A Study On The Transnational Movements And Transculturation In Tender Is The Night

As the spokesman of the Jazz Age,F.Scott Fitzgerald wrote many novels and short stories to depict the lives of fashionable youth in American metropolises then.However,his last complete novel Tender Is the Night chose Europe across the Atlantic as its setting.In this novel,Fitzgerald incorporated his personal experiences and described the story of a group of American expatriates in Europe in the 1920s.By interpreting this novel from the theoretical perspective of transnationalism,the paper explores the author’s profound analysis of the difficulties of transculturation in transnational movements then and the reasons behind them.Previous researches on Tender Is the Night mainly focus on the various manuscripts of the novel,the theme of acquisitive desires of the upper class,the characters’dramatic psychological changes,and the turbulence and transformation of race and gender conventions,with less attention paid to the transnational movements of the fictional characters in the historical context of the 1920s when numerous Americans travelled to Europe.Against the backdrop of increasingly advanced mobility media including transportation and telecommunication,the major characters in the novel including Nicole,Dick and Rosemary embarked on a wave of cross-border movements from America to Europe,lingering in the multicultural environment,but simultaneously experiencing a sense of loss and interpersonal conflicts in the contact zone.Transnationalism is concerned with the multi-stranded social relations forged by immigrants or expatriates that connect home and host countries,enriching the meanings of traditional concepts such as locality,nation state,and identity.In terms of the sociocultural aspect,transnationalism advocates for ideal transculturation which refers to the reciprocal process of cultural interaction between different ethnic groups that transcends the models of acculturation and deculturation.Inspired by the perspective of transnationalism,the paper attempts to explore the different motivations of the characters in Tender Is the Night for crossing their national border and travelling to Europe,as well as the complex emotions of these Americans towards their home and host countries in real cross-border experience.Firstly,the fictional American characters arrived in Europe with pilgrimage mentalities.Referring to external historical documents,the paper finds that the author hides several clues in the novel implying the domestic cultural restrictions of the United States then,such as the Prohibition and film censorship,which forced drinkers,artists,and neurotics to seek a culturally freer society across the Atlantic.On the other hand,the American middle class characters represented by Dick were aware of the huge gap among different social classes at home,hoping to exploit European cultural and social capital to realize their American dreams.Secondly,opposite to their transnational imaginary,the fictional American characters suffered from feelings of uprootedness in Europe,including the sense of insecurity and aimlessness.The frequent military references in the novel reflect the characters’ inevitable vigilance and fear in the foreign environment,while the gradual decline of the American middle class in the novel who were addicted to the hedonistic lifestyle implies the disillusionment of their pilgrimage dreams.Finally,based on the representations of the transculturation dilemma experienced by the American expatriates in Tender Is the Night,this paper endeavors to discuss the reasons for the difficult interaction of American and European cultures in the contact zone in the novel:from the prejudice in the European environment,to the arrogance in the American "homecoming"narrative,and to the camouflaging performance of individuals to achieve the superficial harmony.The conclusion is that Tender Is the Night reveals the difficulties faced by cultural interaction under the seemingly prosperous transnational phenomenon in the 1920s.The disillusionment from pilgrimage to uprootedness is not only related to the hostile environment of the host country,but also to the invasion of the nationalist narrative of the home country.Although the theory of transnationalism arose in the 1990s,a relatively wide range of transnational practices emerged early in the 1920s.With the help of Paul Giles and other theorists’transnational ideation,this paper reflects on the gap between the pilgrimage mentalities and uprooted feelings of the transnational practice participants in Tender Is the Night,thus discovering the author’s contemplation on the various factors hindering the tranculturation in the transnational movements between the United States and Europe in the 1920s,and providing inspiration and reference for the increasingly vigorous transnational practices in the context of contemporary globalization.