Theme Of Women In Tender Is The Night

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Bringing the woman from behind the man

In history, women were looked at as property. They were not given the same rights as men until about thirty to forty years ago. Women began to test the idea of how they were expected to act in the early 1900’s, pushing for reformation for equal rights. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s writing, while lyrical and eloquent, represents quite well the ideals of his time. Men are always his main characters, while the women are supporting characters that are ultimately to blame for the male’s downfall. Fitzgerald’s downplay of female characters is evident in “Tender is the Night”. “Tender is the Night”, a nouvelle written in the 1930’s by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is a piece of literature, like many of his works, that portrays the idea of the “flapper” in its most ideal sense. His main characters were mainly successful males that would fall in love, only to later have that love be his tragic downfall. Fitzgerald’s female characters were often written in as disposable and minor details to the main characters life, but if you take a closer look they brought about the exact image that he wanted for them. F. Scott Fitzgerald
If the audience would bring the women out of the shadows and actually analyze them, then one could see that they do what is necessary to survive and flourish. They “adapt and change to ensure their necessary survival long after their men have fallen prey to personal dilemmas” (Luong, 56). Nicole and Rosemary “preserved their individuality through men and not by opposition to them” (Fitzgerald, Tender 63). They have the strength and knowledge to not conform to the identities created through the men they are involved with, but to rather create their own identities. Divorce was very looked down upon during that era, and the fact that Nicole had the courage to tell Dick that her and her children deserved better and left him is astonishingly

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