argues, is not a tool of rebellion; instead 
    it surrenders a character to the ultimate submission: being represented by someone else 91 because she cannot construct her own narrative. 
    I intend to suggest a third camp, not well-studied as of the twenty-first century: that of 
    the male writer creating and constructing female insanity. The male writer constructing 
    female insanity typically recognizes a need for a woman's resistance to patriarchy, and yet he 
    creates that resistance with the tool of madness, replete with the accompanying judgment, 
    hatred and resentment on the part of male characters. Mad women are often portrayed as 
    disloyal because of their illness, which is interpreted as inconvenient and offensive to male 
    characters who must deal with it. It is a burr in the side of otherwise well-functioning and 
    productive men, threatening, ultimately, to ruin them. Additionally, the implication in these 
    novels is that woman's insanity is part of her nature, part of the female condition
    
• • 91. Madness, therefore, functions as a tool for complicating the plot, not for resisting patriarchy or voicing resistance
    92. he frequently implies that she should be able to better control her behavior, effectively nullifying the legitimacy of her illness.
    118. In this novel, the primary blame for Dick's 
    retrogression lands directly on his wife Nicole Warren, both because of her money and her 
    mental instability.3
     For instance, Milton Stern argues that the "inner focus" of the novel "is 
    the disintegration of the disciplined and creative 'romantic' [i.e., Dick Diver] within the 
    ruinous world of the selfish and the impulsive [i.e., Nicole and her wealth]" (308-9).
    119 Dana Brand "Fitzgerald…represents the easy female embrace of modernity in 
    Tender is the Night in at least dispassionate and possibly admiring terms" (my emphasis) 
    (139)
    Her illness narrative is lost amidst the discussions of modernity, 
    money, and especially her husband
    120. Linda Wagner-Martin quotes a letter from Fitzgerald to his wife Zelda in which "he 
    admonished her not to read Tender is the Night again: 'I feel strongly about your re-reading 
    it. It represents certain phases of our life that are now over'" (177).
    Nancy Comely wrote in her article "Madwomen on the Riviera: The Fitzgeralds, Hemingway and the Matter of Modernism"
    121 (although some, like Wagner-Martin, argue that the diagnosis was incorrect
    when I am very busy being mad I don't usually care what they say, not if I were a 
    million girls" (123)
    122. What is relevant to trauma studies is the author's narrative choice to provide for 
    Nicole a source for her emotional troubles, for while his wife did not have a specific 
    traumatic incident, Fitzgerald recognized the need for Nicole to have one.
    Zelda's illness was too intangible for fiction, too 
    inappropriate for lack of a noticeable and quantifiable beginning. Nicole's madness has more structure, more order to it. Fitzgerald's need for order, even in his madwoman, is significant 
    for us because it shows a lack of understanding of trauma and recovery.
    123. In his fiction, she is either sane or insane at any given moment and this black or white 
    approach to insanity reveals Fitzgerald's attempt to place rules around Nicole's condition.
    124. what we 
    view as a reliable narrator is in fact, quite unreliable, consistently biased towards Dick and 
    against Nicole.
    One aspect is narrative progression, which James Phelan defines as "the way in which the narrative initially establishes certain issues of 
    relationships to be the center of its implied audience's interest" (Narrative 29). 
    our intended ignorance disenfranchises Nicole and her story
    125. each of three scenes containing Nicole's mental breakdowns are narrated by someone other than 
    herself
    Hemingway: In the form it is now it 
    is simply a pathological and not a nice one at that. It has all the dullness of all stories of the 
    insane and where it had the charm of the strange mixture that was Scott it is now about as 
    much fun to read as The Snake Pit" (qtd. in Bruccoli's Reader's Companion 43).
    126. she [Rose] sees Nicole as a peripheral figure, thereby keeping the reader from ever fully 
    exploring or appreciating Nicole
    127. Our first impression of Nicole comes through Rosemary's eyes, and the distance 
    established in that first image remains throughout the novel.
    forcing them to reevaluate her when her own 
    surprisingly tender, although somewhat unstable, voice is finally heard toward the end of 
    Book Two
    128. Nicole. She is avoidable, easily 
    overlooked, a small hurdle in the way of grasping and experiencing Dick. 
    129 "Oh, she chose him, 
    and Nicole, lifting her head saw her choose him, heard the little sigh at the fact that he was 
    already possessed" (20). The reader observes Rosemary's heart going out to Dick—an 
    observation that is interrupted by Nicole's similar vision. She is literally getting in the way of 
    Rosemary, both syntactically, in the sentence, and emotionally by complicating her pursuit of 
    Dick
    131 her quality of life is measured in terms of how her life hurts his hopes for a successful and happy life.
    
