"Masculinity" In Tender Is The Night

The issue of masculinity has always been in the limelight of the studies about F. ScottFitzgerald, perhaps partly due to Fitzgerald’s suggestion of his own “masculinitydeficiency” problem that he feels to be in a “half-feminine” state during the process ofwriting. Inspired by this remark perhaps, scholars attempt to interpret his works throughthe lens of “masculinity”. Edmund Wilson criticized the feminine fashion ofFitzgerald’s writing when he reviewed This Side of Paradise, commentating thatFitzgerald wrote like a woman without any abstract or impersonal thought, who has thecapacity for “pretty writing”, yet lacks the male intellectual force. H. L Mencken doubtsthe manhood of the hero in The Great Gatsby, perceiving him as “a somewhat scleroticfat woman” with the simple sentimentality. Frances Kerr also talks about themasculinity and “gender of emotion” in The Great Gatsby through the lenses ofnarrative structure and the psychology of narrator. Notwithstanding all that, few criticshave paid enough attention to the “masculinity” issue in Fitzgerald’s “weightiestnovel”—Tender Is the Night. On this account, this thesis attempts to put this work in amore “masculine” light, interpreting the fall of protagonist Dick Diver as the result of a“male problem”, thus to deepen and enrich the understanding of this novel.Specifically, the masculinity theory proposed by R. W. Connell and the power theoryby Michel Foucault will be both employed in this article for an analysis of Dick Diver’sfall. In the story, Dick strives to form his own masculinity in accordance with the“hegemonic masculinity” of his time, but he fails and eventually losses himself. These“hegemonic masculinities”, exhibited as the images of “warrior” in the World War I andthe “masculine man” in the postwar world, can be regarded as a sort of“power-knowledge” in Foucault’s ideas, which, in the name of “male truth”, exerts ametaphysical violence upon men, annihilating the male “Others” who fail thecorresponding requirements. Under such oppression and totalitarianism of “the One”,Dick Diver, as an “Other” being, has been turned into the object of some “male truth”,thus losses the real “self”. From this perspective, Tender Is the Night not just manifestsan issue of masculinity, but indicates a hidden “metaphysical violence” in the Westerntraditional philosophy, triggering people’s thought and concern of the group of the“Other”.