Tender is the Night Read Free Page B

nursery rhyme, chimes in with her own earlier letter in which she described Dick as ‘wise behind your face like a white cat’ (139). The wise ‘pussy’ who joins the key at the bottom of the well presumably sees the solution as incarceration. When – with ‘verbal inhumanity’ seeping through the keyholes – the reader finally enters ‘the horror’ in the bathroom it is to witness Dick shutting doors:
    Nicole knelt beside the tub swaying sidewise and sidewise. ‘It’s you!’ she cried, ‘—it’s you come to intrude on the only privacy I have in the world—with your spread with red blood on it. I’ll wear it for you—I’m not ashamed, though it was such a pity. On All Fools Day we had a party on the Zürichsee, and all the fools were there, and I wanted to come dressed in a spread but they wouldn’t let me——’
    â€˜Control yourself!’
    â€˜â€”so I sat in the bathroom and they brought me a domino and said wear that. I did. What else could I do?’
    â€˜Control yourself, Nicole!’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜Control yourself. Get up——’
    Rosemary, back in the salon, heard the bathroom door bang, and stood trembling: now she knew what Violet McKisco had seen in the bathroom at Villa Diana. (125–6)
    In a room designed for purgation Dick insists on repression. Nicole resists as she has resisted before. Her memory of procedures at theZürichsee might be glossed, ‘While at the clinic, among the foolish and the mad, I wished to wear a spread but was given a domino.’ ‘Spread’ condenses a plot; prompted by stained bed-linen, the word recalls the sheet marked with the blood of Nicole’s hymen. Despite ‘spread[s]’ declarative openness, the clinical staff gave her a ‘domino’ – an elaborate and often sequined mask. When Nicole tried to understand her trauma, her doctors sought to disguise it with the artifacts of mannered wealth. Dick is of their party. He holds the key to her case and keeps the door locked. None the less, the stain and the domino are complementary; if they were not, Dick’s therapy could not work. The mask typifies the affluence of a particular class, even as its occasion and incrustation embody those discriminating principles which condense leisure objects into systems of ‘invidious difference’ (Henry James). The stain too is a surface dense with comparative information: beneath it lies the father/phallus, but before he can be seen he is displaced by the hotel linen, the clinicians, the domino, Dick, Mcbeth … Though the associative list can be extended, my point remains a simple one – items in both the bourgeois drawing-room and the unconscious solidify through cumulative nicety. The furnishing of each privacy depends upon an absent father; the Victorian interior expresses his consolidating aggression in the market-place, while in the unconscious, according to Fitzgerald, images solicit over-interpretation and designate at the core of their wealth the missing and threatening father.
    Dick’s task, as a psychiatrist and socialite, is to reduce the paternal threat while maintaining the father’s good name. He is therefore an agent who extends the logic and imperatives of bourgeois privacy. Nicole is Devereux Warren’s continuity: his first daughter is ‘wooden and onanistic’ (168) and will possibly not marry; rebuilt by Dick, the damaged younger child will exchange with her proper mate, that is to say, with a male who can ensure the ‘ducal’ group’s exclusivity and privilege. Warren’s ‘feudal’ monies will be safe with Tommy Barban, mercenary in royal causes, opponent of