• • 133.  It appears, however, that he is to blame, at least in part, for her continued dysfunction. Her credibility is obliterated by her outrageous behavior when upset, but it would seem that the suspicions of Dick's infidelity, which contribute to her emotional reactions, are justifiable. 
    134. In the section of the novel that Nicole narrates, she describes a period of mental illness as being "gone again" (161)
    The image of this departure suits their on-or-off style of madness—one is either 
    here or gone, sane or insane. 
    135. It becomes clear that her manic outbursts can each be tied, not to her childhood trauma, but instead to Dick's behavior. 
    136. The thought continues as it discusses Dick's scars and "open wounds" caused by the 
    emotional drain of Nicole's illnesses.
    137. "Mrs. McKisco came hurrying down from the 
    house. She exuded excitement. In the very silence with which she pulled out a chair and sat 
    down, her eyes staring, her mouth working a little, they all recognized a person crop-full of 
    news" (36)
    138. Instead, Nicole's screams appear incoherent. Close examination, however, lends reason to Nicole's words and reveals that she is upset about more than just the murder scene. Her words revolve around the bedspread, "I never expected you to love me—it was too late—only don't come in the bathroom, the only place I can go for privacy, dragging spreads with red blood on them and asking me to fix them" (112)
    140. His partner Franz tells him, "Your heart isn't in this 
    project any more" as the newest complications over Nicole's condition have contributed to 
    Dick's professional exhaustion and increased drinking (256). He is unable to function as a 
    doctor: readers assume only Nicole's condition is to blame. 
    As John Callahan suggests, Dick should be implicated more fully for the deterioration 
    of the marriage.21
    141. Dick reminds Nicole that the author of the letter was a "mental patient" (187). Bristling from 
    the implication that former mental patients are forever-after easily dismissed, Nicole reminds 
    Dick that she too was once a mental patient. In his typical fashion, Dick undermines Nicole's 
    credibility and intelligence, as he often does in his constant negotiation of the line between 
    Nicole-as-patient and Nicole-as-wife, saying, "Suppose we don't have any nonsense, Nicole" 
    (187). With one phrase, he dismisses her astute intuition, thereby effectively silencing her 
    and severely insulting her.22
     Her silence is only momentary. 
    143. Her outburst functions to show her 
    hysteria, but her verbal response indicates that there was perhaps something influencing her 
    actions. Her outburst can also be seen in terms of a larger question about Nicole's control 
    over her illness. 
    
• • 145. Scott believed the incidents of their lives were for his use and not hers and he felt extremely threatened by Zelda's decision to write about her life, especially since he already was. 
    146. The contrast between Dick's affection for 
    the children and Nicole's stilted caring for them is something Fitzgerald intended and it has a 
    subtle but important impact on how readers view Nicole. She is both a failed wife and a 
    failed mother. She does not embrace her role as mother, but feels trapped by it, and readers 
    are free to judge her for it
    149-150 Her text is not polished, not symmetric; her audience  150
    changes from paragraph to paragraph, sometimes within paragraphs. She writes at one 
    moment to her lawyer, at the next to her sister, her friend Tommy Barban, her husband, her 
    doctor. Her style changes as she writes one side of what is clearly a two-person conversation 
    and then a few sentences later shifts to another conversation
    151.  "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).
    Phyllis Chesler writes that madness can be "an intense experience 
    of female biological, sexual and cultural castration, and a doomed search for potency. The 
    search often involves 'delusions' or displays of physical aggression, grandeur, sexuality, and 
    emotionality….Such traits in women are feared and punished in patriarchal mental asylums" 
    (Chesler 31)
    152 Her actions here, like Catherine's burning of David's manuscript, remove 
    from the mad woman all remaining sympathy, and marginalize her permanently. 
    he liberties that Fitzgerald takes when 
    crafting Nicole's illness reveal his desire for a more perfect madness one that leaves no doubt 
    as to the dangerous effects of the mad woman on those around her
    Milton Stern
    

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