Tender is the Night Read Online Free

socialism and trainee stock-speculator. Oddly, by preparing Nicole for the right marriage, Dick preserves the fount of his own gifts – the accumulations that foster and give purpose to his manners. Asthe Reverend Diver’s child, nostalgic for ‘religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes’ (67), he cannot afford to acknowledge that the monies of the
haute bourgeoisie
were corrupt, even at their head and point of distribution. He knows, better than most, how ‘a century of middle-class love’ finally ‘spent’ itself: he could doubtless map ‘the last love battle’ and measure to the inch the ‘great gust of high explosive love’ (68); incest is very much his Western Front and the end of ‘all [his] beautiful lovely safe world’ (68). He says as much on a visit to the trenches around Amiens; however, by globalizing incest Dick gnomically and unanalytically extends the power of the father.
    The case obliges him to find paternity everywhere and to encourage the reader and Nicole to make and fear such revelations. At a late stage in their marriage Nicole objects, ‘Am I going through the rest of life flinching at the word “father”?’ (311). Her rebuke is a measure of her renewal: she ceases to be a child of two fathers and becomes instead her grandfather reincarnate – her voice and ‘white crook’s eyes’ encourage her to believe that she has ‘gone back to [her] true self’ (314). There is, however, nothing regressive about her return, since, in this instance, the displacement of both fathers ensures the viability of the Warren monies. The whole point about crooked grandfathers is that they know how to invest. Nicole, as her grandfather’s spirit
circa
1929, would take his money to Hollywood: symptomatically, she marries a man who likens himself to Ronald Colman and who, in her eyes, resembles ‘all the adventurers in the movies’ (290).
    But I run ahead of myself. To recap: I have argued that, for Fitzgerald, the central sexual act of
Tender is the Night
operates as an economic metaphor, transposing Devereux Warren’s sexual greed, in all its irresponsibility, into a symptom of compulsive accumulation. Dick by ‘transference’ (134) is associated with the values of a pre-war leisure class. His sureties grant miraculous longevity to the Father (after a brief interview with Dick in Lausanne the apparently dying Warren takes up his bed and walks (271)). None the less, it is important to recognize that the incest motif can be read in another and seemingly opposed way. Seen from withina longer economic perspective, the act contains a second impacted narrative: it embodies accumulation but simultaneously transgresses limits. By penetrating Nicole, Warren becomes father
and
lover, even as he makes his child into daughter
and
mistress. Incest creates
dis
integral selves through a multiplication of roles which, by analogy, I would liken to a shift in economic emphasis. An intersection between sexual and economic trauma registers precisely how a change in the history of capital changes the history of bourgeois selfhood. For the full and Janus-faced significance of incest in
Tender is the Night
to be recognized some account of a crucial shift in the history of capital is necessary.
    III
    The interlude which follows is premised on the belief that the foundation of manners is economic, and that as economic structures change, so manners are modified. From the close of the Civil War to 1900 the story of American capital is largely one of expansion and accumulation of resource. Alan Trachtenberg dubs the gilded age the age of incorporation; however, it is clear that during the opening three decades of the new century the very form of capital was seen to change. But first some facts and figures. While a worker’s income increased by an average of 14 per